Nerd Analysis: Is Government-Subsidized Home Ownership Necessary to "Preserve Our National Identity"? Plus a Rant!

Say WHAT? Robert Shiller may be a Yale economist, but I think he's wrong about this whole home ownership and government subsidy business. Here's his New York Times op-ed, by the way, so you can read for yourself. Besides, government meddling helped create the housing bubble and resulting toxic mortgage mess.

Also, are we really saying that somehow home ownership is a prerequisite for a national identity/character? WHAT? What do you even mean by those words? Pffffft. I already figured out a while ago that in the government obsession with home ownership, even for people who shouldn't have gotten mortgages in the first place, the humble, taxpaying, fiscally responsible apartment renter (like yours truly and most of my hard-working friends) gets the shaft.

Shiller even concedes that government house-buying subsidies have very little economic justification (i.e., actual, practical, common-sense reasons for doing stuff), but he insists on the "social engineering" aspect. And so in the end he begins, most unfortunately, to sound like every other tiresome, ideologically-driven, pie-eyed dreamer with no grip on harsh pragmatic reality, justifying bad policy by claiming some kind of moral high ground and good intention. (Booooooo!)

You know, someday I'd like to buy a house (or a cute condo). But a house isn't the only kind of personal property that matters (and with the Kelo decision and eminent domain, you might still be out of luck with that -- oops, did I say that out loud? Ask some New Yorkers about their property rights). I think the entire idea that homeowning is somehow a requirement for good communities and individual liberties is flawed, and besides, it's reductionist and doesn't even try to account for the fact that people who don't own houses matter too (don't they?). I was in a towering rage about the mortgage mess, and I still am. Homeowning is not the end-all and be-all of life.

I find amusing also in the extreme Shiller's statement that renting puts us all under the "oppression of a landlord" and brings up nasty memories of tenements. REALLY? TENEMENTS? I'm looking around my apartment and out the window at the rest of the sunny complex right now. Hm, we haven't had a single cholera outbreak this month or last, actually. Not a single instance of typhoid or tuberculosis, no rats or vermin or filth or crime, no high-rise fires or leaky pipes, no instances of entire families crammed into a single room, no kids crying because they'd spent all day working in a mill for The Man!

Funny, I don't feel oppressed that I pay rent to someone. I don't feel like some kind of serf or peasant or whatever. In fact, I actually (gasp!) LIKE the fact that I pay my own rent with my own money for my own place to live that I chose. Funny, when I went apartment-hunting, the sheer awful, blood-sucking, soul-killing oppression of it all -- landlords and rent and tenements, oh my! -- never entered my head. I was more thinking, closet space and kitchen appliances and nice sunlight exposure so I can have a place to live and work hard and make my way in the world without depending on anyone other than myself, so I can keep chasing my American Dream. Well, I guess this just doesn't make me part of the community or national identity of people who care about individual liberties and property rights! After all, I'm just a poor sad tenement dweller crushed under the heel of some ruthless landlord. Or something. PFFFFFFT.