by Doug Casey, International Man:

International Man: In recent months, “rent strikes” have emerged in many cities. There has also been an increasing number of politicians suggesting they’ll pass laws to force landlords to “cancel rent.”

What is your take on this?

Doug Casey: Property rights are basic to human rights. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about human rights unless you talk about property rights.

Your primary form of property is your own body. But things outside of your body are equally as important. You can’t survive without possessions, things that belong to you alone, and that you are responsible for. “Rent strikers”—who are philosophically aligned with socialists, communists, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and similar groups— don’t see it that way, however. They believe their problems are your problems. They’re completely irresponsible.

They seem to think that saying something, no matter how irrational, can make it so. And saying that you shouldn’t have to pay rent makes it possible to roll back the laws of economic reality.

Of course, the whole world has pretty much gone on tilt over the last six months. Not paying agreed-upon rents and mortgages is economically destructive. But that’s exactly the result these people want. It’s a step to completely overturning what’s left of capitalism. That’s bad enough. But saying you don’t have to meet your obligations is simply dishonorable. These people shouldn’t be taken seriously but treated with contempt.

International Man: In New York, the government instituted an eviction freeze. Without fear of eviction, many tenants felt they didn’t need to pay rent.

Without rent money, landlords won’t be able to pay their mortgages, their ever-increasing property taxes, and will be unable to meet their other obligations.

How do you see the daisy chain effects playing out?

Doug Casey: It’s predictable, actually. People seem to have forgotten what a dump most of New York City was turning into during the ’70s. Many—perhaps most—apartments were rent-controlled. As a result, landlords were both unwilling and unable to maintain their properties. Nobody was building new ones. The city was crime-ridden and on the edge of bankruptcy. Those days may return.

But it all starts with education.

The last several generations of Americans have grown up in a school system which basically teaches Marxist values. The average American no longer sees any problem with that. People have been completely indoctrinated with perverse views of ethics, economics, politics, and how the world works.

It’s going to end badly. And I’m not just talking about the average man in the street. The executives running major corporations support all of this nonsense and run commercials promoting it. The colleges, and even high schools and grade schools, promote it to students. The news and entertainment industries are totally PC.

The battle has really been lost. Things are likely to keep degenerating because trends in motion tend to stay in motion until they reach a crisis, at which point anything can happen.

So what are the practical effects of this?

Well, one of them is that landlords will stop building because they can see that the rental return on their capital is uncertain. Building is risky enough, but if the sanctity of contracts is broken, it becomes extremely risky.

Even if an entrepreneur wants to build, banks will be very loath to lend on projects for exactly the same reason: they may not get their money back.

The government has painted itself into a corner with all of the debt that it’s encouraged in society over many years.

We might have 20 million families who can’t pay their mortgage or their rent. This is a real possibility if unemployment doesn’t turn around radically and quickly. If they’re evicted, where are they going to go?

Are they going to live under bridges or on sidewalks? Or will they stay where they are, rent-free? Of course the answer is that the government will “step in.” Both renters and landlords will beg them to. And it’s not just a question of paying the rent; there are utilities to be paid as well. There are thousands of electric, gas, and water utility companies who will lobby for it.

So who’s going to eat the cost of all this—the vast numbers of people that were living just on the edge and have now gone over the edge? I suspect this is the next stage of the Greater Depression—one that nobody wants to confront because it’s too scary.

The way to solve the problem, of course, is by deregulating everything. Let the market restructure; let bankruptcies happen; let evictions occur. That should have happened in past crises—but every time, they’re papered over instead. Now the problem is so huge as to be insoluble, short of a real conflagration. Governments are actually cementing the distortions in place, however. It’s perverse since they caused these problems to start with.

I’m not sure how it’s going to end. We had overtures of a socialist revolution in the ’30s. It was even more serious in the late ’60s and early ’70s. This time, things might truly go over the edge for the reasons I touched on and many more.

International Man: What does the growing popularity of rent strikes mean for American society and culture?

Doug Casey: As I said before, the entire society has been corrupted over the last several generations with Marxist and socialist values.

One consequence of that is a breakdown of trust.

Unless you know another person well, you really don’t know if you can trust them. What happens if government steps in and says, “The fact that they made a contract with you means nothing. They don’t have to pay their rent or their mortgage. Not only won’t we help you, we’ll work with them, since they have more votes”?

When you don’t have trust in society, titles become insecure. You can’t believe anything, even if it’s written down on a piece of paper. You find you may not really own what you thought was yours.

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