The Left's Solution to Housing: Make it a Human Right

Recently left-wing magazine The Nation published an article arguing that the "root of the problem" in nose-bleed housing costs is that housing is treated as a "instrument of profit."

Their solution is to instead make housing a "human right."

Founded in 1865, Nation was long the nation’s leading progressive magazine, its signal achievement installing a “professional and impartial” federal bureaucracy insulated from the unwashed voters.

We now call this the Deep State. Which is neither professional nor, emphatically, is it impartial. But it’s certainly progressive.

Far beyond the Nation, for decades we've seen this pitch from the left, to take things out of the market and instead “guarantee” them as a human right: Yes! Magazine says energy is a human right. The UN says free contraceptives are a human right. The Pulitzer Center says air conditioning is a human right.

So what's the problem?

Simple: If housing -- or air conditioning -- isn’t an "instrument of profit" who's going to build it?

Because there are three and only three options in this world: Profit, slavery, or do without.

Make it worth their while -- profit.

Or make them somebody else do it.

Or do without.

After all, houses aren’t built by the magical house fairies. People actually have to wake up at 5, lug a pot of coffee and a bag lunch, and work all day in the sun to build a house.

Other people have to save up money, skipping the family vacation or pinching pennies so they can lend to the home-builders who pay those workers until the house is done.

Now, why do the carpenters wake up at 5? And why do the savers skip the vacation? Because they get paid.

So calling for houses to "not be treated as an instrument of profit" is a call either for the houses not to exist -- presumably not what The Nation has in mind.

Or for those workers, and those savers, to do it all for free.

We do have a word for this: slavery. You work, and I take your work. In this case, in the form of a free house.

Of course, today we have a more polite word for it: taxation. You work, the professional and impartial bureaucrat takes it. And he gives your work to somebody else. Of course, slicing off a fat slab to cover his cushy government job and a little something for Ukraine.

So those are the choices: Pay the builders, force them, or do without and complain about broken capitalism.

Final point, there are people who cannot afford a house, so how to handle them? Simple: make it as easy as humanly possible to start a business, both as an entrepreneur and to hire others.

Unless you'll be building the house yourself, a job is how you afford a house. There is no other way that doesn't involve making somebody else do it for you.

There are few ideologies whose marketing is so cheery, and who's reality is so brutal, as socialism. For centuries -- millennia, actually -- it marches, ultimately, to that special North Korean blend of slavery and doing without.

Unfortunately, our education and media have been seized by socialists. Who've brainwashed significant portions of Americans, including many who vote.

Ben Franklin once said "experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." Creeping socialism will eventually wake these people up. As the shortages multiply, the prices become ever more outrageous, and the gulf widens between what you earn and what you keep.

Eventually, even the brainwashed legions can see with their own eyes.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are forced to join them on their magical journey of discovery of the true meaning of socialism.

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