Skip to content

Timmy elsewhere

At the ASI

Solving the housing problem requires only that the government do less.

12 thoughts on “Timmy elsewhere”

  1. At lease two problems immediately spring to mind:

    1. Does the Govt really want to solve the problem and see house prices for the middle classes come down? I very much doubt it.

    2. Because of the concrete monstrosities that were built in the 60s and 70s which then became no-go areas for the police and descended in to social hell people naturally mistrust multi-dwelling units. MDUs are how most of the problems are solved on the continent.

  2. Bloke With Boat-

    Much of the social disaster of 20th century social hellholes seems to be a consequence of central planning ideas applied to cities. Particularly, the woefully mistaken idea that a city is a tree.

    Regarding the main article, it is also worth noting that one thing the government could do is stop handing out citizenships like confetti i.e. abandon the disastrous immigrationist policies of the post-war period.

  3. BwaB, 2:
    I’m afraid that opinion is out of date. Tower blocks are all the rage these days, whether in east London or in city centres across the country. It’s NIMBYism enforced by the planning system which prevents more towers being built. Local council officers are generally in favour of more residential towers, because they can squeeze the developers for section 106 cash. (The Guardian considers this to be a bug, not a feature.)

  4. Adam Smith did suggest moving to a tax that would solve the affordability problems and rent-seeking at a stroke. That you didn’t mention it is a more than a bit of a travesty.

  5. “In the current crisis, more government is not the solution to the problem, government IS the problem.” – Ronald Reagan, 1981

  6. ac I is right. That the Adam Smith Institute blows laissez faire shit out of it arse continually without mentioning that the great man was a king of the land taxers is more than a bit of a travesty.

  7. Without doing the detail (yet again), Ricardo’s “Law” of Rent is horseshit based on a fundamental error- both he and Smith believed in intrinsic value. Smith ascribed it to “labour”, Ricardo- with his invention of an economic class struggle theory that led directly into Marxism- derived his version from the productivity of land measured in bushels of corn. You start off thinking with a fundamental error like that, you end up with nonsensical conclusions like the idea that one can impose a tax without it affecting anyone (because the “land value” is fixed in corn units, natch).

    It’s just wrong. It’s like the phlogiston theory. Wrong, superceded, redundant, erroneous.

  8. Ian B
    You are right about the so- called Ricardo Law of Rent. It is not what people mean: the person who propounded that surplus profits always get converted to ground rent was Karl Marx.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *