Why Bailing Out Homeowners Doesn’t Make Sense
This excellent piece on Slate.com encapsulates perfectly the inherent wrongness of a government bailout of distressed homeowners. First, author Steven E. Landsburg points out that homes are never truly lost; they just change hands.
None of these foreclosed houses is going to disappear. After a foreclosure, one family moves out, and another moves in. We see the sad faces of the people moving out, but we don’t as often see the happy faces of the new homeowners moving in. Nevertheless, those happy faces are out there, and we should not discount them.
In other words, one person’s loss is another person’s gain. We hear about the loss, but not about the gain, which is equally, if not more, valid.
But this is the heart of the matter:
Losing your house is painful. Never having anything to lose is even more painful.
Does anyone else see the illogic, the absurdity, of helping people who can’t afford their $300,000, $500,000 or $800,000 homes?
As Landsburg’s piece points out, shouldn’t our country focus first on people who have nothing, instead of those who managed to nab a sprawling, overpriced abode?
This housing “crisis” lends new meaning to the term “embarrassment of riches.” We should be embarrassed at how materialistic and consumptive we have become as a nation. It’s the reason people in other countries ridicule and hate us.
In the same newspaper with the story about Americans “losing” their 3,000-square-foot homes is the story of a man in Zimbabwe who walks nine miles each way to work each day because the public-transportation system has gone away.
There’s nothing wrong with owning a home. There’s nothing wrong with feeling emotionally attached to a home. Unfortunately, the Land of Opportunity has morphed into the Land of the Opportunistic. A little more perspective — and a lot less greed — would be welcome.
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Griffith Park Steal
What You Get for Half a Million
