Globalists Contra Adam Smith...

 

Connor Harris, "A Nation of Rentiers: The notion that homeownership should be a primary tool for building wealth is mistaken."

A recent Wall Street Journal report that institutional investors were buying single-family homes as rental properties spurred outrage from populists across the political spectrum, from conservative author and Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance to socialist magazine editor Nathan J. Robinson. One common phrase appeared in many of these condemnations: that institutional investors were depriving the working and middle classes of a chance to “build wealth” through homeownership.

This conventional wisdom that homeownership ought to be a chance to build wealth deserves scrutiny, along with related notions, such as that renting a dwelling means throwing money away. The prevalence of such ideas itself illustrates a disordered investment marketplace. In a free market, asset prices adjust so that no asset remains a clearly better investment than another for long. If buying a house consistently offers better returns than, say, renting a dwelling instead and putting the money saved into the stock market, this can be due only to market distortions.

Owning a home has long been a worthy investment in the sense that house prices were generally stable and less volatile than stocks. And the idea that homeownership makes for better citizens—the justification for homeownership subsidies, such as federal subsidized mortgages—has some empirical support. Several studies have found that homeowners are more likely than renters to vote, join civic organizations, or be good citizens in other ways (though nations such as Switzerland and Germany that don’t lack for civic order and bourgeois virtue have far lower homeownership rates than the United States). Economist William Fischel’s work on what he calls the “homevoter hypothesis” explains many facets of American local governance, such as how state funding of schools tends to produce worse education than local funding. Homeowners must take an interest in local governance, Fischel argues, to protect their property values.

The Bourgeois own.  Proletariats rent.   For they must follow their work like the Romani...