Posted by Neil Craig on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:56 | #

The evidence is that the only areas with cuts or tiny increases are places where regulatory controls don’t seriously prevent people building or ebforce the use of building techniques which were current before Henry started making the model T.

To put it another way the rise is house prices is almost entirely due not to free market pressure but to government (albiet usually local government) created monopolies.

Houses should not be treated as an investment - they are a place to live. Investments in the stock market create wealth for a nation - investment in housing doesn’t.

Thus if some easing of building controls in some areas are allowing people to build better houses at lower prices this is not a bad thing.

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:03 | #

if some easing of building controls in some areas are allowing people to build better houses at lower prices this is not a bad thing.

Absolutely and it should have been done when the boomers needed to form families, not when the hispanic hoard arrived and needed servants quarters.

However, now that we’re here, there is a problem:  The economy is based on this bad premise and the rest of the economy—and humanity—have been gutted as a consequence.

Posted by Bo Sears on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:25 | #

While it is not strictly a majority rights issue, I think James Bowery’s analysis is correct. The US economy, since Reagan was president, has been based on a debt-economy especially in the growth of the trade deficit, the federal & state budget deficits, and family-based deficits.

Apparently the only thing that holds the American economy together is the manipulation of the capital asset sectors in such a way as to allow the pillaging of parts of the value of the capital assets in question.

The high tech boom of the late nineties here in California was a great example. Corporate officers filched billions from investors through high salaries and stock options. The wealth transfer held employment high while it was going on.

The following & now ending housing boom took its place as the next example. Financial instiutions acted with great irresponsibility in reducing interest rates and, coupled with slacker processing of loan applications, we find ourselves on the brink of a collapse of house prices and the loss of capital investments.

Here are two examples of how bad it was. First, new homeowners blithely purchased homes on mortgages requiring only payment of interest for the first five years. Second, up to 40% of all new homes constructed were purchased by speculators in the hope that value would continue to rise. Both groups, along with their lenders, are apt to be greatly disappointed.

So what is next? I believe the masters of our American economy have the next bubble already planned. It will expand debt, pull money back from Asia, and generate countless opportunities to pull wealth in dollars out of the new bubble. In a way, this prediction is good news because it grants us another ten years of lowish inflation. It is the fantastic increase in infrastructure already planned and authorized by Congress in north-south transit corridors.

Congress has already authorized over 40 north-south transit corridors. Two big ones will go from Texas to Canada along different routes, ten lanes each, with a central spot for rail & utilities. There are at least four plans for monstrous monorail construction, including one from Sacramento via San Franciso to San Diego. This will enrich the same people who have been enriched on reconstruction in Iraq, but at least it will create tens of thousands of jobs inside America. And it isn’t all make work, either. This punch in the economy will do for norh-south traffic and riches the same thing that was done for east-west traffic and riches starting with President Eisenhower.

So get ready for the next big bubble in the US economy. This one might do some good for the real economy.

There is a lot of hostility toward the north-south schemes because there is a justified fear that NAFTA will shortly be enlarged into an EU type of structure, replacing or displacing provinces and states into a new North American nation. It could be true, and the danger that raises needs to be addressed separately on this board.

If Canada, the US, and Mexico are unified into some governmental organization, it will make the present northward pressures of immigration look like peanuts, but how the southward pressures of capital investments will work with Mexicans is going to be very interesting. And this all has a lot for the EGI people to think through.

Posted by PatrickZ on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 20:27 | #

Don’t make this more complicated than it is. I can see reality with my own eyes.

I live on a fish shaped suburb of NYC(same town as John Derbyshire) White Americans are fleeing because of high housing costs and high property taxes.

High housing costs drive up property taxes. Non-white immigrants are flooding into this fish shaped suburb. Without a doubt, non-white immigrants are driving up home values, and as a consequence, property taxes also. Even if you paid off your mortgage, you are a defacto renter from the county.

Even if you “own” your home, You can loose it-very easily these days- in a tax lien sales to a wealthy pakistani or hindu immigrant. This has already happened to some local seniors(the White ones)

So we now have a situation where wealthy asians and muslims who are driving up housing costs and property taxes are competing to steal the homes of the local American Whites.

For a short period of time, it might be possible to bring housing costs down by paving over of what is left of the open space(watershed land,parks and the last few acres of farmland).

But the environmentalist oppose this while at the same time they are enthusiastic about importing high fertility asians and muslims. I’m not making this up.

It doesn’t make a difference if a free market solution is implemented-build more homes to increase the supply of homes-or if a goverment solution is implemented-restrict the supply of housing to protect open space.Either way, there is a catastrophe in the making.

And this inevitable catastrophe will be a direct consequence of the passage of the 1965 immigration reform act which openned the floodgates of asian,muslim,hispanic and african immigration.

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:01 | #

And this inevitable catastrophe will be a direct consequence of the passage of the 1965 immigration reform act which openned the floodgates of asian,muslim,hispanic and african immigration.

The passage of which your neighbor, John Derbyshire, mendaciously attributes to the equal protection clause even though the rights of non-citizens are not addressed by the Constitution.

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 05 Sep 2006 23:20 | #

I live on a fish shaped suburb of NYC(same town as John Derbyshire) White Americans are fleeing because of high housing costs and high property taxes.

Actually whites they are fleeing the ethnic nepotism of the post 1965 immigration act—ethnic nepotism focused on rent-seeking.  A consequence of optimized rent-seeking is centralization of wealth and destruction of the middle class.  If you look at the real estate prices and wages in terms of the price of gold, however, a very different picture emerges:  Depression.