The U.S. Housing Market: Rent-Serfs and Artificial Scarcity

Unleash the powers of unlimited credit / excess capital on a limited, essential resource such as shelter and this is what we end up with: artificial scarcity, rent-serfs and half-vacant neighborhoods.

Ideologies sound wonderful in the abstract, but run aground in the granular real world. The dominate ideology in the world today isn't a political ideology, it's the ideology of the market: in this ideology, the market is presented as the ideal problem-solving mechanism, as the interplay of supply and demand and the free flow of capital and labor will a…