Even Paul Krugman gets it.

The New York Times’ resident Keynesian apologist is a reliable standard bearer for the planted axioms of liberal orthodoxy, but every so often one can catch a glimpse of the tension that resides in the poor man, as the residues of his impressive economic training struggle against the tendentious veneer of his practiced liberalism, periodically breaching it. Behold, for example, his frustrated defense of the principle of comparative advantage while advocating for free trade, to the anguished chagrin of his NTY contemporaries, back when free trade was a bad thing – i.e. before Donald Trump decided he was against it.

So, too, did his liberal dogmatism weaken before the weight of pure economic reasoning when he wrote this about rent control back in 2000:

“The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and – among economists, anyway – one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ”a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.” Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go – and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out – what yesterday’s article oddly described as ”free-market horror stories” – and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.”

It is difficult to come up with an economic idea more thoroughly discredited than rent control, though minimum wage and collectivization of agriculture follow close behind. The prudential arguments are well known – if the aim is to bring down rental prices by increasing the supply of housing, then it makes no sense to artificially inflate demand and create a shortage of said housing.

The shortage is created in three ways: a) artificially low rents entice property owners to sell single-family home rentals to owner-occupants, removing those homes from the rental housing market altogether (single-family home rentals, incidentally, constitute by far the largest percentage of rentals in Colorado); b) those who acquire the rent-controlled housing will be less inclined to give it up, passing it on to friends or family members, for example, rather than putting it back on the market (in this way, rent controls tend to benefit only the initial occupants, not those who follow and cannot find available dwelling); and c) less housing gets built as developers balk at constructing housing when their ability to recover their cost via market rent is eliminated.

Rent control presents other distortions as well; the shortages spur “black market” activity, i.e., illegal payments and bribes being made and accepted to bump to the head of a waiting list. Also, lack of maintenance and property improvement becomes endemic, as rent controls decrease incentives to maintain rental property. Such maintenance and improvements are costly, and those costs cannot be recovered with artificially low rents; nor is there as strong a need to make investments in a property to market it when demand is so much higher. Ultimately, abandonment follows – this is a key reason why some neighborhoods in parts of New York in the 1970’s wound up looking like Dresden the day after the bombings.

Yes, the perils are well known, but it’s a nostrum that has a remarkable talent for resurrection. A bill, Senate Bill 225, has surfaced in the waning days of the current legislative session which would repeal the state’s prohibition on local governments enacting rent controls. No, the bill does not impose rent control on the state, but the temptation it offers to certain urban liberal enclaves to adopt the policy could prove irresistible, and the prohibition’s drafters were sagacious enough to recognize the reciprocal impacts of rent control laws on neighboring communities.

The bill utilizes a bit of terminological legerdemain to disguise its intentions – labeling the concept “rent stabilization” rather than the more odious “rent control” (terms which even the bill’s sponsor admitted in committee were “functionally interchangeable”) and offering itself as a tool of “local control,” the left’s new label of convenience for stealth insertion of statist ideas. It is offered as merely a tool for local governments to use in their attempt to address housing shortages and high rents, but is one which presents only the potential to exacerbate the situation it purports to solve.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask Paul Krugman.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and recovering journalist based in Denver. He is also an energy and environmental policy fellow at Centennial Institute.