A good article at the BBC about the history of Home-Owner-Ism:
In 1966 the Conservative party manifesto made a promise. A Tory government would "get the houses up and keep the prices down".
Fast forward to the present day. UK house prices rose 8.4% in the year to January 2015. In London they went up by 13%. There's widespread concern that this is far too fast. That young would-be buyers are being priced out of the market.
And yet the idea that either a Conservative or Labour government would pledge to hold down prices today would be regarded by virtually everyone as far-fetched...
Unfortunately, the author appears to have fallen for the lie that higher land prices = more wealth; they do not.
Higher land prices mean primarily that there are or will be larger net transfers from non-landowners to landowners.
High land prices are not even a zero-sum game. In the grander scheme of things, higher land prices lead to there being less wealth overall in the same way as high rates of taxes on earnings and output lead to lower overall earnings and output and hence wealth.
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
That was then, this is now...
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8 comments:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-is-too-tolerant-and-should-interfere-more-in-peoples-lives-says-david-cameron-10246517.html
Fancy sending your tweets and fb posts to the police, Mark? Because that's what the PM wants.
R, they are free to read and put their point of view in the comments
They did lose in 1966 possibly why they haven't done the same thing twice.
LF, indeed they did, but that's because people trusted Labour to build even more houses and to keep prices even lower.
"They did lose in 1966"
A shame, or they would have found, like Labour did, that building more houses did nothing to keep prices down, the reverse, actually. Mind you they wouldn't have taken any notice; nobody did, which is why everyone still thinks it's "supply and demand".
B, hang about, the first house price bubble I can remember was in the early 1970s, when Heath/Barber went for easing credit rules and house building was starting to tail off again - it did not happen under Wilson in the 1960s.
I thought that the 1960's building boom was accompanied by price rises, but I may be wrong. It was on that programme about the 60s/70s housing boom you referenced on this blog last year sometime?
B, the big, inflationary price rises were in the early 1970s; Heath disguised the ensuing real price falls by stoking massive price inflation for a couple of years so that nominal prices stayed flat.
So Wilson post-74 had to deal with the 'secondary banking crisis' and the inflation caused all sorts of friction with trade unions wanting massive pay increases and it was all vicious cycle of shit for twenty years or so.
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