Talking to Free Market "Conservatives" about Blackrock and Home Ownership
Faith in the market conserves nothing
Normie conservatives tend to get squeamish in discussions about economic inequality. I suspect that this is because most have accepted, or even grown up with, the notion that conservatism equals the free market. That is, economically there is no difference between economic conservatism and economic libertarianism. To suggest any different suggests commie, leftist leanings. This attitude has diminished in certain sectors of conservatism, but for the most part economic inequality is something that can be fixed by the “market.”
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: the other week Cultural Husbandry had a great twitter thread about Blackrock and other Wall Street investment corporations buying up single-family homes. The average American family cannot compete with their 20% down payment (if they have even that). The result? It is becoming increasingly difficult for middle-class families to achieve that important step toward financial wealth and stability: owning a home. A few mainstream publications, like the Wall Street Journal, have been publishing on this for awhile (of course many more have been arguing that this is not a problem at all). There have been plenty of articles out recently about Bill Gates buying up land in the West. Joel Kotkin has been warning about the coming of neo-feudalism for a few years now.
The Land Report, a publication which tracks land ownership in America, shows that most land is owned today by billionaires. In 2007, America’s top 100 wealthiest owned about 27 million acres of land. This is the approximate size of Maine and New Hampshire put together. Today that amount is around 40 million acres and the size of New England. I’ve already mentioned Bill Gates, but Jeff Bezos is the 25th largest land-owner in America today. The Koch Family is the 57th. There is concern that the West is growing increasingly land poor insofar as the government the most land (50%) and these large estates own the other. California, per usual, is a scary example: the average household salary is $60,000 per year, the average property price is around $500,000. The situation is dire.
These are not the only problems that are keeping Americans from home ownership. Debt also kills the dream of owning property. Millennials not only lag behind in marriage and family, but also home ownership due to their large amount of student loan debt. For every $1,000 owed in student loans, home ownership decreases by 1-2%. Even with low interest rates, high housing prices and Covid-19 have prevented millennials from having the same amount of home ownership as Boomers and Gen-Xers at similar ages. Who knows what will be the case for the Zoomer generation?
Back to conservatives - awhile ago I had a conversation with a group of people about the decline of property ownership. These people would all consider themselves free market conservatives. They could not see any problem with a lifetime of renting. After all, you still have shelter. There was no moral problem with Blackrock buying up single family homes, because they would not stay empty. Those houses would still be available to families, even if they did not own them. Finally - and this is always the crux of the argument - if people wanted homes, the market would respond to this desire. Millennials, they claimed, like to rent - people no longer want to own homes.
I suppose millennial and zoomer generations have been habituated to this attitude: we have a subscription-based life. We subscribe to our tv, our music, our cars, why would it be a problem to subscribe to our homes? The minimalist aesthetic has been propagandized for years now. It is unfashionable to have property - I mean clutter. When the ideal of this ethereal and transient way of being has been promoted for years, of course a sort of consent has been manufactured. Many of the people I was talking to actually do want to live in the pods.
And so the solution is to do nothing. Faith in the market leads to a quietism about the most serious political problem. Some abstract replacement for God will swoop in and fix the problem as long as government will get out of the way. And if it isn’t working, its because the market is not sufficiently free yet - we haven’t really tried true free market economics yet!
I’ll repeat what others have said: if this is conservatism, I’m not sure what it is conserving. If we take conservatism to mean the American Founding, the Founders wanted and encouraged widespread property ownership. The Northwest Ordinance, which outlawed entail and primogeniture, is the most notable policy example of this desire. Widespread property ownership is better for republican government. And while I won’t pretend that we have republican government anymore, I will point out that this conservative-type has forgotten what the Founders understood quite clearly: property and political rights go together. The loss of one ultimately leads to the loss of the other.
Prior to the housing crash in 2008, 68% of Americans owned homes. Today this number stands around 61% and will probably only trend lower. Admittedly, I’m not sure what our policy responses should be (though I don’t think corporations should be able to buy single family homes). But what I do know is that faith that the market will take care of this problem is ultimately pernicious. The result of such an attitude will only prove Kotkin’s predictions about our coming neo-feudalism, or even the Great Reset - You will own nothing and be happy - true. It ultimately conserves nothing.