The great things about liberals is that even though most have never run a business, they all know exactly how businesses should be run.  It's as if all those courses they took at Amherst or Yale on women's studies, art history, and neo-colonialism gave them an intuitive sense for market forces, and exactly how much businesses should pay employees, exactly how much in taxes businesses should pay, and how to run every aspect of their companies.

It's hardly surprising, then, to find an exposé in the Washington Post focusing on Fox News commentator Sean Hannity.  Hannity spent millions of dollars to buy ownership in over a thousand rental properties, and then, once he acquired ownership, he started evicting tenants left and right – all for the "crime" of not paying rent!  How bizarre is that?  When Sean Hannity invested millions of dollars in rental properties, he actually expected the tenants to pay rent to him!

Liberals, of course, know that this is immoral and scandalous – the economic equivalent of keeping a "brown slave" like Eric Schneiderman or sexting while babysitting like Anthony Weiner.

Here's what the intrepid business experts at the WaPo uncovered:

[A] Washington Post analysis shows that managers at Hannity's four largest apartment complexes in Georgia have taken an unusually aggressive approach to rent collection.  They have sought court-ordered evictions at twice the statewide rate – in a state known for high numbers of evictions and landlord-friendly laws – and frequently have done so less than two weeks after a missed payment.

All good points!  Rental properties like Hannity's are exactly the same as all other rental properties in Georgia, therefore the eviction rate should be exactly the same.  The WaPo knows this because, well, it just does is!

As for evicting two weeks after a missed payment, even though tenants sign leases knowing this will be a consequence of nonpayment of rent, the WaPo knows that it is not ethical to evict a tenant after only two weeks of nonpayment.  I was disappointed that the WaPo didn't reveal the proper amount of time that should pass, morally, before eviction becomes appropriate – perhaps the WaPo feels that eviction is never morally justified!

After all, it's not as if rental properties have any need to get rental checks on time.  The money just goes into a huge, "Goldfinger"-style Fort Knox-like vault, where it is instantly converted into gold bars.  Rental properties have no immediate need to pay salaries to groundskeepers, handymen, cleaners, accountants, sales representatives, secretaries, and managers, and certainly they don't have any capital expenses that have to be paid down.  What's a little two- or even three- or four-week delay in the rental property's income stream?

Among the tenants Hannity's property managers sought to evict, records show, were a former corrections officer and her wife [sic], who fell behind while awaiting a disability determination; a double amputee who had lived in an apartment with her daughter for five years but did not pay on time after being hospitalized; and a single mother of three whose $980 rent check was rejected because she could not come up with a $1,050 cleaning fee for a bedbug infestation.

Disabled people and single mothers with bedbugs are way more virtuous than your typical white male tenants and should not have to pay rent.  I'm sure the WaPo did not cherry-pick these cases and that most of those evicted did not have legs or were hospitalized.  Just look at what happened to this poor black lesbian couple:

[H]ealth problems forced Lashondra Cosby, 40, to take a leave from her job as a corrections officer. 

In late February 2017, one of their rent checks bounced, court records show.  A follow-up payment cleared a week later, but when the couple didn't pay their March rent before the 20th, Hampton filed for eviction, and a judge ordered them to pay $330 in court and eviction fees or move out.

The Cosbys pawned their PlayStation, video games and a camera to cover the fees.  But in each of the next two months, a nearly identical scenario played out: a late payment, an eviction filing and a judge ordering another $330 in penalty payments, court records show.

"They kept us down at the courthouse all the time," Zandra Cosby said.  "I'd have to call out a half-day and try not to cut off my nose to spite my face."

So while Lashondra didn't have a job, Zandra did...so why didn't she pay the rent? 

We can be sympathetic to people who lose their job or are disabled, but why don't they have savings?  Why can't they get loans from family or friends?  Why can't they move in with family or friends (as the Cosbys eventually did)?

And why is it Sean Hannity's responsibility to let them live rent-free in his rental units?

I get the feeling that if liberals ran Hannity's properties, very quickly they would run them into the ground like public housing.  In the meantime, liberals pontificate on the moral way to run businesses they don't have the slightest understanding of.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.