Regulation does not come out of thin air--it comes in response to abuses. It's intellectual twaddle to complain about the resulting regulation without acknowledging its source--which is abuse of the commons.
Sometimes the cure proposed is as bad as or worse than the disease. We need to be sure we pay attention to the effects of our decisions, and reverse, augment or change them as needed.
Switzerland could make everything less expensive if they imported cheap labor and cut the minimum wage. But they elect not to.
I guarantee that if you made California cheaper you'd attract more people and then it'd just become more expensive again. There's not enough space there to accommodate all the people in the country that would live there if they could afford it.
Of course, those states will have to enact things similar to California when it comes to employee rights, like refusing to enforce most non-compete agreements.
These regulations had numerous unintended and unforeseen consequences, however, which collectively had the effect of exacerbating rather than curing all of the economic problems that were changing society in the 1970s.
There is some truth to what you're claiming, but I'm tired of this "California just wanted to freeze itself in the 1960s and look how wrong they were." In truth everything was going pretty good for everyone until the last decade or two.
You can see exactly that continuous spectrum of decay in California in many places. The state has become ever more polarized into rich and poor, with less and less middle, during that entire time. This is partially a process that was going on everywhere in the US, but all the extra regulation in California that was designed to halt that process actually made it worse.
The California middle class has been massively eroding since the '70s. Before that, you could drop out of high school and still get a job that would lead to you owning a house within a few years. Now, owning a house is impossible for almost everyone.
The land regulations that restricted supply have made long term housing prices grow far faster than the national average: http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0...
Huge tracts of formerly middle class suburbs near San Francisco and LA have become massive ghettoes -- where you still have to pay half a million dollars or more to buy a house next to thugs who openly sell crack 24 hours a day, where people are shot a couple of times a month. Where else in the US do you pay half a million dollars for a house in the ghetto?
The middle class jobs have mostly evaporated -- other than sinecures in California's vast bureaucratic and public employee apparatus, in which case you get a job for life with a powerful, politically-connected union to keep you from ever being fired for any reason. Good luck getting one of those unless you have a friend or relative who's already there.
Yes, things are great if you happen to be a high skilled tech worker in San Francisco during the late 90s or from circa 2010 to present, but this is a very small fraction of the population. Most Californians who don't have advanced computer programming skills only got squeezed harder by that influx of new money pushing up real estate prices still further.
And we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the "smart farm" trend really kicks in: http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/fac...
Soon, very soon, robots will be picking all the produce in the Central Valley, and there will be millions of newly unemployed low-skilled workers flooding into San Francisco and LA looking for work.
Rent control in SF was a direct response to Prop 13 and certain landlords enacting disproportionate rent increases. Strict zoning had been happening before prop13 (1978) and still continues to this day based on the desires of each community and how each would like its city planned.
Yes, rent control was intended to alleviate the problem of large rent increases. In practice it has only made large rent increases even worse -- by shifting them from long term tenants onto "people who have moved recently," which does not necessarily correlate with "people who are not long term residents a community." This is precisely the sort of unintended and unforeseen consequence I referred to in my post above. New tenants paying market rate rent are forced to subsidize the long-term tenants' rent. (Besides, it is inherently xenophobic, which is a seperate issue.)
It is a wealth transfer from "people who have moved recently" to "people who have not moved recently." It incentivizes residents to never move, so that they can keep their rent control, and it incentivizes landlords to raise the rents as high as possible when a unit is released back to market rate.
The perverse and unintended effect is insanely high market rate rents, which eventually leads inevitably to the disintegration of the same lower income communities that rent control was designed to preserve, as rental units are inevitably slowly released back to market rate. Poor people sometimes move, too, or die. Young adults moving out of their parents' place can't afford to live in the neighborhood where they grew up. Only much richer people can afford to move in.
As far as your second point, I don't think you know that demand for housing is so inelastic that the clearing price for $/square foot would remain static regardless of supply. I have a feeling it would retreat if more supply came on the market.
> What if Californians just decided they want their communities to look the way they do now?
If that, rather than selfishly increasing their property values at public expense, is their true motivation, they can do this in a way that satisfies everyone. Drive out all the businesses that bring in the money chasing after housing.
Are you just reflexively defending the concept of regulation generally, or do you have a specific defense for the regulations maligned?
To my ears, the only "intellectual twaddle" is the shallow implication that the author hasn't considered that sometimes regulations are there for a reason. The author surveys relevant research, highlights some key effects, and recommends specific reforms. You quote "the commons" as if the author didn't also have Hardin as required reading in undergraduate economics.
You're half-right, insofar as you say that regulation doesn't come out of thin air, but you're neglecting the role of philosophical ideas in history.
Regulation comes as a result of certain philosophical perspectives gaining sway. Namely, there was an era before German philosophy swept into America and gave rise to the Progressive movement (which, by all accounts, fought tirelessly for regulation.)
I don't have enough time to go into how Kant, Hegel, Marx and others influenced American intellectuals, and influenced/led to the utilitarians and pragmatists, and how this led to the Progressive movement, but it did, and this is not even a controversial point.