1. Chart of the Day I (above) shows some housing and homeless data for the Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles MSAs. See any patterns?

2. We Don’t Need More Affordable Housing, We Need More Housing So It Will Be Affordable is what we learn from a 2018 article in Forbes by Roger Valdez:

These two groups, single-family neighbors and socialist, have married for convenience in the political arena and their child is the notion of “affordability.” The first group opposes new market rate housing because it will hurt them economically even though their stated reasons are a rhetorical distraction from that fact. The second group believes that the reason prices are high is because of profiteering, therefore they believe that in order to make housing affordable the only solution is to redistribute profits from market rate housing through fees and taxes to the production of affordable housing built by non-profits. Neighbors support these schemes such as Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) because they know they will slow the production of market rate housing with process and cost. 

MP: It’s simple Economics 101 that if you restrict the supply of new housing through government regulations (e.g., zoning), the price of housing will increase, the affordability of housing will decline, and homelessness will increase.

3. Quotation of the Day is from Barton Swain’s op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal “Capitalism Isn’t a ‘System’“:

Although the term “capitalism” has long worked as a shorthand signifier for a market economy, there is a sense in which to use it at all is to accept the socialist’s premise that a market economy is a consciously created system, manipulated by its creators for their own material ends. But it isn’t that. A socialist economy is, by definition, a system—it must be created, planned, vigilantly monitored and forcefully regulated in order to function. But a market economy has no plan. It begins to exhibit the qualities of a system when its wealthiest actors are allowed to bend governmental policies to their advantage, but that is a vastly different thing from a system deliberately designed for stated goals from the beginning.

MP: It’s a very important and mostly overlooked point that a key difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism is a “system” that necessarily requires a top-down “consciously created system manipulated by it creators” — elected officials and government bureaucrats — and free-market capitalism is an unplanned, organic, anti-systematic, bottoms-up form of economic organization directed by spontaneous order and impersonal market forces. And the main difference between socialism and capitalism? Capitalism works.

4. Chart of the Day II (above) shows another important US energy milestone — through September of this year, America produced more energy than it consumed for the first time since 1957, more than sixty years ago. For that amazing reversal of a near half-century trend of the US increasingly being reliant on foreign sources of energy you can thank the revolutionary, made-in-the-USA technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which opened up previously inaccessible oceans of shale gas and oil. Carpe oleum

5. Chart of the Day III (above) shows another remarkable US energy milestone — US net petroleum imports have fallen to only 3.7% this year through November, the lowest level in at least 70 years since the Energy Information Administration started tracking and reporting these data in 1949. For that amazing reversal for more than half a century of the US becoming increasingly reliant on foreign sources of petroleum, often from unfriendly regions of the world, you can thank the drilling and extraction technologies of fracking and horizontal drilling, two of the most amazing, marvels of engineering and scientific innovation in history. Carpe oleum

6. Chart of the Day IV (above) shows another US energy milestone – oil production in North Dakota surpassed the 1.5 million barrels per day mark in October for the first time and set another all-time oil output record for the Peace Garden State. Also, the production increase of nearly 74,000 in October from the previous month was the third-largest monthly increase in the state’s history.

7. It Has Been a Miraculous Decade for America’s Oil and Gas Frackers writes Christopher Helman in Forbes:

Thanks to their enterprising innovations in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, domestic petroleum output has tripled over the past decade to more than 12 million barrels per day, while supplies of natural gas have surged 60% to a daily 113 billion cubic feet. The biggest overall beneficiaries have been everyday Americans—who now pay $100 billion less per year for fossil fuels. And because gas burns far cleaner than coal (which has lost a third of its market share), our national carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 15% from the 2007 peak. 

MP: Carpe oleum

8. Who’d a-Thunk It? Urban Transit Is an Inefficient Energy Hog? That’s what I learned today from the Antiplanner blog:

Transit is often touted as a way to save energy. But since 2009 transit has used more energy, per passenger mile, than the average car. Since 2016, transit has used more than the average of cars and light trucks together. Automobiles and planes are becoming more energy efficient each year. But the annual reports of the National Transit Database reveals that urban transit is moving in the opposite direction, requiring more energy to move a person one mile in each of the last four years.

The reason for this is simple: ridership is declining, but transit agencies aren’t proportionately reducing miles of transit service. As a result, the average occupancies of buses and other transit vehicles has declined in every year since 2013. While transit agencies may be purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles, the increase in average efficiencies per vehicle mile can’t make up for the loss in passengers.

9. Markets in Everything: Thanks to democratic socialism, Venezuela’s currency is worth more as craft paper than money, via Aljazeera:

Instead of using his homeland’s money to pay for daily essentials in his native country, Venezuelan immigrant Hector Cordero weaves the currency into wallets and purses, which he sells to tourists in Colombia. His artful crafts underscore the creative methods that Venezuelans are using to extract value from a currency that – amid skyrocketing inflation – many consider worthless.

10. Videos of the Day (below) features German teenage Naomi Seibt, the anti-Teenage Climate Puppet, who explains her journey from climate alarmism/hysteria to climate realism in this YouTube video. Here’s a money quote:

Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably, anti-human ideology. We are taught to look down upon our achievements with guilt, shame and disgust and not even to take into account the many, many benefits we have gained from using fossil fuels as our main energy source. Because just look around. We’re living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation and we’re not allowed to be proud of that at all?

MP: I hereby nominate Naomi Seibt for the 2020 Time Magazine Person of the Year and/or the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.

The post Thursday night links appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.