Whatever Happened to Property Rights? by Stephen Moore for Town Hall
I’m no lawyer, that’s for sure, and so I don’t have expertise on the intricacies of the law, but I am angry as a hornet by the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal “eviction moratorium.”
On Tuesday, the high court in a divided 5-4 opinion will allow the moratorium to continue until August. This moratorium allows people to stay in their apartments and other rental units and not pay the rent they agreed to.
This policy started more than a year ago when the pandemic was in full force. But the policy is unconstitutional — an affront to basic property rights and the sanctity of contracts. It should have never been allowed and implemented in the first place and certainly has no place in the law now that COVID-19 is over and there are 9.1 million open jobs in the country.
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Since when can the government tell a private enterprise that it can’t collect its rightful payments from its customers? What’s next? Politicians promising to end hunger in America by allowing poor people to go into a grocery store or 7-Eleven and taking whatever food they want without paying? This law puts all the cost of achieving a social objective — not having people lose the roof over their heads — during tough times on businesses and individuals. Amazing how humanitarian the political class is with other people’s money.
This is also a case where the left’s do-gooder edicts defy basic common sense. I am friends with several owners of apartment buildings and rental units. Guess what happened the day after these local, state and federal waivers on paying rent are implemented? Over half the tenants and, in some cases, as many as 90% of the occupants stopped paying their rent.
The latest national estimate is that landlords are losing about $13 billion A MONTH in rental payments. But as one apartment owner tells me: “If I can’t collect the rental payments, I can’t pay the bank the mortgage on the property. I may have to default on the loan.” The latest estimates from CNBC are that more than 11 million Americans have stopped paying their rent on time — or have just stopped paying entirely.
