Thomas Sowell..*sigh*

In light of bridges falling down due to lack of maintenance precipitated, in part by "conservative" governors cutting spending and giving tax breaks to wealthy people, you'd think they would lay low. Not Mr. Sowell. I suppose that since he writes better than I do, and is more connected that I am, he can get a ready forum for his nonsense. His latest:

Government has been the principal factor preventing the “affordable housing” that politicians talk about so much.

I mean really. Are the editors of NRO THAT dumb as to let this pass for journalism? Let's examine Mr. Sowell's argument:

n the San Francisco Bay Area, 66 percent of the new mortgages were of this type.

Why this difference in times and places? Because housing prices were skyrocketing in some places and times, so that people of modest incomes had to go out on a limb to buy a house, if they expected to buy a house at all.

But why were housing prices going up so fast, in the first place? A number of studies of communities across the United States and in countries overseas turned up the same conclusion: Government restrictions on building.

While many other factors can be involved — rising incomes, population growth, construction costs — a scrutiny of the times and places where housing prices doubled, tripled, or quadrupled within a decade shows that restrictions on building have been the key.


What say MR. Sowell provide a link to that report? See these anti-government types see evil anytime a government agency says, hey, this is a residential zone and people shouldn't have to live where there are massive diesel emissions or chemical run off or where children will be at risk for being run over. Things like that. That's a problem to Mr. Sowell. Mr. Sowell apparently has no problem with landlords and real estate agencies that are simply greedy. How about that? How about plans for stadiums in say, NYC and Brooklyn, paid for, in part by huge tax contributions by the the city of New York to extremely wealthy people? How about THAT Mr. Sowell

It seems simply implausible to Mr. Sowell that there are actually greedy mofo's out there. No it cannot possibly be the "free market" where greedy banks and hedge fund people are more concerned with lining their pockets by selling loans to Asian banks and therefore not even holding the risk for the mortgages they gave out to people who should have never been given a red cent to begin with.

It should also be noted that the run up in housing prices also coincides with the popularized notion of houses as investment properties to be "flipped" at will and the rise in the home equity loan market, where Americans, no longer satisfied with running up credit card debt and leasing vehicles they otherwise would not be able to "purchase" took out loans against the values of their homes in order to buy more consumer goods.

No, Instead of government being the cause of the lack of affordable housing it has been historically a moderating force in that market with things such as rent stabilization. It is when the government acts in the interests of the monied, as it did with the "credit reform" that people get shafted. It's really sad how big business and their lackeys blame the government for problems that the businesses themselves created trying to compete with each other to get more money.