Rob Lyman,
The more expensive housing is, the more politicians can buy votes by offering to make it more affordable (via cheap credit, lower down payment requirements, etc.); same with education. Notice a pattern? Government distortions increase costs of living, and politicians run for government on promises not to remove those distortions, but to add new distortions that will supposedly ameliorate those high costs.
I'm no libertarian, but I'd think libertarians would be on to this by now.
Posted by DaveinHackensack | October 30, 2008 3:24 PM
Friday, October 31, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Yup - many of us have been on it for years, deacades, nay, even a century and more.
All subsidy to housing is a distortion of the market and ends up in the hands of landowners who have done nothing, qua landowners specifically, to derserve other than be in the right place at the right time with something they do not need.
And we know the Bank of England *deliberately* ramped up the value of land (not housing per se but usually through the housing market) in order that people who owned already would feel good about their situation and pled innocence and subsidy to help those who were priced out of the nasty property market they ramped up!
Bastards.
> be in the right place at the right time with something they do not need
Is a valuable skill though.
However most land rent is rent seeking i.e. the person who owns it doesn't/hasn't done any WORK to get the income.
The best thing about Market Geonomics is it tends to get the most WORK/value out of the land, and squeeze out rent seeking.
Post a Comment