Post #51278 by albaby1 on the US Policy board

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And price controls work really well, don't they? We don't have loads of examples of bad outcomes on things like rent control, do we? Things that are taught in every Econ 101 class?

They can work really well - in response to market failures. Econ 101 doesn't tell us that price controls are good or bad, it just says that they generally have worse outcomes than a functioning free market alternative. But for goods that can't be provided in a free market (like, say, access to courts or national defense) or that suffer from significant free market failures (like, say, access to firefighting in urban environments), price controls can be a better alternative than the broken market system.

So rent control usually works poorly compared to the alternative. Fixed prices for filing a lawsuit works pretty well, because there literally is no free market alternative.

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