Bubbles and crashes are overhead. They're very, very expensive overhead.
Because even if the banks pay back every last cent they've 'borrowed' - which is about as likely to happen as Jupiter is to crash into the Andromeda galaxy - millions of people will still have lost jobs, homes, marriages and life opportunities, and will be permanently scarred in the aftermath.
Perhaps you think this is unimportant. That's certainly your right, but if so you're not going to find many people on ET who agree with you.
That's the bottom line here. The great free-enterprise rhetoric about freedom and opportunity and its inherent superiority to evil communism is a naked, screaming, childish lie. If you're one of the losers - and as wealth becomes ever more concentrated, more and more people discover that they're losers - you will not be better off. You will not be happier, you will not be more comfortable, you will not have more opportunity.
Banking is at the centre of this, because US-style banking either pushes for a rentier culture which concentrates wealth for the sake of it, or it grudgingly tolerates an investment culture which redistributes wealth for the sake of wider benefit.
And the evidence is clear - rentier culture doesn't work. It doesn't even work for rentiers. Real prosperity has only ever happened under strategic redistributive government investment and management programs. Anything else is a pantomime of horrors.
You're taking a philosophical point of view that Jake didn't, and that's perfectly your right and my pleasure to discuss it. Not only I don't take the absolutely-free markets vs communism as the only two possible alternatives, but I do think they are even somehow related. Unfortunately US style banking became the paragon of banking success, like everything else coming from the US, not the least management and marketing techniques. I'm not for forcing people into stuff though - I wouldn't tax rentiers to death for instance, but create incentive for them to not hoard, but to somehow return the money into the society. Or with things like globalisation, this is hardly possible. I don't even think rentiers are all that rich in the end (I'm still thinking of the poor Noirmoutier fishermen whose houses tripled in value and they dumbfound themselves due "rich" tax) or all that happy to be just rentiers. I mean I wouldn't demonize them quite so easily. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Claiming that price accurately reflects value leads you into the kind of dead end where your economic model fails to accommodate speculative bubbles and the value of goods that cannot be assigned a price by the existing institutions.
In the precise case of the fishermen, the problem lies with the French state's stubborn in taking into account realestate market prices as a criteria for wealth tax. I guess I don't need to tell you that this smells like a law against rentiers, made by -- do I need to tell you who?... Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Including real estate in a wealth tax is a perfectly sensible thing to do. Allowing real estate prices to bubble out of control is a perfectly idiotic thing to do.
Why would yuo have them rent their family house?
Because then they don't have to worry about fluctuations in real estate prices. And they don't get fictitious value increases that can be played up by politicians who are fond of printing money and handing it to rich fucks.
Altogether a better deal for the political economy as a whole. And usually also for the people principally involved.
And needless to say, renting makes you much more mobile, because you can terminate your occupancy without having to go through the hassle of selling the property.
And how do you propose to rein in the realestate bubble?
Progressive wealth taxes, prohibit casino mortgages, limit mortgages to 80 % of the taxed value of the house, provide adequate and affordable public housing. And that's just off the top of my head - I could probably think of a couple of other things if I took a little time to do it.
So, a system of incentives needs to be set up which aligns the interests of both the renter and the owner, so that it is in the interest of both of them to improve the property.
I know many people whose main motivation for wanting to own is "to be able to modify their home". The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Of course, that would also expose the owner to a number of structural risks. But people who can afford to buy to let are better placed to carry those risks than people who are renting from them.
F**k the political economy. Just keep out of My Land will ya! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Or, more bluntly put, if not for the existence of a political economy, you would have to spend most of your time defending "your" land from intruders.
Democratical state guaranteeing the right to private ownership as a fundamental human right does not give it (the State) any prerogative (exceptional situations excepted) to dispose of My Goods.
There you go again with the ideology. The notion of fundamental human rights is an ideological position (one that I happen to share, but also one that the vast, vast majority of human society throughout the history of the species does not).
And I would remind you that for every sob story you can find about poor fishermen being forced to leave their ancestral home because the real estate bubble unjustly inflates their land taxes, there is a multitude of stories to be told about people who quite voluntarily sell their house during a bubble and cash in the inflated price. They have produced no value at all in that transaction - not a single meter of railroad has been built because the price of their house went up, not a single ball bearing has been cast because the price of their house went up, not a single windmill was assembled because the price of their house went up.
Since society in aggregate did not get wealthier, any gain they have made by that transaction comes directly at the expense of someone else in society. How's that fair or just? How's it fair that the price I pay for bread and rent goes up, just because the real estate market is in a manic phase? How is it fair that my job disappears just because the real estate market is in a depressive phase?
Yes, the tools used to pop bubbles have side effects. Innocent people - like your hypothetical fishermen - will be hit by those side effects. But they are less than the predictable and unavoidable effects of not popping the bubble. So if you want to avoid wealth taxes, including taxes on real estate, you have to provide a viable alternative for popping bubbles. Preferably one that causes less collateral damage to innocent people.
If cabins are sold in bubble times, those sales can be taxed. This is a means to fight bubbles, btw, and in the mean time, build some railroads to nicely criss-cross those muddy lands.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason. This is called injustice and anyone affected should be justly compensated. It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
(note: the sob story is real, I saw the fisherman's daughter with my own eyes telling it) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Which ideology was that, exactly?
It could be any of several, including but not limited to humanism, constitutionalism and the Enlightenment notion of "natural law." And, of course, a plethora of more or less wingnut versions of lazzes-faire liberalism.
They may temporarily converge with ideas of the modern right, classical liberalism or social democracy, but don't have as a source a particular ideology.
Ah, but you do. And I am actually getting a fairly detailed picture of it by now.
I don't know whether it has a name, but it draws rather heavily upon late Enlightenment notions of natural law, along with a helping of frankly unenlightened Compulsive Centrist Disorder. There's a couple of other things in there as well, but those are the two main points.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason.
Don't we all. But as it happens, bubbles have very grave collateral damage when they are not popped early.
It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
Why, yes, they are. If you choose to define justice as a binary attribute, then all policies to deal with bubbles are unjust - including the policy of not dealing with it. Once bubbles form, you have the choice between popping it now and popping it later. When it pops, it will impose some inconvenience, or even hardship, upon everyone it touches. Some of those people will be innocent, in the sense that they were not participating in inflating the bubble. That is beyond the realm of political choice. What you can choose is to pop the bubble sooner rather than later, thus minimising the collateral damage.
