Destroyers Of Wealth

Ozzy Osbourne, self-proclaimed 'Prince of Darkness' and centerpiece of possibly the only un-scripted, un-staged "reality" show ever to come to your TV screen, once lamented that his beloved bulldogs were good for only one thing. As I recall, he said that's turning good food into shit.

Substitute "money" for "food," and you have the essence of what progressive politics in America is all about.

This came unbidden into my forebrain as I read the latest column by Nellie Bowles of The Free Press. Specifically, the observation that our domestic socialists oppose any privately-funded, privately-built, new housing:

[F]or the last decade at least, the block on new construction in cities has come from the American left, which is really against all new housing unless it is state-owned. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s just that simple. Here’s Denver’s DSA spokesperson Mary Imgrund speaking to Denverite about blocking housing on the golf course: "From a socialist perspective, it seems kind of naïve and silly that people are like, ‘The market got us into this crisis, and by God, the market’s gonna get us back out of it.'"

The embedded socialist's quote is farcical - government, not the market, created the housing crisis. Rent control, aggressive zoning laws, political payola, regulatory hell, and permitting processes that require both specialists and connections to navigate all contributed, across decades, to a shortage of housing stock and pricing distortions. But, alas, facts never seem to matter to the crusading moralizers who only want two things: Other People's Money and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody. The former is my broken-record refrain, and the latter, abbreviated BANANA, has displaced the now quaint notion of Not In My Back Yard, aka NIMBY.

It's as if they don't actually want the housing crisis remediated.

Yes, indeed, there are some who know that a crisis resolved is the termination of an activist's career and raison d'être, but too many righteous, angry naifs actually believe the Left's BS on this. They think that, if only all the money the rich people would spend on building housing for other rich people (let alone that this is all done with debt) were taken by their proxies and used to build profit-free housing for poor people, everyone's rent (including their own) would diminish and there'd be nice shiny new homes galore. One look at the housing projects of the 1960s should disabuse any honest person of this fantasy.

What happens when, as Alvin Lee of Ten Years After sang, "there are no rich no more?" When they fulfill Margaret Thatcher's aphorism?

When government, which is so notoriously bad at managing money that its gambling monopoly in NY went bankrupt, that it gave up on trying to audit the Pentagon's books, and that it lost over half a trillion dollars in its rush to remediate the COVID-based economic hardships it itself imposed, looks to displace the private sector's wealth creation, the guaranteed end-state is wealth destruction. After they burn through all the productive people’s money, what next? After they destroy all the incentives that motivate wealth-creators, how will they fund the structures they built?

Government sucks at everything it does, full-stop. Even minarchist societies still, nevertheless, assign it certain jobs, because things like protection of rights and courts and policing and prosecution of crimes and national defense are better handled by a representative system than in an anarchic fashion. But, we mustn't make the mistake of concluding that, because we assign these things to government, government is good and efficient at doing them, and by extension doing other stuff.

That goes triply so for big and/or socialistic government. It's skilled at only one thing: turning good money into shit.