Bookworm Room has it right.

Bernie is evil. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say that he’s just the crazy uncle who’s a straight shooter with his consistent beliefs, something that must earn him respect.

No. This is a man who lived through more than 50% of the 20th century, a century that saw socialism in its various forms send around 100 million people to early graves through murder, war, torture, and slave labor. Bernie was around for that. He was born during WWII; he saw what happened in North Korea; he saw what happened in Vietnam; he saw what happened in Cuba; he saw what happened across Latin America and Africa; he saw what happened in the Soviet Union; and he saw what happened in China. That he can still believe in socialism despite seeing the misery it relentlessly inflicted around the world means that he’s either completely evil or he’s a fool . . . and I don’t think he’s a fool.

Moreover, Bernie is a grossly dishonest person. Back in 2016, when he was merely a parasite who lived off of government and wives, one could say that he was an honest man who lived in accordance with his belief system. Since then, though, as Bloomberg was good enough to point out during the debate, Bernie has become a multimillionaire with real estate holdings and fast cars, who flies around American in private jets.

Rather than give up this wealth as a good true believer should, Bernie has instead given up his attacks on millionaires and now only attacks billionaires. While Trump may puff about statistics, he’s completely honest about his core beliefs. Bernie, however, applied his apparent core beliefs to himself only because he was incapable of earning money (angry communists usually are).

When Bernie finally earned money, he didn’t act like an honest man and say, “I was wrong in my beliefs.” Instead, like every tyrant in the world, he said, “I don’t have to live by the rules I intend to impose on others.” That’s hypocritical and, because socialism and death march hand-in-hand, evil.

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Bookworm understates Socialism’s death toll, I’m afraid.

Yuri N. Maltsev discussing the Staggering Toll of the Russian Revolution:

The late Rudolph Rummel, the demographer of government mass murder, estimated the human toll of twentieth-century socialism to be about 61 million in the Soviet Union, 78 million in China, and roughly 200 million worldwide. These victims perished during state-organized famines, collectivization, cultural revolutions, purges, campaigns against ‘unearned’ income, and other devilish experiments in social engineering.”

HT: Vanderleun.

A Berlin rent protest.

You missed visiting bombed-out, rubble-strewn Berlin post-1945? Don’t worry. You’ll have another chance, just a few short years down the road, to see entire empty neighborhoods comprised of falling-down, abandoned buildings.

New York City had square miles of buildings like that, back in the 1970s, thanks to Rent Control.

When Government Price Controls gift tenants with give-away rents and buildings’ incomes fail to suffice to pay taxes and buy heating oil, their owners have no choice but to walk away. Nobody wants to abandon valuable real estate, but when the Government expropriates all the income and destroys a property’s value, abandonment becomes inevitable. In NYC, countless thousands of buildings, entire neigborhoods, were once boarded up and abandoned. Berlin’s turn is obviously coming.

Bloomberg

Germany’s capital is taking extreme measures to stay (relatively) affordable and not go the way of San Francisco or London. Beginning in early 2020, Berlin’s left-leaning government will freeze rents for five years. Landlords will be required to show new tenants the most recent rental contracts to prove they aren’t jacking up prices. They’ll also have to follow new rent-cap rules, which for many landlords could mean lowering rents by as much as 40%. Those who don’t comply will be hit with fines as high as €500,000 ($553,000) for each violation.

Even more radically, tenant groups and thousands of activists are demanding that large corporate landlords be expelled from the city altogether, their property expropriated. The goal is to get the government to buy back roughly 250,000 properties—almost one-eighth of Berlin’s housing stock—and turn them into public housing. And while the move may sound far-fetched, it’s won support from anywhere from 29% to 54% of Berliners, according to yvarious polls. Two of the city’s three ruling political parties have even endorsed a nonbinding public referendum on whether to force big landlords to sell their real estate to the government. (The biggest party, the Social Democratic Party, or SPD, is against the move, as is German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. They’ve signaled their intentions to challenge the new regulations in court.)

Berlin’s landlords, big and small, are reeling. The city’s publicly traded real estate companies, whose share prices fell for most of the summer after the government announced the planned freeze in June, complain that Berlin’s new regulations will scare off needed capital. Fewer companies will invest in modernizations to make buildings more appealing or energy-efficient, they say, and construction of new units may suffer, which would exacerbate Berlin’s shortages. “Almost 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that some people want the former conditions back,” Michael Zahn, chief executive officer of Berlin’s largest publicly traded landlord, Deutsche Wohnen SE, said in an earnings call in November, referring to the former East Germany’s all-controlling government. “Tenants and landlords will face great uncertainty. That’s a poison pill for investment.”

RTWT

Styephe

* Forbes story.