The 18-year cycle in house prices

From today's Telegraph:

Four times since the 1940s, house prices have rocketed to become worth more than seven times families’ disposable incomes — in 1948, 1979*, 1988 and 2007. In the first three cases, house prices then fell by about 30 per cent in real terms. Why should the current situation be any different? There is no compelling answer, and the statistics are bearing this out. So far this crash is looking sharper than the last one.

*There was no 1979 peak. The correct years are actually 1948, 1973, 1989, 2007 - see chart here. The 1948 peak was a result of genuine housing shortage after WW2, and the normal 18-year cycle was stretched to over twenty years by simple virtue of Labour and Tory governments encouraging home-building in the fifties and sixties, but the basic point still stands.

So who's up for a Property Bubble Tax to dampen the booms and hence cushion us against the busts?