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Maybe you saw the short article in the National Post the other day about the New York artist ordered evicted from her rent-controlled apartment for having let it out on Airbnb. Eileen Hickey has been in the apartment, which is in Tribeca, on the lower west side of Manhattan, for 43 years and was paying US$1,500 a month for an entire floor. She was renting it out on Airbnb for the equivalent of US$4,500 a month. According to one real estate website, that’s the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Tribeca.

“Econ 101,” thinks an economist when reading that. Control prices and craziness happens. Rent control is the classic example. As the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck once put it, “Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique so far known for destroying cities.”

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If the control price is the price the market would have produced anyway, no problem. Well, almost no problem: Even if prices don’t get out of whack, rent control introduces rules and regulations that add to the cost of being in the apartment business.