Blagnet.net

High rents are usually caused by…

Anyone, anyone? Bueller?… Bueller?… Government! Ding ding ding ding ding! I’m not sure if Brian of the MGoBlog was being serious or mocking the business-hating State worshipers who surround him in Ann Arbor when he wrote this blag post about Leopold Brothers closing, but I’m sure plenty of our enlightened academics feel that way:

Todd Leopold has just announced that he and Leopold Brothers are leaving A2 for Denver.

The reason is the same one it always is: skyrocketing rents.

Death to landlords! Death to capitalism! Death to Amerikkka! I might be over-reacting slightly!

By milking businesses all that it can with property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, liquor licenses, and probably lots of taxes I don’t know about, not to mention forcibly limiting the amount of land that is allowed to be developed, artificially raising the price of real estate, the State causes landlords to continually increase rents by outrageous amounts. This difficulty in making a profit limits the ability of companies (real-estate developers and others) to expand their business to other locations, further limiting the supply of land and buildings developed and thereby contributing to higher prices. Any more detailed or more educated insight into the causes of skyrocketing rents would be welcome, as I am no economist (though I appear to know some things even “trained” economists don’t, thanks to my readings of Austrian economists).

A high demand for real estate in Ann Arbor per se, extraneous to all the State interference, probably contributed a great deal to this situation as well, but based on all I’ve read, seen, and experienced with governments and private companies, the government only restricts the ability of the real estate market to adapt to such a high demand for land in this city, whereas an unfettered market would respond to the supply and demand for land in a way that benefited both businesses and consumers. In this situation, the (probably artificially) high rent has forced a pretty popular and quite unique Ann Arbor establishment to close down and move elsewhere.

(I know you aren’t supposed to modify the word unique with anything because something is either unique or it isn’t, but I don’t care; something can be almost unique, i.e., rare but not unique, in which case very unique or quite unique seems perfectly valid to me, in an informal blag post on a personal website. In the case of Leopold Brothers, its warehouse-like ambiance and the board games you can play there certainly make it unique to Ann Arbor, but I wasn’t quite ready to speak for every other bar in the world today.)