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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
That’s a great question, Ben! No, local jurisdictions poison-pill taxing supply-hoarded, vacant housing is authentically libertarian and actually truer to Adam Smith and other darling “free market” philosophical antecedents. The National Association of Realtors being a multi-decade advocacy project lobbying for state power to enforce market-rigging conditions like closed bidding is “centrally planned”— Private bankers printing public money to later leverage religious (not-gold-backed) fiat currency and encourage unlimited infusions of foreign capital to inflate housing costs in rural Kansas by the global top 1% who mostly build non-USD wealth is “centrally planned”— Citizens behaving as rational market actors and hijacking state power to do so is the freest market imaginable. This assumes we are logical and fix selective amnesia among Ivy League economists and corporate business journalists.
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Ben - [C/x]
@benersing
If bottoms-up at the city council / neighborhood level, I agree. If top down from state or federal level, its still unclear to me how it'd be different from the examples you provided. Slight aside, I’m familiar with the role of private equity owners in SFR markets pushing up prices via increase demand and willingness to pay, but not as familiar with price fixing via intentional vacancy. Can you elaborate? Is there data you can share?
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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
I see a slippery-slope fallacy here presuming that all “top down” tax policy creates the same outcome— in libertarian lore, the centralization demon robbing local actors of freedom. If we accept that slippery slope, the Federal Reserve is the most communist abomination imaginable, oppressing all of us with an unavoidable tax to private oligarchs any time government governs. Unless we eliminate the Federal Reserve and dozens of other top-down market-manipulating policy favoring oligarchs, a federal poison-pill tax on vacant housing would be the fairest: Just like our tithe to private bankers cannot be avoided, our tithe to sane reconciliation of housing supply with local capital supply should not be avoidable either. Commercial real estate is just as anti-market now, with banks price-fixing markets using clauses that poison-pill bill mortgage holders for lost value if they sell or rent beneath a certain price. Here’s some data: housing cost increases by state over 40 years. Compare to median wages
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Stuart
@olystuart
As a Washingtonian... Ouch. Fucking ouch. That's so screwed up
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Ben - [C/x]
@benersing
I agree we can't assumes the same outcome necessarily, that depends on the specific policy goal. In general though top-down policy in today’s political system more frequently contributes to less economic freedom for people who have less real voice in the decision. Yes the FED is centrally influencing markets via monetary policy, but its not creating or killing markets based on the desire to intervene in competitive forces when it doesn't like the outcome (the exception being if it presents an existential threat to the system). This is my understanding of what our discussion is about. Any data on intentional vacancies / price fixing?
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