John T. Reed’s news blog

No state has statewide rent control. OR is about to become the first.   Rent control destroys the apartment buildings it applies to—slowly but surely. Very simply, it lowers the net income of the buildings by restraining rents but not expenses. As net income declines, the landlords sell or become sullen, “fix it yourself” slumlords.   What is the rent-controlled tenant gonna do when he is treated badly? Move out? Never. Their rent controlled apartment is to good of a deal. Move-outs per year become more and more rare as the deal each tenant has become better and better. Although...

China is more of a mess than a threat. .But because they are PERCEIVED by too many as a threat, they are an annoyance and a distraction. We should, like Dorothy’s dog Toto, pull back the curtain and reveal the fraudster trying to sound like the “great and powerful Oz.”.We should also actively attack their weaknesses. The basic principle of offense is strength against weakness. What are China’s weaknesses and how can we attack them?.• Pollution—advertise it to discourage people from going there to live or invest, enlist the environmental movement strange bedfellows to punish China with sanctions, bans on investment...

There used to be a phrase: "God, motherhood, and apple pie.".It correctly described what all politicians claimed to be in favor of. There was another phrase back then: Tweedledum and Tweedledee---a condemnation of the two main parties as having no meaningful differences..Now, the Democrats hold people who believe in God in contempt and attack them in court and in confirmation hearings. But I must note that they hate Jews so much that they love Palestinians. And they will tolerate Catholic grade school dropouts from Central American s***hole countries as long as they get on welfare a la Julia, continue to...

I had an interesting question from a reader recently. I’ll share it here to illustrate the kind of information that is in two of my book genres (hyperinflation/depression and real estate investment). The reader got it out of my book How to Protect Yourself from Hyperinflation & Depression, 2nd edition. But it is a topic also covered in my real estate investment booksIn the hyperinflation book, I said owing a high loan-to-value ratio, non-recourse mortgage would be a great investment for protection against both inflation and deflation (depression). It would be a you-can-win-but-you-can’t-lose-much investment.The whole idea is borderline legally impossible,...

I finished Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities. His basic point is that the notion that all differences between black and white in incarceration rates, incomes, net worths, education are caused by white racism against blacks is bull. . One of his main pieces of evidence is all the differences between just blacks in those categories; and between just whites. Those disparities obviously are NOT caused by racism. . One variable that does correlate with disparate results is the number of parents in the home raising children. It ranges from 0 to 1 to 2. Blacks have a higher rate...