The Chinese are just more blatant about it...

From the BBC:

More than a dozen Chinese newspapers have published a joint editorial calling for the abolition of the household registration or "hukou"... The hukou was introduced in the 1950s as a tool of central economic planning [and] registers every Chinese citizen according to their household origins as either town dwellers or country peasants...

Since economic reforms began 30 years ago, many Chinese migrant workers have left the land to contribute to the country's rapid growth and industrialisation. But they remain registered as rural dwellers and are not entitled to the same welfare as their city counterparts. This has created social inequality.

To Western ears, that all seems a bit harsh, but is Home-Owner-Ism really that different? The Chinese justify hukou as being 'economic planning' and the Home-Owner-Ists justify NIMBYism as being necessary to protect The Hallowed Greenbelt, but the underlying purpose is the same: to try and preserve privilege.

Existing homeowners are like the city dwellers, who get all this stuff like roads and schools and hospitals paid for by taxes imposed on the productive economy (sure, homeowners pay income tax as well, but they get a refund of most of it with rising property values); and the priced out generation are like the landless peasants, who not only have to pay the income taxes to pay for the roads and schools and hospitals, they have to pay for the privilege of living somewhere to be able to access them, usually end up living in much smaller accommodation than they would have been able to afford a decade or three ago.

UPDATE: in the FT article, it said that hukou registration is quasi hereditary, so peasants go to the cities to work, but they can't afford to have children because they won't get free state school in the cities, so yet another analogy with the priced-out generation, or certainly those who'd like to send their kids to a good state school.

Just sayin', is all.