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Rangel's rank hypocrisy
Thursday July 24, 2008
By Ellis Washington
This immorality [New York's rent-control laws] produces a host of evils so obvious you would expect even the city's illiterate public-school graduates to understand them.~ Becky Akers
Recently, "Paul" of Birmingham, Ala., one of my most ardent and devoted readers, sent me a fascinating article by writer Becky Akers on Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., and his current scandal regarding the 65-year-old infamous rent-control scam against the tenants, landlords and the good people of New York City.
For decades, this 19-term, powerful, bellicose chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has quietly exploited a loophole in rent-subsidy laws that were supposedly designed to protect "poor tenants" from the bloodlust of New York's notoriously "greedy" landlords.
Regarding Rangel's blatant hypocrisy in abusing New York's rent control laws, Akers stated:
On July 11, the usually gutless New York Times revealed that Rangel leases four rent-stabilized apartments in one of Harlem's most luxurious buildings. He combined three of them into a home so opulent that a recent book on interior design devotes several pages to it; he turned the fourth into a campaign office.This has New York City in an uproar. Its rent-control laws permit each tenant only one such cut-rate apartment, and it must be his "primary residence." No living elsewhere and keeping the apartment for occasional visits to the City, no converting it into a storeroom or office, even for campaigns. But – and can't you just see the legislators grinning at this little loophole? – such usages and multiple rent-controlled leases become illegal only when a landlord objects. Believe me, landlords object – unless the offender is a powerful politician who can put them out of business.
Regarding the historical background that brought about such a tyrannous, anti-capitalist policy, Walter Bock, in a fine article in "The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics," wrote:
New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act – also known as rent control – as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the recent Gulf War, nor the Vietnam War. It is World War II. That is when rent control started in New York City. Of course, war has very little to do with apartment shortages. On the contrary, the difficulty is created by rent control, the supposed solution. Gotham is far from the only city to have embraced rent control – a form of housing socialism. Many others across the United States have succumbed to the blandishments of this legislative "fix."The historical background behind rent control in New York would serve as the template for how socialists, liberals and progressives would realize their nefarious ends by infusing Leviathan government into every conceivable aspect of our lives: First, create or co-opt a pretext. In this case, in 1943 America was in the middle of World War II when mandated shortages of every conceivable item were understandably the norm, and most Americans were in dire straights.
Second, create a boogey man or a red herring to keep the people's eyes off the real enemies of freedom and liberty. In this case, socialists and their willing accomplices in the media, using Machiavellian tactics, sold the rent-control policy as a magnanimous gesture by the government to stave off the merciless moneychangers (landlords) who couldn't wait to raise the rents of the poor during war time and kick them out into the mean streets of New York.
Both the pretext and the policy was all a colossal farce. Aker writes:
Rent control has cursed New York since World War II, when it transferred decisions about where and how residents will live from us to the Legislature. But tenants don't see it that way. Instead, they rejoice that politicians save them from a horror more dreaded than terrorists: free-market rents. And politicians rejoice that tenants, who vastly outnumber landlords in the voting pool, are that gullible.Ergo, Our Rulers force certain entrepreneurs to subsidize some of the apartments they lease. Exactly which landlords, buildings and even apartments within those buildings depends on so many variables that it keeps battalions of lawyers in court. At the end of the war, some apartments rent for only a fraction of what the same space across the hall costs. The landlord eats the difference.
Here, I want to take a detour from Akers' analysis of Rangel's criminal exploitation of New York's rent-control programs to chide the people of New York who have tolerated this corrupt policy against their own vested interests for over six decades. Thomas Jefferson, in his transcendent Declaration of Independence, upholds the standard of all free peoples:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. …We are Americans. We were born into freedom and liberty, and our country is the oldest and continuing representative republic in the world. That means that any time fat-cat, corrupt political hacks like Rangel and the remnants of the crooked Tammany Hall machine in New York overtly or covertly try to put their filthy mitts on our tax dollars, we must hold them accountable, and when we find corruption, we must throw the bums out of office – Democrats or Republicans – it doesn't matter to me because truth transcends any political ideology.
But as Shakespeare said in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, "… and there's the rub."
The people of New York, who pride themselves on being some of the most intelligent, progressive, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, high-class people on the planet, for the past 65 years have allowed unscrupulous politicians they elected to high office in the name of rent egalitarianism, rent equality and socialized housing to shamelessly exploit millions of tenants and their landlords for no other reason than to enrich the politicians that enact these policies and the shyster attorneys who enforce them in the courts, thus denigrating the quality of life for all New York residents. But why?
What this entire Rangel-New York rent-control fiasco shows me is that the curse that progressivism, liberalism and socialism has bequeathed to America isn't so much FDR's "New Deal," LBJ's "Great Society," Jimmy Carter's admonition to turn down our thermostats to 68 degrees, Obama's scolding us to speak Spanish or stop driving our SUVs, or any other of the innumerable socialist policies done in the name of good intentions like "helping the poor," "making the rich pay their fair share," or the most ubiquitous pretext: "for the public good."
No, no, no, dear reader, the triumph of liberalism that strikes a mortal blow to Jefferson's inheritance to us over 230 years ago – Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – is that we allowed the teachers unions and progressive educators to establish and then take over the public schools.
The tragedy or America's Stalinist public education system has in turn produced generation, after generation, after generation of brain-dead, illiterate people who can't think or reason for themselves, who don't understand the basic precepts of logic, deductive reasoning and a representative republic to comprehend when they are being bamboozled by devious government bureaucrats.
The Russian dictator Josef Stalin was right when he said that, "[State-controlled] education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." A propagandized or poorly educated populace is how we tolerate a pol like Charlie Rangel.
Charlie has no fear of an honest, strong man challenging him in the next election. Why should he worry? He has been successful at hoodwinking his own people for 40 years. Why not 40 more?
Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality:
The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil:
Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).
Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."
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