Hakim Horrifically Misinterprets the UK’s Housing Crisis for Ideological Purposes

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5luQB_yFmTM

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2021/mar/31/uk-housing-crisis-how-did-owning-a-home-become-unaffordable

https://www.adamsmith.org/capitalismcansolvethehousingcrisis

             YouTube’s favorite far-left Tankie, known for such previous outrages as denying the deliberately anti-Ukrainian intentions of the Holodomor famine, has recently attempted to clean up his image and has subsequently deleted much of his past content. This was doubtless to make his AtlasVPN sponsor happier, as even they must have their limits on what they can have associated with their brand name. Seeing one of the people they’re sponsoring have a video titled “Why All Landlords Are Parasites” with a picture of Mao Zedong in the thumbnail must have understandably set off some alarms at their headquarters. We can infer this and not a change of ideology to be the case because in his recent “What is Neo-liberalism?” video, he quotes Joseph Stalin, but very vaguely attempts to hide who he is quoting. So, his horrific beliefs around Soviet crimes have not changed? Got it. With that, naturally, his horrific understanding of economic history has not gotten any better. This is fully encapsulated in the aforementioned video on neoliberalism and what he thinks Margaret Thatcher’s “Right to Buy Policy” resulted in.

            Demonstrating that Hakim apparently only opposes landlords when they are in the private sector, this previous denouncer of landlords as “parasites” decided to declare Thatcher’s turning over of social housing from their landlord local council governments to the tenants as the “most insidious of policies”. So, landlords are parasites in the private sector, yet it is insidious to do away with (some) landlords when they’re operating in the public sector? Such an ideologically consistent position to hold. Anyway, so Thatcher let tenants purchase the homes they were living in. What was so wrong with this? It was not like she sold all the houses to a realtor company who proceeded to massively hike the rents or something. Well, apparently, the policy quickly resulted in local governments running out of social housing and there being a sudden drop in the building of new housing. This resulted in housing prices in the UK rising over 1000% since 1980 and young people today having no chance of purchasing even the cheapest of homes. This is said to have been all by design. Is that spooky conspiracy theory substantiated by any evidence? Of course not.

So, what is the problem with this narrative? Well, to start, it is not like the post-war United Kingdom had the same policy as the Soviet Union when it came to housing. Even with Clement Attlee’s Labour Party cementing the country as a mixed economy with a large state presence for over three decades, there was still much private financing and construction of homes. Not even a full third of the UK’s housing stock was provided by local governments at the start of the 1970s, a decade before the Right to Buy policy that Thatcher didn’t even create, but merely accelerated, began to draw attention. All the same, yes, the Right to Buy policy resulted in a shortfall of social housing, but it also led to around 500,000 new homeowners. Apparently, their happiness does not count. They should have had to have been their local government’s tenant for the rest of their lives.

 All the same, Hakim touches on a very real problem in the UK when he mentions that young people in the country today find it impossible to buy a home. Prices have indeed gone nowhere but up since the 1970s in that country, as in much of the developed world. Does that mean this was a grand conspiracy by Thatcher and her fellow neoliberals to keep everyone poorer? Is that the only possible explanation? Well, on a horrifyingly simplistic Marxist propaganda channel, the answer to both is naturally “Yes”, but here in reality, it is a resounding “No”.  The problem lies in the insane zoning laws, land use laws, and building regulations that even restrict the height of what buildings can be. This is especially severe in London, but it is a problem throughout the country. There are no Singapore-like skyrise apartment complexes being built because the laws won’t allow for them. Politically-motivated homeowners lobby against repealing any of this because they wish to keep their property values higher. As is so often the case, the government, not the market, is making people poorer. Why the Friedrich Hayek-aligned Thatcher would approve of any of this protectionism for homeowners is never explained by Hakim because the true causes of the problem themselves are never even remotely addressed. He does briefly mention that government subsidies for private housing exist, but never explains why such a policy contrary to the marketization of everything was allowed to become a thing by the dogmatic neoliberals who have apparently been at the helm of the UK’s government since Thatcher. Above all, what is never explained why the market for housing in the UK seems to be so broken. In an unhampered market, higher prices attract new entrants to markets in order to make money before the price goes back down again. Why wouldn’t this be happening in the UK if housing prices were so high? Could it be government restrictions. Of course not. This is a Marxist video, after all. Governments only ever act in the interests of the capitalist class. If something in the economy happened and it was unfortunate for a large part of the population, it must have been orchestrated from the top. Without such a conspiratorial view of the world, how is Hakim to get more converts to his political religion of Marxism?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump Opponents Should Point Out the Price Inflation His Tariffs Will Cause

 We all remember the very bizarre moment back in 2019 where Trump was speaking at that year’s CPAC and he was attempting to explain the Great Tariff Debate of 1888 and how his tariffs could, like those of the Republican Party’s back then, bring in so much revenue that the government would not know what to do with it. Needless to say, the much smaller federal budget as a percentage of America’s GDP, the much smaller debt to GDP ratio of America in 1888, nor even the fact that there was no income tax back then, did not enter the equation during this APUSH moment on the 45th’s part. That being said, 1888 is not a completely irrelevant year for Trump, as it was basically Grover Cleveland’s equivalent to the 2020 election. He lost to Benjamin Harrison that year, despite ironically losing the popular vote as a Democrat, but came back four years in 1892. He won that election and became the first President to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was thus the 22nd and 24th President in the s...
Read more

In Defense of Jacque Turgot’s Actions During His Tenure as Minister of Finance

  In a Politico article that seemed to be more about promoting interventionist government policies than it was about honestly explaining history or economics, Professor Jacob Soll of the University of Southern California recently made a hackneyed comparison between now former Prime Minister of the U.K. Liz Truss’s proposed tax reform that has since been largely reversed and the decision of 1775 France’s Minister of Finance, Jacque Turgot, to liberalize the economy with regards to grain trading and the events of the Flour War that same year which were ostensibly created by his actions. The fact that markets were “reeling” from Truss’s diabolical plan to lower the U.K.’s top income tax rate bracket from 45% to 40% is rather cynically compared to the real hardship that occurred in France in 1775. Whether the former is even the actual cause of Britain’s current problems is a very contested theory, as the expansionary monetary policy, high taxes, and large budget deficits of the last de...
Read more

Violating "Intellectual Property" is Not Theft or a Violation of Property Rights

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZMxM7DdQUM In a recent video by the generally decent, economically liberal YouTube channel, Stephen Michael Davis, Davis reports that one of his previous videos was flagged for a copyright claim because it quoted from Bernie Sanders’ 2023 book It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. Davis unfortunately defended this decision by YouTube on the grounds that if he just posted the whole book or even portions of it, that that would ostensibly be “theft and a violation of property rights” and Penguin Random House would be perfectly within their rights to have the video taken down. The problem with this is that property rights and theft imply that scarcity of a given object exists and that scarcity has to be allocated in a just way. With words on paper, there is no scarcity and therefore no property rights and subsequently, there was no theft. Whether in the form of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or anything else, intellectual property i...
Read more