The Power of Prejudice

Not long ago, Mark wrote a post on the myth that building more houses would bring down prices. However, this is a very persistent meme, one which I've come across twice in the first half of the latest copy of Moneyweek, and the contributors to Moneyweek usually have the right idea about matters to do with land. The second mention was in an abstract of an article by Robin Harding in the Financial Times, which, having started off by identifying the huge transfer of wealth from renters and recent buyers to existing homeowners and sellers, then goes on to attribute entirely to planning restrictions.

Now this may be the same effect as noticing that suddenly, a lot of other drivers seem to have just bought the same model of car as you. However, I think there is more to it than that. There is huge power in getting an idea into the public consciousness, embedded so that it becomes a prejudice, i.e. that it is pre-judged to be correct and no longer exposed to any logical criticism, just accepted as a truth. We can see this process with LVT and the drip, drip, drip of "killer arguments against" spotted and exposed for their utter illogicality in this blog to zero wider effect. The process both is propagated by and propagates the meme, like a sort of fast-breeder reactor. Unsurprisingly, given its effectiveness, this process has been widely used by politicians, pressure groups and vested interests, the demonisation of fat in our diets and the man-made global warming theory being a past and a present example.

Although it is likely that a lot of the commenters on matters to do with land taxes are actually shills for the banks and Big Land generally,there is actually no need for them to do this. The idea that LVT is a bad idea is such a foregone conclusion for many that all the comments could be from people who are who they say they are, just as it is unlikely that Robin Harding is simply trotting out the Homeownerist line, given the thrust of his article.

On the same page in Moneyweek, there is a piece from the Spectator suggesting that wave and tidal power is a waste of time and that the DECC would be better off pointing its subsidies towards solar and wind energy instead of wave and tidal power. This is not an idea I've come across before, but considering that subsidies to solar and wind power benefit landowners and subsidies to wave and tidal power don't, then could we be seeing the birth of another meme?