Contract law only really works for two people in similar bargaining positions. Good luck to you if you have poor credit history or are barely making ends meet and have to rent from whoever will take you.
If that's the only protection, then it's precisely the people who can't afford to be kicked out suddenly who won't have protection against it.
There are two lease contracts the landlord can offer you. One has a lower rent but allows them to evict you at any time without notice, the other has a higher rent and gives you two months notice. You can pass a law against the first one, but then you're left with the second one. And then the person barely making ends meat has to pay more in rent.
There are ways to do that, but some of them are better than others. For example, institute a UBI and the person barely making ends meat will be doing better and be able to afford the lease with the notice.
In general, the policies that work are the ones that don't try to micromanage anything or prohibit anything. If people are choosing something, assume it's not because they're idiots. Give them more choices, not fewer.
For example, a great way to help the poor is to have tuition-free community colleges, or encourage anything that lowers housing prices. But we don't really have that. Instead we subsidize student loan interest and mortgage interest, because that's more profitable to the banks who lobbied for it and the for-profit colleges and existing landowners it allows to inflate prices into the sky.
The problem with programs to help the poor is that the ones that actually do are expensive and don't pass, while the ones that pass will claim to but really do something else that most of the time makes things worse, completely by design from the perspective of the people who proposed it because they profit from it.
Better to have a UBI than subsidized loan interest, but better to have nothing than subsidized loan interest. Many "solutions" produce negative progress.
If you give them money they can use for anything, it doesn't increase the real cost of anything in particular, it only reduces the relative disparity between the rich and the poor.
I would rather a situation where people actually can't afford housing, which forces a solution, to one where we can pretend people are fine until they aren't. A similar argument is used against minimum wages, and yet the poor are almost universally better off in countries where minimum wages are high.
Which is why passing laws against things generally hurts the poor. The rich don't need to sleep under a bridge, so who does a law against it affect?
> I would rather a situation where people actually can't afford housing, which forces a solution, to one where we can pretend people are fine until they aren't.
Only it hasn't actually forced a solution. But rents sure are high now.
> A similar argument is used against minimum wages, and yet the poor are almost universally better off in countries where minimum wages are high.
The unemployed youth in France are not having a good time.
But more to the point, these kinds of laws tend to follow prosperity rather than the other way around.
That's not a reasonable conclusion. Laws against usury protect the poor. Laws against dangerous workplaces protect the poor. Hell, laws against slavery and debt prisons protect the poor.
> Only it hasn't actually forced a solution. But rents sure are high now.
They may be high, but it hasn't increased homelessness. Homelessness is barely above a ten year minimum, lower than during the GFC. [1]
That's sort of my point, at this stage people just barely get by, which is exactly the sort of situation legislators can ignore.
> The unemployed youth in France are not having a good time.
Cherry picking, but also not obviously related to the point. Are the unemployed youth in France unemployed due to minimum wage laws? Would they be better off if such laws weren't in place? Citation?
> But more to the point, these kinds of laws tend to follow prosperity rather than the other way around.
I'm not making an argument for maximising prosperity. A country with one quadrillionaire and everyone else broke would be the most prosperous in the world. I'm making an argument for protecting the poor.
[1] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2018-AHAR-P..., page 10
Laws against usury subject the poor to illegal loan sharks who will break their kneecaps for non-payment rather than paying a high interest rate to a payday loan place that will merely ding their credit score and try to reclaim their loan money using the legal process.
> Laws against dangerous workplaces protect the poor.
Laws against dangerous workplaces protect shareholders from losing their investment when somebody gets hurt and sues the company. And give the company cover because they had their inspection done when somebody gets hurt regardless, so it's more difficult for the poor to sue them after an injury as long as their paperwork is in order.
Moreover, the compliance cost for companies that were not operating an unsafe workplace to begin with imposes overhead on small businesses and reduces competition, which can lower wages.
It's likely that they don't cause a major harm because there is no good reason to be operating an unsafe workplace regardless of whether there is a law against it, but they're still pretty close to breakeven.
> Hell, laws against slavery and debt prisons protect the poor.
Laws binding the legislature from instituting slavery or debt prisons, i.e. laws against certain laws, are not really canonical examples here.
> That's sort of my point, at this stage people just barely get by, which is exactly the sort of situation legislators can ignore.
We made things worse, but only by increasing inequality, not to the point of increasing homelessness. So we should make things even worse, that way when everything is really on fire someone will have to notice? What if we only get even more inequality and malaise?
> Are the unemployed youth in France unemployed due to minimum wage laws? Citation?
As part of a broad framework of high-overhead labor laws that discourage employers from hiring.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
> I'm not making an argument for maximising prosperity. A country with one quadrillionaire and everyone else broke would be the most prosperous in the world. I'm making an argument for protecting the poor.
The best way to protect the poor is to get them out of poverty. Giving all the money to one quadrillionaire doesn't do that, but neither does binding everyone's hands or making it more expensive for anyone to start a small business.
Still, I found your counterexamples here dismissive but unconvincing. Loan sharks and kneecappings are precisely the things we need legislature against. Contract law by itself can't prevent desperate people from signing loan-shark contracts. "No good reason to be operating an unsafe workplace" is still enough reason to use children in coal mines until actual labor laws get passed. Anti-slavery laws are pretty plainly laws against powerful individuals enslaving weaker individuals--not sure what you mean with the "laws against laws" card there.
But then how is the problem not already being solved through contract law without needing anything separate?
And sometimes you don't want that, e.g. you may have to stay in a hotel for an indeterminate period of time because your house was damaged by a storm, but still want be able to check out whenever you want instead of having to give two months notice.
> That seems like a good thing, and rents are sky-high in my area and the market is very vibrant, so it's clearly not making landlords unwilling to participate in the market.
Rents being sky-high actually is a sign that landlords are unwilling to participate in the market, but it's more likely caused by restrictive zoning (causing new construction to be unwilling/unable to participate in the market) than some kind of lease requirements that may or may not exist there.