Debating the Right to Housing | Vanessa Brown Calder, Cato Institute | Public Forum

0:01 to housing and this is a really important topic I think um for quite a few different reasons um rights language gets used a lot and thrown around a lot in the political debate and so whether or not you feel passionately about the question of whether or not housing is a right you certainly will hear about rights in all sorts of different topic areas outside of just housing so it’s something that it’s really important for us all to understand just as Citizens so tonight I’m going to actually break my presentation into kind of three parts the first part is going to be a more sort of the theoretical underpinning of Rights and we’re going to discuss rights

0:47 language from a sort of philosophical standpoint the second part of the presentation is actually going to be a little bit more practical in nature so we are going to talk about what it looks like what a world looks like where we are actually treating housing as a right and then finally in the third portion of the presentation we’re going to talk about some alternatives to treating housing as a right and um to calling it a right or declaring it a right so I hope you’ll stick with me through all three portions and I promise we’re going somewhere with it so just to begin with I think it’s really important that I State before anything else that it is perfectly consistent to care that people have

1:33 housing and to Meanwhile say that housing should not be called a right and that it is not a right um let me explain a little bit more why so first of all what are rights this is incredibly important question as I mentioned before broadly speaking rights protect us from each other they protect us from other individuals and they protect us from government protect us from other inter uh other individuals interfering in our lives or oppressing us and they protect us from government interfering in our lives and oppressing us if you think about the traditional rights that are enshrined in the United State Constitution Bill of Rights and

2:19 Declaration of Independence we can draw on a couple of scenes between all of those um you’ll remember that some of these rights include the right to life liberty and of Happiness um the right to believe what you want to believe that’s the freedom of religion of course the right to free speech and there are others the right to bear arms etc etc um what are the what are the commonalities between these disperate different um types of Rights in found in the Constitution well I’m going to kind of walk you through a definition of Rights and we may not be able to read the screen per perfectly if you’re not able to I’m sorry I think this will all be available to you after the fact um so

3:07 just bear with me on that the first element of the definition of a right is that rights are enforceable claims against other people um this is pretty simple this just means that any right that you have must be defended um it can be defended by you or if government is involved it will be protected or defended by government so it’s enforceable at the end of the day by some entity or the police force or individually individually if you if we’re in a state of nature meaning that there is no government available to defend it second of all rights are universally held and they’re universally obligating so this

3:53 sounds complicated but really all it means is that if something is a right it is both possible for everyone to claim it and it is possible and it is provided that everyone is obligated or Duty bound to actually provide that right to other individuals in society next rights are constraints on our Behavior so this is really important like I mentioned before rights protect us from harming each other from oppressing each other so I like to think of right as sort of guard rails or side constraints so we are able to do all of these things we have all of these opportunities available to us of actions that we can

4:39 take in our own lives and this is freedom and liberty to actually choose which action we want to take but these guard rails tell us that we can do all those things except for the thing that’s going to hurt someone else so that is how rights are constraints on behavior and then finally rights cannot be self- deeding they can’t be contradictory and what I mean by this is that if I am using my right to something it shouldn’t make it harder for you to use your right to that same thing okay so that was a lot what does this mean in regards to housing and I’m going to break this down for housing just piece by piece here unfortunately housing fails on three of four rights requirements um it fails on the second

5:26 requirement because uh if you think about any propos to provide housing to people these proposals are never equal in nature in other words what we’re talking about is not providing housing to every individual in society and that every individual in society is somehow responsible for doing that for everyone else so it’s not that there’s an equality of both obligation and claim instead generally what we hear is that certain individuals some individuals over here that we think aren’t very good at providing housing for themselves are going to be the ones that will be claiming the rights and meanwhile over here you’re going to have this group of people that we think are so good that

6:11 they are going to provide that right well that’s not actually equal rights at all um we can talk about what that is in a minute next advocating for housing as a right is not providing a con housing as a right does not provide a constraint on your behavior it actually tells you what you must do you must provide housing so that’s different than saying that you have a right to life wherein I can live and um you can live and we can both live happily in the same Society it sort of gets into it can’t be self-defeating or contradictory if I have to provide you a right to housing that actually makes it harder

6:57 for me to provide my own housing and so right the the right to housing is actually sort of a self-defeating or contradictory thing so it really fails on three of four accounts when it comes to the definition of what a right is so what is housing if it’s not something that we are considering an equal right if it doesn’t fit the definition of Rights what is it then well how is what we’re really trying to do when we say that we want everyone to have housing in society is we are just talking about a different distribution of a good um so we are just talking about redistributing housing or redistributing

7:44 resources and what we’re really looking at here is an equality of results or an equality of outcomes not an equality of Rights but let’s pretend that you don’t buy into this that you are not really a fan of the theoretic IAL um you don’t really care about the political philosophical background on rights and you want to just pretend that housing is a right what then what if we treated housing as a right even though it actually isn’t by definition how does that look well luckily for you I’m going to walk you through sort of a more practical concrete tangible hopefully analysis of what that might end up looking like just so you can get a sense for it

8:31 so if we’re playing pretend and saying that housing is a right though it doesn’t fit the definition we would have to decide some difficult questions we would have to ask ourselves as a society what qualifies who would decide what qualifies this housing is it that we want to provide everyone tents everyone mud Huts everyone Apartments everyone Mansions probably most people would say that it’s something in between all of those things so somewhere in the middle and between I mean between the two ends of the spectrum there so not tents and not Mansions but maybe apartments or homes okay who is going to provide that housing what I really want to hammer home here is that government does not

9:18 provide anything on its own um this is something that you will become more and more familiar with uh after you graduate high school and graduate college but government can only provide things through the individuals that it serves so in other words or that it serves um that actually serve it as well so individuals living under a government are going to provide the resources to it which then will be used by government and allocated to housing so it’s actually the individuals that provide either the money the time the resources in order to provide the housing so that’s something that we just have to kind of make clear from the get-go and finally what is a mechanism

10:04 that we would actually use this opens us up to all sorts of questions as well will we just tax people more in order to provide housing for other people um will we actually conscript people or we come to their doors knock on their door and say we actually we need you outside right now to build housing for your neighbor these are some of the uncomfortable questions that we really have to answer for we’re going to pretend that housing is a right I’m just going to use some of the sort of moderate uh sort of compromised um assumptions here as I’m going forward and you’ll see what I mean so I’m going to assume that actually and that is so hard to read that I actually

10:51 need my notes so that I can walk you through this um so hopefully you’ll be able to see this after the fact um so what I have on the sheet if you can’t see it is basically a scenario where I crunched some numbers in the scenario I am looking at what the Practical implications of providing housing to the entire United States would be um the entire United States there’s about 325 million or sorry yes million people that are living here Among Us the median household price or home price I should say in the United States is $193,000 almost $194,000 and we make or we take in the

11:40 federal government I should say takes in about $3.2 trillion dollars in tax revenue a year so if we provide that type of housing just the medium type of housing to every person it would take us 20 years to do that if we spent every single penny of tax revenue on housing which of course we wouldn’t do and it’s politically completely unfeasible uh because we have other things that the federal government likes to provide such as um you know milit military that will protect us infrastructure um you know roads and hospitals and schools and things like that so this would never actually happen but nonetheless in our hypothetical

12:25 scenario that’s how long it would take us to provide each individual with that type home but you might say wait wait wait wait wait I think that some individuals are actually going to live in families so I’ve B that in in the second line there the second assumption you can see how long it would take if we provided that the average household size in the United States is 2.53 people which it is it would take us eight years if we devoted every single dollar every single cent of federal tax revenue to this one purpose which is providing housing and of course doing that we would actually be behind in eight years because the population would be growing in the meantime but what you have to remember

13:11 is that rights actually Traverse borders so it’s not only that we would be needing to provide housing to the United States population but really Our obligation with rights because they’re universally held and universally obligating is we would need to provide to the entire world population so what does that look like well there you can see I hope on your screen that um the world population is what now 7.4 uh let’s see you know a Habitat for Humanity home costs about $135,000 to build so I’m not even using the American the average American or the median American home price anymore but a

13:57 little lower number and if you’re providing that type of phone to the entire world population and assuming that the world wants to live in sort of family uh configurations that are similar to the United States so an average household size of 2.53 it would take us 123 years in order to provide that housing at the worldwide level if we devoted every single penny of tax revenue to it of course we couldn’t do that because there are many of other obligations that the federal government has but just for the purposes of the type of edical so we see that Not only would it be very difficult fiscally uh potentially very fiscally irresponsible

14:44 and economically challenging to try to provide something like this there are also other rather unsavory implications so it’s not that you can just provide everyone a house and nothing else happens nobody changes their behavor behavior in fact people do change their behavior they respond to the incentives that you provide them they respond to external they respond to their circumstances um so we predict or I would predict that when you provide people with housing for free by rights you’re going to have certain things happen and you know an economics 101 class would predict the same thing so this is nothing Earth shattering this is just sort of

15:29 what is believed to be the cause and effect of providing certain benefits so for one thing you would reduce the labor force participation worldwide in other words not as many people that can work would work this would compound your budget problems of course in the United States because not as many people working means not as much federal tax revenue which means that it’s even harder to pay for these program additionally um you know housing assistance it doesn’t just lower employment but also lowers earnings more than it lowers employment at least that’s what the academic literature tells us this might be even a a more

16:18 troubling effect than we think it is because people are not actually progressing in their careers in the same way that they would be otherwise and so they’re not maybe making those promotions or raises Additionally you have a uh an implied reduction in Innovation and an economic growth that would occur as a result of less people working and less people involved in the labor force and what’s problematic about that is that that actually really it means a decline in the quality of life that we all experience and finally you can always expect whenever you to provide any type of welfare benefits to individuals and

17:03 society that the configurations of families and the robustness of civil society which is really family and um Church organizations and clubs and things like that will change somewhat and I would expect that it would deteriorate somewhat in this case people wouldn’t have to live together in the same way that they did before they may be able to all live separately that’s actually a bad thing for civil society not having people relying on each other but having people actually relying on government is a bad thing for civil society okay so if it’s true that housing is not a right by definition and if it’s true that treating it like a

17:49 right has very negative fiscal and economic impacts how else can we treat housing is it possible for us to actually provide housing to individuals without calling it a right the answer to that luckily is yes we absolutely can provide housing to individuals and we can actually do a better job of providing housing to individuals through other mechanisms than by legislating it as a right or calling it a right um we have a couple of the the um solutions that I’m going to touch on here so free markets volunteering philanthropy um reductions in regulations that strangle the free

18:36 market are all ideas so I’m going to walk you through those so first of all free markets are key just to put it in perspective for you um I know that we are very concerned about providing housing to individuals particularly the homeless and we should be this does it just matters a lot we want to take care of each other but Freer markets do a much better job of doing that and when you start to declare housing a right you by default have to get you have to become more and more interventionalist when it comes to the market the housing market so here I just pulled a couple of the countries that are Freer and a couple of the countries that are the least free economically and

19:21 I looked at their homelessness rates um in the United States we have not even 1% % of the population that is living in homelessness thank heaven in Switzerland they have even less than we do and of course they are actually economically Freer than we are we fall under the I believe somewhat free category or maybe it’s a little bit better than that mostly free category um Switzerland is categorized as being very free economically now Venezuela and Zimbabwe it was actually hard to find numbers on some of the least free economies as far as their homelessness rate because those economies are so closed that they don’t publish data uh they don’t provide data

20:07 publicly but Venezuela and Zimbabwe apparently do um and those are some of the least free or unfree countries in the world and as you can see their homelessness rates are multiple times larger than the United States or Switzerland homeless homeless rates um in fact the Venezuelans have I think declared housing to be a right in all sorts of different legislation possibly even in their constitution I looked into this at one point in time and it’s projected that in a couple years from now so in 2019 almost let’s see 40% of the population of Venezuela will live in government provided housing and these

20:54 pictures on the screen here um I wasn’t trying trying to you know create a biased collage or anything like that I just picked the first picture off of a Google image search when I typed in Venezuelan housing uh Zimbabwe housing Switzerland housing and as you can see it’s not just that a Freer Market does a better job providing housing by the numbers but the quality of that housing is also much much better and a Freer Market what are some other ways that we can provide housing outside of making sure that our markets stay very free and fluid which by the way we don’t actually exist in a totally free market in the United States

21:41 just so you’re aware and there are things that we can do to actually make that market for housing Freer and we can talk about that in Q&A if you’re interested but outside of the free market there are other ways to get involved one way of course is volunteering um I think I mentioned Habitat for Humanity earlier in this presentation and it certainly this is a nonprofit profit organization which provides housing to low-income families in the United States domestically and internationally and they do quite a good job of it um they build thousands of housings of housing units all over the United States every year I have an intern who’s actually worked on about 50 housing

22:28 projects Habitat for Humanity housing projects just in the State of Florida over the last couple of years so they are really out there doing it and they are a completely voluntary organization if you care about housing then you can get involved with them and certainly if any of you are interested you should look into it they love to have young recruits that are willing and able to build outside of sort of joining a organization and providing your own time you can also down the road voluntarily provide your own money um this slide I think is very hopeful this is a total charitable giving that United States um

23:16 Americans have provided over the past oh I don’t know let’s see 40 years or so and in fact in the past two years well in 2015 and 2014 I think that’s the latest numbers that we have here those years were the most broke records for the most charitable giving ever 99% in fact of high net worth individuals in the United States give to charity and 80% of those High net worth individuals are giving to basic needs organizations so organizations that specifically Target things like housing and food and clothing and things like that so this is definitely something

24:02 that you can keep in mind for later on best of all charity is more effective so the numbers on charitable giving are such that it looks like about 70% of the dollars that are spent at the average organization are given directly to the individuals in need only 30% are given to the administrators um the people who are working at the nonprofit sort of the overhead cost when you look at government welfare programs it’s the exact opposite about 70% of the money for welfare programs in the government are given to government bureaucrats administrators overhead

24:48 costs and only 30% of that money makes it way makes its way to the recipients to the individuals that need it most okay so we’re about wrapping up here um so in summary what are the takeaways number one philosophically housing does not fit the definition of a right number two if we were to pretend that housing was a right and act like and treat it like a right it would be almost inconceivably burdensome and difficult and fiscally irresponsible for us to try to treat it in that way it would be nearly impossible to achieve our objectives and number three it is

25:36 still perfectly congruent to say that you do not want to treat it that way through government or use government coercion in order to provide housing to people and also say that you do care about people having housing and there are very good ways to help provide that to them the people that need it most thank you so much for listen in and now I am looking forward to reading some of your questions here so let’s get started all right I’m gonna have to start scrolling through these let’s see if I can figure this out guys okay so the first question is out of curiosity assuming that we plan to

26:22 use this in our debate do we have any do you have any source for this information um and in parentheses the chart thank you Michael for that question I’m not sure I’m guessing that the chart that you’re talking about is this one right here or perhaps uh this next one so I actually crunched these numbers myself but I do have reference information if you’re interested in where I got the numbers on household size or population or median home price you can really Google any of this stuff uh the median home price for instance I I think I pulled that off some US Census Bureau or American housing survey uh data set population you know you can just do a Google search on the current population um in America

27:10 I think this is what you’re talking about I hope um the total cost I mean right here you just are multiplying these things together right and then when it comes to the time frame you’re just dividing the total cost by the number of federal tax revenue dollars that we collect in any given year so I hope that that helps um okay let’s move down okay yeah so it looks like you were saying scenario one Andrea says why is military spending a priority over affordable housing that’s a really interesting question I

27:55 would say for one thing um again the government initial sort of purpose is to protect us from each other and if you don’t have security so in the hierarchy of needs do you guys know about moso’s hierarchy of needs I’m guessing some of you have taken a psychology class in order to have many of the other things and the hierarchy of needs the things that you want you have to start with a base level of kind of like Safety and Security it’s key so if you have a foreign Invasion happening on your soil for instance then it’s very hard to say that you that anyone has housing right because it can be taken away from you at

28:42 any given moment so you have to start with some base level of safety and sort of stability in order for anyone to even have property rights and property rights that you up to have sort of the ability to provide yourself with a house I hope that that helps um could you give us a link to your sources so I’m not sure which sources we’re talking about now if you’re um yeah I mean absolutely I can provide links to anything that you want here if you want a link to the total giving there is actually a source down at the bottom there it’s the giving USA Foundation 2016 numbers you can just pull that off the internet you can go searching for it um the list of homeless

29:29 countries and the percentage of people that are homeless in any country um I can’t remember where I got that but I can track it down super easily so I am happy to send some of these things to you all through Kate after the presentation let’s see uh okay uh Kate says to tell you all that she will email you the Powerpoint okay okay Jonathan Kelly says if something is a right doesn’t the

30:15 government have a moral obligation to provide that right for everyone I would say yeah generally speaking um I’m not a political philosopher so I don’t want to take a super strong stand on that particular question but yeah generally speaking that’s what government is for is to protect our rights the problem is that with housing as we already discussed housing is not actually a right by definition for all sorts of different reasons okay all right Michael asks could you define economically free I’m sorry everybody’s asking questions okay thank

31:00 you um sure I can definitely I can definitely Define economically free so in an economically free Society you are going to have um voluntary transactions happening instead of having somebody at the top of the sort of government pyramid who is deciding how many houses you need for instance and this context how many you should build and where you should build them you have the private Market deciding that and that’s happening through voluntary exchanges um people on the ground are deciding I want to build a house here and I’m gonna I’m going to build a house for myself rather than the government saying I think we need to

31:46 build public housing as is happening in Venezuela for you know 100% of the population eventually instead of having the government really involved and trenched in the housing market you have private citizens or private companies building housing for themselves but then even more broadly than that a free market has other aspects too right it has um free trade it has low taxes it has uh low tariffs um there’s all sorts of other components and if you’re interested in looking at how that ranking was done in particular that I was using on this free markets our key slide then I would suggest that

32:32 you go check out the Heritage Foundation because they put together an index of economic freedom on a yearly basis and I pulled it directly from that all right Carrie is asking where are you getting the homelessness statistics again I apologize uh you guys really want the data sources and I love you for that um I I can’t remember okay the homelessness statistics came from all sorts of different places because there’s not actually as far as I’m aware maybe there is somewhere there’s not like a world Bank ranking of homelessness so I had to pull these from different unique sources um again I’m happy to provide those sources they came from different places because of course the different countries are publishing

33:18 these statistics separately rather than together Jonathan says I think this is an important point if housing is a right and a government has an obligation to provide it us right isn’t it unjust for the government to fail to provide us these rights okay so I uh David Edwards says I agree with Jonathan doesn’t the government lose legitimacy if it fails to do its duty to protect and provide rights to people so I think that this is I think we’re having still some difficulty in the definition of what a right is so I’m just going to take us back a little bit and see if I can describe it a little bit better hopefully so maybe one way to think

34:03 about this that would be more useful is that rights are things which limit Behavior they limit other people’s behavior and they limit the government’s Behavior this is what negative rights are there’s this term called negative rights now some people think that there are positive rights and if you are ever calling housing a right then you’re basically calling it a positive right positive rights are things which require you to actually actively do things they tell you you must do such and such so you must pay more money to the government so that they can provide housing to someone

34:48 else that is an example of a positive rights the reason why we don’t like positive rights is because they lead to the oppression of the individual so there’s a big difference between telling somebody that there are certain things that you can’t do over here but there are all of these things that you can do you can do everything else but you can’t do this little itty bitty Thing versus a positive right tells you that you must do certain things that you absolutely must and are required to do them and that limits your ability as an individual to choose to have choice to have freedom to have a say over yourself and most fundamentally um we all I think we all

35:36 agree that self ownership is really key it’s sort of the first right the most fundamental right is self- ownership the ability to choose what to do with yourself when to do it as long as it doesn’t hurt other people and that is infringed upon when you start telling people that there are positive rights I think there’s another thing to be said here another argument to be made which is that if you start to call housing a right then you have to wonder where does what is not a right anymore is uh is a car a right is I don’t know a prod bag a right is I mean that might seem extreme but there’s no clear differentiating line between all sorts of different

36:21 Goods um that we would want to put in that same bucket so if you’re talking about positive right rights are endless and they’re completely unprovided by government I hope that that helps a little bit okay um just reading through Kate’s comments here on the side and then I’m going to keep scanning down okay I may have to skip over some of these just because we don’t have forever here so bear with me let’s

37:06 see would a plan to provide housing be exclusive to United States citizens or all people who are residing in the United States um yeah if something is truly a right then it would apply to all individuals in the United States and it would Traverse borders as I mentioned before so it would also apply to individuals worldwide where is the definition of rights from um well you can look up if you’re interested I’m guessing that you want sources again here and that’s what you’re trying to get at um you can look for an you can look up natural rights you can look up negative rights um you can look up robt Robert notk um and you can read some of his he

37:54 was a Harvard philosopher philosopher and you can read some of his writings okay let’s see would it be considered just to only provide people below a certain household income with housing as a right okay so this is really key if you’re just providing housing to some people remember that is not a right the reason being that it actually conflicts with definitional component of Rights number two here which is that rights are claims that everyone has and that are

38:39 universally obligating so you would need to be providing housing to all people and providing it by all people in the same way that the right to life is provided to everyone and everyone can claim that and we all have the obligation to provide that right to life to everyone else I hope that helps okay um Cherry says your presentation is great for con what points would you make for pros that the US ought to guarantee the right to housing I think that what you’re going to see here when you debate

39:24 someone or when you are the person who is debating on the other side if I had to guess and obviously I mean I’m not going to argue with myself completely but I assume that what you’re going to see on the other side is that people will say just think about Bobby Joe he is living on the street it’s not fair he has a horrible life if we just gave him housing then all of these other things in his life would become better and he would be healthier and he would be more involved in work and he’d be able to get a job and he would be happier and maybe he could get married and all these other things so what I’m trying to say is that when people make the

40:11 argument uh in favor of guaranteeing housing as a right most likely they will appeal to Pathos so they will appeal to emotion so it’s not likely to be a particularly rational logical discussion it’s likely to be more emotionally driven I’m sure that people will find um ways to make it more rational and logical but I think that that’s mostly what it will boil down to um okay let’s see what else do we have here okay um I think that this is actually really

40:57 interesting and I feel bad that I haven’t got through all the questions yet Kerry says with the history of redlining and discrimin discriminatory housing practices could we realistically move to say housing should be a right this is a really interesting question um so I think that there’s a difference between what you’re suggesting so red lining for those of you that aren’t familiar was basically a way of preventing racial minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods this is actually a really horrible thing that happened in American history over the course of the 20th century and it happened in some cities

41:44 and neighborhoods um and that was something that happened through government policy in a lot of cases in fact aside from redlining another way that people kind of redlined was through zoning regulations and actually this still continues to happen today where the government will actually say well not exactly the government the citizens will come to the government and they will say we only want you to be able to build we only want people to be able to build large single family homes in our neighborhoods and so what does that do it keeps racial minorities in cases where race is correlated with income in other when poor people are also racial minorities it keeps those

42:31 people out of those neighborhoods now saying that that is absolutely wrong which it is and I am the first to say that we should reduce zoning regulations in fact I spend a lot of my time thinking about zoning regulations and how we can reduce them and how we should reduce them and although I am the first to say that red lining is horrible and we should have never done that that is not the same as saying these are two different separate issues whether or not the government should prevent people from moving into certain neighborhoods the answer to that is absolutely no the government needs to respect individual rights but that’s not

43:17 the same as saying that the government should now decide that they’re the developer and that they’re going to develop housing for every racial minority um these are two very different arguments so I hope I hope the way that I’ve explained it it makes sense to you that these are not the same thing you can be very much against redlining and that has nothing to do with whether or not you want the government to actually get involved in producing housing as they do through actually public housing today Sophie says how would you suggest that we affirm this resolution housing ought to be a right um no I would absolutely argue that it should not be a

44:04 right and I hope that my presentation helped make that more clear if it was confusing at the beginning would a plan to provide housing push our national debt past the point of no return if it was provided as a right by right then the answer to that is yes because that would mean that we were actually providing housing for every individual and that would be as I hope I showed you in in scenario one that would definitely push our budget um our debt past the point of no return in fact already at this point in time there’s 22.5 trillion dollar that we’re holding in debt in the United States and

44:51 we have the highest debt to GDP ratio that we have had in a 100 years right now today and that’s without deciding that we’re going to provide housing for everyone which is extremely expensive okay let’s see what else do we have here these are some good questions very good question um let’s [Music]

45:36 see just want to scan through and okay yeah and in answer to Jake’s question how would a right to housing affect to banking in our country it’s a good question um I think that the that the banking sector I’m certainly no expert when it comes to monetary policy but I definitely believe that the banking sector would be out of business um that

46:23 there would be a reduction in um business people wouldn’t need need to go get a loan right if the government is providing housing the government is actually would be the one that was taking out loans um and so from a consumer perspective that would most likely be the change let’s see this person um how I’m not sure that’s the most satisfactory according to definition of economic freedom don’t all social programs violate economic freedom by deserving who deserves deciding who deserves what um you would have to go in there and look at what Heritage

47:09 Foundation uses in order to calculate economic freedom and I can’t remember exactly what I said um the definition was before but certainly when you interfere with individuals by producing more and more tax burden on them that definitely that definitely reduces economic freedom and it does it in multiple ways right it makes it so that individuals don’t actually get to choose what to do where to invest their money what to do with their money um it also makes it it also makes it so that individuals are much less likely to want to work hard um and because of that they are very very like

47:56 likely to you know be more dependent on some of these social programs and government benefits and it’s kind of just a bit of a downward spiral but yes according to that definition of economic freedom social programs do actually reduce economic freedom somewhat okay I’m trying to see if I missed any um okay I I think this is maybe kind of the second time that I’ve got this question but um Lewis mentioned that in

48:43 debate we have to argue both sides there are any arguments that might be helpful on the other side I certainly don’t want to make the arguments for the other side um because I don’t think that they’re correct which I hope that you all have understood throughout this or throughout this presentation nonetheless I think that probably people on the other side will try to talk about the um United Nations I can’t remember what it’s called basic rights Charter or something like that um you can look it up where basically a whole bunch of countries tried to talk about all sorts of different positive rights like housing as being um actual rights which they want to provide for through government I also also just wanted to mention on an earlier question

49:29 um I’m not sure that I really covered this in the presentation but some of you mentioned redlining I think it’s really important that you know that regulations that interfere with the free market like zoning regulations they constrain housing Supply and so they actually increase the price of housing for poor people specifically so I really want you to know that even when governments like Venezuela’s government or Cuba’s government declare housing as a right there are things so there’s two things here number one we can actually provide housing much better much higher quality through a free market and on top of that there are

50:15 certain things that we can do to make the market even Freer that will make it so that our government not our government the free market is actually much much more effective at producing this housing that we want everyone to have at the end of the day okay um I’m just gonna take this one last question and then I think we’re gonna sign off here oh man I just got a long one I’m gonna have to move up I’m sorry Michael uh Ben asks if we were to lower the cost of the housing built is it possible to provide cheaper housing that’s a great question question generally what we like to talk about in housing policy is filtering which means

51:02 that actually we build new housing that housing costs a lot and then the older housing filters down to lower income individuals so the more new housing you build the better because older housing becomes cheaper when there’s more competition when there’s more opportunities there’s alternatives to that that has answered some of your questions I hope this was helpful I wish you all well in your debate and I’ll turn it over to Kate now hi all that’s about all we have uh I want to have all of us join me and thanking Miss Calder for uh her

51:48 presentation and answering questions um I’m just going to go ahead and over to here uh we have a really quick service