4 ms·

Feels like a safety net for the banks that she happens to benefit from. We badly need a massive crash in house prices. This woman's case is pretty exceptional

Feels like a safety net for the banks that she happens to benefit from. We badly need a massive crash in house prices. This woman's case is pretty exceptional and emotive so I don't think it's a great example. In general we need a huge crash and to hell with the few who bought in near the top. All future generations are facing turning over most of their wages to the banks without a correction. And yes you correctly point out we need property taxes. As I said stop using this one person as an example it's not helpful for a discussion of policy. We can all cite disabled people negatively impacted by high prices as a counter-point.

pjc50 11y ago
No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.
- branchless 11y ago
  Just read something that made me think of this: When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more — this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors. As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains, “England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve. The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages. http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/ http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust... Just like tax credits (and housing benefit). The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.

pjc50 11y ago

No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.

branchless 11y ago
Just read something that made me think of this: When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more — this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors. As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains, “England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve. The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages. http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/ http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust... Just like tax credits (and housing benefit). The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.