#what is it with leftists and being seemingly unable to imagine that second-order consequences could even exist?

[king-of-men]

"Private violence has the advantage of not being directed by majority vote" sounds distinctly not like an advantage!

You prefer your violence to be a monopoly of whoever gets 50 percent of the vote, plus one? Great fun as long as you're in the 50%, no doubt. Less so if you happen to be a minority.

it would play out as a death sentence for me and all of my friends!

I do not believe that is true, but suppose so for the sake of argument. That means that you are being kept alive by violence exerted by other people on your behalf. In other words, from the options "work, beg, steal, starve", you have chosen "steal". I understand the difficulty of choosing "starve" and the reluctance to choose "beg", but do you really intend to assert that this is a moral position? And aside from the morality, do you think you have a convincing argument for the people being stolen from?

Do you think it's impossible to leverage agreements to be maximally in your favour, or to maximally screw over someone you don't like?

Yes, actually, in a genuinely free market those are both impossible. For the good and simple reason that a free market has what we technic'ly call competition, that is to say, other people to contract with.

If Morlock is unable to live in a home that he's just been priced out of, what makes you think that any other family will be enabled to move into that home instead?

Er, what? So the sequence of events is, the landlord raises the rent; Morlock can't pay and moves out; and... the landlord, twirling his mustache from sheer gleeful evilness, lets the unit stand empty? I don't understand your model here; please elucidate.

If a landlord would benefit from a sudden increase in rent prices, what will happen to the poorer renters as a result?

They will move to cheaper, less convenient homes; or they will pay a higher proportion of their incomes in rent, depending on where they have slack.

Speaking of which, why is the government regulating things 'state violence' (the bad kind) but a swathe of landlords deciding en masse to increase their rental prices is assumed to be 'private violence' (the advantageous, undemocratic kind)?

You conflate two different things I said. Raising the rent is not violence of any kind, whether state or private. The state uses violence, or its threat, to prevent people from raising the rent. Private violence entered the discussion when Morlock asked how property rights are enforced.

At the very least, even in your most uncharitable reading of Morlock as saying "I want stuff and I want it cheap, freedoms be damned", the benefits of that stuff being cheap(er) would also extend to you.

No it wouldn't! That's the whole point, that's exactly why people who have a theory of mind oppose rent control! If Morlock gets a cheap rent-controlled apartment that helps me exactly zero! In fact it helps me negatively by suppressing construction and raising every other rental price in the area. In the long run it helps Morlock negatively because now he's stuck in the "cheap" apartment that might not be his best location anymore, plus the landlord has to cut down the amenities including maintenance. Getting cheaper stuff through free-market competition would indeed help everyone. When the few lucky people who happened to get a lease at exactly the right time have lower-than-market rent increases, that's negative sum: It hurts everyone else.

If you shoplift, you're getting stuff cheap; would you like to explain how that's helping anyone else? Same thing.

Why do you assume a housing boom would have happened 20 years ago?

Because I understand the first thing about markets? To wit, that they clear, that is to say, supply meets demand, when not violently prevented from doing so. In particular, every time rent control (and zoning more generally) is loosened the slightest bit we get an immediate housing boom; so if it hadn't been imposed in the first place, well then. "Boom" may not be the right word since there wouldn't be the pent-up demand for more housing; rather we'd get a smooth expansion of new housing fairly exactly matching new people who want it.

In what sense do you think Morlock has been 'screwed over' by rent control?

Rent control is the second-fastest way known to destroy housing; the fastest is strategic bombing - and that's much easier to recover from. Evidently nobody benefits from having their local housing destroyed, even if their specific place by some miracle escaped the bombs got rent-controlled while they were in it; it makes it very difficult to move. Morlock has been screwed over by being trapped: Sure, he can afford to stay in that one apartment - but if he moves he has to go outside the city. He's gotten cheaper rent at the expense of a drastically damaged housing market; a classic case of the seen and the unseen.

What benefit did you receive from the freedom of being forced to move out of your home 3 months ago?

You will please notice I did not argue this was a benefit to me. It is indeed a cost. I find it rather odd to be on this side of the argument, but sometimes you have to be willing to take one for the team. That lease nonrenewal did not benefit me, but it did (and this is what I actually argued; please read my words again) benefit the landlord, her relatives who moved into the place, and society in general. And I benefit from living in a society where that's possible; if it weren't, people would be much more reluctant to rent out their houses in the first place, and I'd have to pay more or move elsewhere.

... are you getting cognitive dissonance from being told by a libertarian that you should be less selfish, and adjust your policies to benefit society more and yourself less? Because I sure am.

I am all for market based solutions, but markets are complicated and I always want to know what the back-up is if something unknown causes the market to behave in a way that we don't expect.