Letters to the Editor
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Houses can be rented too
Not every rental is an apartment.
The dirt in the back yard will not be there to help you when you get old. What you've saved by not throwing good money after bad in a falling market WILL be there. Hey, if you aren't all that attached to your money, I'd be only too glad to take that useless stuff off your hands.
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PS: Link is broken
Those wacky Brits spell "subsidising" with an s instead of a z. Here's a working URL:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/12/subsidising_rootedness.cfm
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Stock Market
Most people actually lose money in the stock market. For every stock market millionaire, there are a million people who lose a dollar. So the argument that "I could invest in the stock market and make money" is a false hope perpetuated by the one guy that makes the million dollars off of a million suckers. The best advice I can give is, buy a home, a townhome, a condo, anything just to get started. You can trade up as your equity increases over time.
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Getting old.
Re: Fran Taylor:
By the time I get old, my house will already have been paid off. I won't need to find the money to meet my monthly rent or face eviction for failing to do so. I'll invest that money instead and/or live off of it. Then I'll putter around in my backyard and grow veggies in the "useless" dirt.
There are benefits and arguments for renting and owning. After years of renting, I'm very happy I own.
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Apparently, Most of You Live in Places Where Houses Values Still are Going Up
All You American Way Homeowner Patriots,
Just wait until the national malaise spreads to your zip codes. When your own houses start dropping in value, when you need to sell, but find no buyers for a year or more, you will blog out of the other sides of your keyboards.
Can you imagine selling your house for tens of thousands of dollars less than you owe on your mortgage?
You have an "It Can't Happen Here" (Frank Zappa) mentality. But the Conventional Wisdom is going out of fashion.
Good luck! I sincerely hope something miraculous happens, and we all head back onto our old, innocent guaranteed-profit track. But please take this as a warning. And do not post so arrogantly about home ownership.
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Such emotions
I always knew people were emotional about their homes, but I'm almost always surprised by how much so. What's really unfounded is the criticism here that The Economist for arguing for the well off. The love of homeownership if anything is a boon for the well off. Between tax breaks and appreciating property values, it's the landed class who benefits. The more that people clamor for home ownership the more the prices go up. This is not to say owning a home doesn't make sense for many people. It does, but we would be all better off looking at it with more objective eyes.
There's no question that the tax break given mortgages is one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the poor to the well off. If any politician had true political courage, this should be one of the first tax breaks to go. If anything home ownership and other property rights are the base of capitalism. I would think that more Salon readers would support criticism of those institutions.
The Economist is also right to point that mobility is key to economics success. This is something many legal and illegal aliens are well aware of.
While I'm a fan of community, I often think the world might be better place if we weren't all so "rooted." Too many conflicts derive with sense attachment to place, justified or not. Look at the Middle East. Besides, I've always felt community is best defined by people rather than a particular house or location. With improving technology, I think we can transcend place.
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A great example of dinosaur-era economic thinking
An example of antiquated economic thinking. The clasical notion that people are mobile resources that move to where the jobs are has long since been discredited as overly simplistic and in many cases simply false. In the modern world, people lucky enough to have some socioeconomic power and/or who are willing to make sacrifices often decide in advance where they would like to live -- based on quality of life -- and end up attracting jobs to that location. That phenomenon is responsible for large sectors of our economy in western Montana, for example. Large numbers of highly educated people have chosen to locate here because they want to be near world-class recreational opportunities, scenic beauty, and relatively healthy communities. The result has been a very skilled labor pool that has attracted high-paying service industries like biotech, specialized health care, engineering firms etc.
It's true that people follow jobs, but jobs also follow people. And encouraging home ownership and attachment to community is precisely the kind of measure that can improve quality of life and help attract jobs to an area.
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Home ownership
I'm sure I'm not the first one to say it, but this looks like nothing more or less than a bit to limit home ownership to the lesure classes.
I've lived in neighborhoods where most people owned their own homes and in others where most people were renting. There is no comparison. High ownership areas have lower crime rates, better schools and more community involvement. Even in those "suburbian bedroom communities" that I'm sure someone has complained about.
Those tax credits that the author wants to do away with are about the only way that many young people can afford to buy a home and as such they have a direct effect on the quality of life in communities all over the country that would otherwise be slowly sliding into high crime, mostly rental neighborhoods.
Rootless cosmopolitans, my ass. Buy a home, put down some roots and build up your community. That's how civilizations get created. Rootlessness is for outlaw bikers, professional soldiers and traveling salesmen. Even hunter-gatherering cultures are territorial.
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Bullshit
Let's leave aside the existential and the philosophical. Let's talk dollars and cents. Most places have rents which are commensurate with mortgages if not higher. Last place I lived, my mortgage on a three bedroom house was $591. I could have rented my house for over $1000. And I'm not even approaching the issue of the freedom from having somebody trying to tell you what you can and can't do in your own home. So if you want to enrich the rentier class and impoverish the proletariat, go ahead and rent.
And, as long as we are talking about turns of phraseology...
I am offended at your phrase libertarian nihilism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy. Nihilism is a philosophy of life. Libertarians are not ipso facto nihilists and, in fact, I suspect very few of them are. Conflating the two is a disservice.