Up with conservative journalists!

Ah, but reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Friedersdorf: "His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won't occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer's incentive to build it."

That theme is virtually a chapter-and-verse replication of what is perhaps the most famous essay written by the great French journalist of the early C19, Frédéric Bastiat, from his deathless classic Economic Sophisms. Its title translates into English as "What is Seen and What is Not Seen," and has been a staple of such libertarian outreach groups as The Foundation for Economic Education - the very Platonic opposite of a CPACking activist cell for the pinkcheeked and blueblazered - for over sixty years. FEE's most intellectually distinguished Trustee, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was in some ways Bastiat's heir a century on, and as good a model of the urbane journalist as the broadly-defined right has yet witnessed. Starting in 1913 as a stenographer at The Wall Street Journal when barely out of high school (family finance dictated quitting City College early), he undertook a highly disciplined study, night by night, of economics, literature and philosophy, rising through the ranks of the Manhattan journorati until by 1933, with three still-delightful books behind him, he succeeded as editor of The American Mercury the great H.L. Mencken, who pronounced him "the only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist, of practical as well as theoretical training...he is one of the few economists in human history who could really write." A dozen years as economic columnist at The New York Times followed, capped by his million-selling 1946 volume Economics in One Lesson, through which Bastiat/Austrian School insights reached the lay public across six decades now. A further twenty years as Newsweek columnist penning its "Business Tides" feature closed out his career institutionally at age 72, with a further 27 years of freelance and authorial projects ensuring nonagenarian fitness of mind found today only among such a fellow pillar of liberal education in the grand manner as Jacques Barzun, who turned 100 last fall. And he grew to finest flower, mirabile dictu, without a self-conscious "movement" to tempt him away from his chosen last, that of the maximum development of his intellect, learning and gifts as a writer.

You kids out there, whether in college or journalism or neither, get to know such among your elders. Do ya a world of good [resumes whittling after relighting corncob pipe next to potbellied stove].

"A message from the Church of DSL. of Lahti-Dave Scotts".

"A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off. His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won't occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer's incentive to build it."

I would dearly love someone, anyone to explore this possibility. How would removing rent controls improve the availability of housing for the poor people who are supposed to be helped by these controls? The assumption here is that if rent controls are removed landlords would be motivated to improve the units they are offering, build new units of higher quality, and that the poor would somehow magically be able to afford them absent intervention from the government.

Setting aside the fallen nature of humankind and any possible influence greed might come to play in this, let's assume that the landlords do clean up and modernize their offerings absent rent control. Let's assume that new units are built, and that these units are kept up to code, clean, and functional.

How do the poor afford these? Is direct government subsidy the answer? Payment of a housing voucher to the poor?

It seems that the author addresses only one portion of the problem...the presence of controls, without addressing the other portion...the lack of income.

"Is direct government subsidy the answer? Payment of a housing voucher to the poor?"

Interestingly enough... yes. Yes, that is the answer. If the government wants to "do something about affordable housing", then that is the best way to go.

Culture 11 is great news. Podcasts would be great. Hint, Hint.

"Is direct government subsidy the answer? Payment of a housing voucher to the poor?"

Joe Marier: "Interestingly enough... yes. Yes, that is the answer. If the government wants to "do something about affordable housing", then that is the best way to go."

I see...so instead of controlling the rent amounts, you would rather transfer tax money into the hands of landlords.

Fine...let's test this a second. Let's assume that we do this scenario...remove the rent controls and instead provide subsidies for the housing. Should there be strict laws on the books that punish the landlords for providing unsanitary, unsafe housing? I don't mean fines, I mean jail time. Since it's taxpayer money paying for the housing, what kind of guarantees would you expect be placed upon the landlords to insure that the taxpayers are not being fleeced?

Second, isn't this simply another wealth transfer mechanism from the have nots and have littles to the have much?

Good post Rod. Conservatives need to be willing to fight for their ideas in a forum that does not automatically assume they are correct. Conservatives seem to have decided to opt to work for Fox News, or not at all (slight exaggeration). Our media, and country, will be better off when conservative journalists are covering the daily mundane news and trying their best to be objective like most of the other journalists. Then, we will have a proper balance without so much of the bitterness we have now.

Bet you get lots of hate mail on this one.

Steve

I'm a second-generation journalist with 40-odd years under my belt. I've seen my trade go to great lengths to institutionalize fairness, objectivity or what you will, only to be charged with bias with greater frequency and intensity. By now, it's almost conventional wisdom that all news media, up to and including The Associated Press, are biased.

The people charging media bias are going to get a stiffer-than-ever dose of what they've been complaining about. Long-established primary sources of news, newspapers and broadcast networks, are in steep decline. More and more people are turning to cable-TV and online sources with much narrower circulation and more pronounced ideological slants.

Don't worry, Rod, you're going to get more conservative journalists. More liberal journalists, too. But you'll have a hard time distinguishing them from commentators, because there won't be much difference.

And to get the unvarnished facts? Guess you'll have to do the legwork yourself.

Politics is -- epistemilogically speaking -- merely one category of social action. Along with economics, education and cultural pursuits such as architecture, performing arts and physical exercise, it is the way a human being stops being an individual and enters into relationship with other like-minded men and women of good will, exercising virtues and inhibiting vices. The way to tell when virtue is the course to tack, or a sea change of vice needs to be met and overcome, is to read the signs of the times: the direction of the winds and their force.

Boats cannot sail directly into the wind and knowing how to tell where the wind is coming from will save you a lot of frustration. For racing, this skill is particularly important. Sailors learn to use devices like "tell-tales" to judge wind direction. Thus Rod's "A big part of this is storytelling -- not only narrative journalism, but also novel-writing, filmmaking, television-producing, and the like." is so apropos: journalists are the instruments of the culture that inform us of when the wind blows. The challenge is one of first causes - Who makes the wind blow? Those who deny the necessity of answering that question will have a heck of a time coming up with narratives to explain the competing ideologies of a "Campaign for Liberty from Wind" or the "Defeat the Ocean of Evil: Drain the Swamp"?

Since the advent of the Enlightenment, and Descartes 'cogito ergo sum,' the temptation to justify acts that contradict reality with loosy-goosing sophistry has overwhelmed the concupiscence of fallen mankind: this tone of this very thread betrays the worshiping of a social justice of two dimensions - that the only fair way to practice equality is a "pris fix."

WRONG!

The 'pris juste' of marginal utility is the narrative of millenia of human social encounter and commercial intercourse from Mesopotamia onwards. Read Menger. Praxeology in the political theatre is no different than praxeology in an orchestra pit - the wind instruments may only harmonize with the strings when they follow the composer's score helped along by the conductor's careful prompting. A "conservative" ideologue blasting indignation from his tuba is no more able to win a standing ovation than a "liberal" ne'er do well discordantly clanging his tympani. A society that permits abortion on demand is like an orchestra that uses sawblades instead of bows on their stringed instruments, and a society that permits FIAT currency via fractional reserve banking is like a chorus singing the refrain uninterruptedly without the verses, wondering why the crowds have turned their backs. Without the lyrical evocation of a life well-lived, the droning beat echoes the marching orders of a slave driver on a chain gang.

That's where we are at - the Left wants a Marxist chain gang tune, the Right wants a Falangist chain gang tune. Both are tyrannts of the relativism of "mind over matter" ideologies - whether wage parity or capital accumulation, neither acknowledges a third dimension: the most important factor of production, the dignity of free will of the human person. Such a narrative is the "a priori" wisdom that modern schools of political and economic science outright DENIES!

Until our churches preach -- and our schools teach -- the personalism of the sanctity of life, we are doomed to be serfs in a sculling contest where the Gold medal goes to China!