Given the number of Americans who own a small number of rental properties — including, for full disclosure, some members of my own extended family — policies such as these do not only impact large real estate firms.

Proponents of the new eviction moratorium will, of course, retreat to some version of the refrain that “extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.” However, we should be suspect of this line of argument. First of all, officeholders and commentators have been known to throw around the word “crisis” far too liberally in recent months, such as when Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared in June that racism in her city now constitutes a public health crisis. Second, with employment opportunities returning throughout the country, 70 percent of Americans now having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and the shortest recession in American history now behind us, the time for so-called emergency measures has passed. The fact that some demand their indefinite continuation only confirms the thesis of economist Robert Higgs’s seminal 1987 book “Crisis and Leviathan” that government takes advantage of crises to expand its scope, while seldom returning to pre-crisis levels of involvement once said crisis abates.

Although certain requirements of landlords are surely reasonable, this recent spate of policies goes too far in restricting homeowners’ ability to do as they wish with the properties that are theirs.