Wednesday, September 15, 2010
A Thought About Home Ownership
Widespread home/condo/co-op ownership only makes sense if a lot of people are living on one place long enough that buying, rather than renting, makes sense cost-wise or if housing prices always go up. But the only way housing prices can outpace inflation and interest is if there is an exponentially increasing shortage of housing (i.e. demand growing faster than supply) which means wide-spread home/condo/co-op ownership ain't happening.
A while back it was fashionable to talk about "the ownership society". Did anybody stop to consider that in order to have one of those you need to have some measure of economic stability so that way it makes sense for people to purchase things like housing (without having to worry that they may need to move in order to find a new job in case they loose their old one)?
Either the goals of those who talk a good capitalist talk are fundamentally against what they claim they are for (i.e. those who talk about broad-based home ownership really are interested in the opposite) or such people really, for all their claims that they understand economics better than the rest of us, don't understand economics at all.
Why then, do we still take such people seriously on economics matters?
Relatedly -- why is the media surprised at Geithner's calendar? Of course, come general election time, this will be used to show that "see even the liberal media realizes that the Democrats really work for the plutocrats and not the working stiffs they claim they want to help" in the usual GOP "vote for Side Show Bob" sort of way. So how's that 11-dimensional chess working out? Fortunately, it seems the GOP is in the process of imploding, so I guess it's best we just let them implode. But while were standing their watching, must we shoot ourselves in the foot as well? The old (successful) GOP would have gone for the kill while their enemy was week.
A while back it was fashionable to talk about "the ownership society". Did anybody stop to consider that in order to have one of those you need to have some measure of economic stability so that way it makes sense for people to purchase things like housing (without having to worry that they may need to move in order to find a new job in case they loose their old one)?
Either the goals of those who talk a good capitalist talk are fundamentally against what they claim they are for (i.e. those who talk about broad-based home ownership really are interested in the opposite) or such people really, for all their claims that they understand economics better than the rest of us, don't understand economics at all.
Why then, do we still take such people seriously on economics matters?
Relatedly -- why is the media surprised at Geithner's calendar? Of course, come general election time, this will be used to show that "see even the liberal media realizes that the Democrats really work for the plutocrats and not the working stiffs they claim they want to help" in the usual GOP "vote for Side Show Bob" sort of way. So how's that 11-dimensional chess working out? Fortunately, it seems the GOP is in the process of imploding, so I guess it's best we just let them implode. But while were standing their watching, must we shoot ourselves in the foot as well? The old (successful) GOP would have gone for the kill while their enemy was week.
# posted by alberich @ 7:30 PM 
