Out-of-touch wackos’

“Out-of-touch wackos’”, Carmel Pine Cone— Sept. 29, 2023

Bureaucracies never die. They just grow and fester. If the Monterey Rental Registry is created, it will never go away. It will morph into something bigger, more expensive, and intrusive. It will harm both renters and landlords. It will assume powers that were never envisioned in its original design.  It will, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Monterey’s rental registry is being created under the erroneous assumption that higher rents can be blamed on landlords, and not on government-created inflation or the forty years of governmental efforts to prevent the building of more housing units.

Politicians caused this housing crisis, and now they think they can somehow miraculously fix it with another cumbersome and tax-consuming bureaucracy. Who are the real out-of-touch wackos?

Lawrence Samuels, Carmel