Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts

27 October 2017

Don't like the government? Blame the National Party

For the second time in over 20 years of MMP, the left has got, pretty much, what it wanted in a government.  This time, a Labour Party led by a complete neophyte (Jacinda has never sat in Cabinet, never been a junior Minister), with a caucus inhabited by unionists and ex.public servants, with the Greens (led by an ex. Marxist student activist - yes I remember him at university) and Winston the country's leading political whore-monger (look how he , will lead a leftwing government.

This government is already opposed to capitalism (although mind-numbingly can't work out what system means New Zealanders produces goods and services that get exported or sells services to tourists to pay their way in the world).  It is keen on identity politics and not only believes that climate change is damaging New Zealand, but that New Zealand reducing its emissions will make a difference to it.  This is pure scientific nonsense, but there's more.  This government believes that child poverty can be solved by giving people more of other peoples money for having children they can't afford to raise, and that it is not up to people to be responsible parents.  This government doesn't even realise that the biggest problems it campaigned on in the election, such as housing, healthcare, education, river pollution and welfare, are almost nothing to do with capitalism, but rather government intervention.

The problem with housing is primarily due to local government, applying the Resource Management Act, to constrain the supply of housing, in part to meet the new urbanist ideological objectives of densification that is the dominant philosophy of urban planning departments in major cities (not just in New Zealand, but also Australia and the US cities with the most expensive housing).  

The problem with healthcare is that there is little relationship between what consumers want and what they are able or willing to pay for, as politicians, not the market, drive the supply of healthcare.

The problem with education is that it is centrally driven and only recently has been opened up to additional competition, so that it can be innovative and meet the diverse needs of students and parents.  The new government is completely beholden to the producer interests of the suppliers of health and education, who in education in particular, are completely uninterested in being rewarded on performance.

The river pollution problem is a failure to apply private property rights, which could be applied to adjoining land owners including Iwi, to provide a framework to control water quality based on the self interest of multiple private owners of the rivers.  However, this government wants to kneecap one of the country's leading industries, even wanting a debate about "how many cows" there should be.  Why would anyone think they would know how many cows there should be, when they don't know how many of anything there should be, when it should be a matter of supply and demand?

The child poverty problem is a failure of the welfare state, which has never been so generous to people who want to have children, but can't afford to pay for them.  It is also the failure of policies that inflate the cost of living, primarily for housing (see above), but also the regular increases in GST, fuel tax and tinkering with the energy market (albeit not on the disastrous scale seen in Australia and the UK).  

Yet what real difference will be made?  Nine years of National saw little done in any of these areas, housing belatedly had some movement recently, charter schools were a start that was far too little too late, and National just fed the middle class welfare addiction that Helen Clark started.

This government wont do much different from National (yes you'll see uneconomic railway and tram line built instead of motorways), the difference is this lot actually believe in what they are doing.

You see the National Party has been a very poor promoter of the free market, private enterprise and individual freedom.

After leading a courageous government that started tackling welfarism and waste in government, Jim Bolger lost all sense of courage to do what is right and for no sound political reason whatsoever held a referendum on electoral reform that would obviously make it more difficult for one party government (and certainly was being backed by the left because they thought MMP would give them more power, and they were right).  He then led a chaotic government for two years with Winston Peters, before resigning and the final year limping on with Jenny Shipley.  Jim Bolger, remember, cut his teeth in being a Minister under Rob Muldoon, the most economically socialist government to date.

John Key got elected on a platform opposing the high tax, big government philosophy of Helen Clark and spent more, and how much really changed?  Was the welfare state reduced?  No.  Did the state's role in education get scaled back? Hardly.  Was the planning system liberalised?  Only for the government building roads.  Did corporate welfare get scaled back?  No, the opposite.  Yes there was some partial privatisation, but the fundamental causes of the housing crisis were barely touched.   John Key with Rodney Hide's help implemented Labour's local government policy on Auckland, creating a behemoth of a bureaucracy, with more employees than the councils it replaced, spending more.  Of course National also funded the multi-billion dollar underground rail fetish in downtown Auckland, which will never make a single dollar of operating surplus to pay for it.

What New Zealand now has is a government that believes in something, most of it is at best misguided, at worst destructive and ignorant, but it IS driven by philosophy.  A philosophy of "we know best" of "problems are best fixed by throwing money at them" of "climate change can be changed by whatever we do, and if you question it you're evil" of "a person should be judged by their identity group/s and intersectionality of them, not what they actually do, experience or think" of "you are a means to an end".

National only offered a diluted version of this, a half hearted "it's all going well" belief that "we're entitled to rule".  It didn't offer anything different, anything new and never challenged all of the assertions on poverty and the environment spouted by the left.

So while Bill English might say he is leading a "strong opposition", what is he actually opposed to?

The new government is just National with the courage of the philosophical convictions in implementing essentially the same policies, on steroids.

Do you really think National would reverse anything Labour is about to do?

20 February 2013

The end result of the welfare state culture

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the editors of the Daily Mail and The Express cannot be disappointed at the discovery of Heather Frost, 37, who personifies the caricature of a welfare parasite (although the same can be said of the feckless sperm donors who abandoned their offspring in her).  Don't worry, she is in the Daily Mirror as well.

She "struggles" to live at taxpayers' expense, in two adjacent houses in Churchdown, Gloucestershire, with her 11 children, 2 grandchildren and unemployed partner Jake.  She would love to have more children, but is sterile (due to cervical cancer), and says she is married.

She also bought a horse and keeps it for one of her daughters, at £200 a month.

Now none of this would matter if her and her kin were sustaining themselves or other people were sustaining them by choice.  I couldn't care less if she wants to breed.  

However, this is a family that costs other people money, and not through ill fortune, but by lifestyle choice.  In fact, this choice, facilitated by the generous UK welfare state, has given the woman the gall to demand more.  

She has been complaining to the council that the housing provided at the expense of others is inadequate, so the Council is now building a brand new house for the family at the price of £400,000.

A true libertarian would cancel her benefits, tell her to get the money from the kids' dads, get a job and warn her that when the house she has asked for is built, it will be sold and the rent where she currently is will go up to market rates.

It is easy to moan about this, but what is needed is answers and a broader reflection on why this happens, when it is blatantly goes against the values of most of the population.

Quite simply, the incentives are set up to encourage this.  

Money and housing is offered in exchange for breeding, without employment and without a call upon the other party responsible for the breeding.  The more breeding, the more money and the bigger the home.  The quality of parenting (which would appear to be at least questionable) is irrelevant.

Defenders of the status quo on the left would hold their hands up and say "what else can you do", and claim these cases are so rare that it is wrong to destroy or reform a system that makes these cases news because they are rare.  Yet these very same people will protest and harass companies that legally seek to minimise their tax bills, and wonder why they do so?

After all, if you invested your hard earned money in a business, would you want a penny of it going to the likes of Heather Frost? 

The culture bred by the welfare state is this one of entitlement, which isn't just about expecting the Council to give you a new house for nothing, but raising children who expect to never have to work, who are resentful of those who have worked and have things they want, and who believe that it is right to raise kids the same.  Her eldest (21) already has a child of 2, who lives with them all.  

Consider the effect of promoting this culture has on business, employment, crime and society as a whole.  Indeed the left ought to consider how it breeds undying resentment amongst the broad mass of people who resent being the host to the parasitical claims of those who choose to be unproductive.

The only answer to this culture is to stop guaranteeing people every growing income for breeding and housing to accommodate it.   Would Heather Frost have kept breeding if she knew she wouldn't get more money or a bigger house to accommodate the children?  She claims that if she could have more children, she would. Maybe she would have named the fathers and they would have had a portion of their income taken to help pay?  If she had been denied more money and housing for breeding, would the social services system let her raise the children in such poverty or take them away so they could be fostered or adopted?  

There are some relatively gentle responses that take us down the path of more individual responsibility.

26 August 2011

What went wrong on council estates?

An interesting programme on BBC 4 last night largely lauded the massive expansion in local government owned housing in the UK in much of the 20th century, driven partly by socialist beliefs that the state could supply people with better housing than they had, to the point where eventually 60% of the population lived in council housing.

However, it brought out some rather interesting points that showed both the dark side of the spread of council housing, but also what went wrong.

The dark side was how it was an excuse for slum clearances.  Large swathes of cities, populated by people in poverty, but living on otherwise empty land or in very cheap rental accommodation, were bulldozed to put in housing estates - for other people.  They were not built for the homeless or the needy, but were built for the employed, for couples and families and people had to pay rent sufficient to keep the place maintained.   

To get council housing, people needed to be vetted.  They needed letters of reference from their employer to prove that Mr. X was a fit and proper person, didn't have any criminal convictions and earned enough money to pay the rent.  Those on welfare alone, those without work and those who had committed crimes were not going to get homes provided by the state.  Indeed, their homes could be swept aside with aplomb so that the aspiring working classes could get homes.

The result was that even when the grotesque Corbusier style housing estates started popping up around the UK (many built by private investors with extensive state subsidies), their first generation of residents were proud aspirational people on relatively low to middling incomes.  

They were almost entirely couple or families.  Intact families, not single parent families.  They were almost entirely employed and as they were all people who aspired for a better life, instilled the work ethic they had into their children.  They lived as a community together, and instilled the same ethic in each others' children.  Most of all, because they had to be able to afford to pay rent, they treated these communal areas as their own, with some pride.  When a family gained such a flat, they had it until they wanted to leave as long as they paid up.  If they stayed, their children could inherit the right to remain tenants.

To a non-socialist it sounds absurd, the state providing permanent housing, but it was the state effectively providing housing on a similar basis to the private sector.  By renting to people who aspired, to people who gave a damn, and who had a stake in their new rental homes, it meant the social structure was of people who were not an underclass of criminal parasites, who did not vandalise and terrorise, and who did act as a community of voluntary interacting adults (and children).

What changed?

Some on the left would blame Thatcher and mass unemployment, because it left many families struggling and men in particular lacking "purpose" and motivation.   However, the change happened in the decade or so before Thatcher.

Some on the right would blame mass immigration.  Yet it was pointed out that quite a few residents of these estates WERE Afro-Caribbean or South Asian families, with the same aspiration and work ethic as the indigenous British.   Some would blame a change in the traditional family, as women did not stay at home to look after their children, but went out working.

One factor is certainly the social change in the 1960s and 1970s that saw the rise of divorce and single parent families.  Included with that is the cultural change from families that were tight knit, well disciplined and bound by a Judeo-Christian code of ethics that had hardened during the war, to a moral relativist attitude of "do what you like".   The breakdown of traditional families hit both indigenous British and Afro-Caribbean families the most, as migrants from India and Pakistan tended to retain close family ties.

However, the single biggest factor, explained by the programme, was the removal of vetting for council housing.  It was deemed "discriminatory" for people to be vetted based on income, so council housing was there for the poor, regardless of employment or indeed criminal history.  Council estates became the places were people went to live when they got out of prison, it became the place to live when you couldn't afford anything else or private landlords wouldn't rent to you.   The culture of hard work and aspiration was eroded by a culture of violence, thieving, vandalism and disregard for the property and lives of others.

It was exacerbated by the expansion of the welfare state into supporting single parents who had never been married, or de facto couples, into paying more for every child, and so rewarding fecklessness. 

Council estates moved from being places were having a home was a privilege, earned by meeting minimum standards set by the owner (the council) and paid for, to places where anyone could go.  The result was that they became the breeding grounds for the parasitical entitlement led mob that recently went on a rampage.  

It is what happens when you reward fecklessness and bad behaviour, whilst penalising frugality and hard work.  Consider that the British government is currently printing money and producing ultra low interest credit on a scale that means the average bank account owner LOSES 5% of his money every year, but still insists on adjusting welfare to that inflation (although few working in the private sector are having pay rises to match inflation).   

Consider that there is a debate only now about whether to deny convicted rioters and looters welfare, or to evict them from council housing (and of course the shrill cries from the left about how "unfair" it is and it will just make them do it again - as if their policies stopped it).

The socialism of the 1960s and 1970s saw council estates in the UK sink into the abyss of squalor, bad behaviour and welfarism, as the end of full employment, the breakdown of traditional families, the rewards of unconditional free money and housing, and the end of vetting council tenancies saw the worst of society being hothoused in what one old council tenant described as "holes".

It has failed.  It is time to sell out these estates, to stop building new ones, and to let the criminals, the feckless and the anti-social try their luck with charity.   Of course those who claim to give a damn about all of them rarely think it is right that they pay out of their own pocket voluntarily, for a charity to help house rapists, thieves and child abusers - but they want you to be forced to do so.

05 January 2011

Monbiot says share your house or else! (UPDATED for Monbiotbots)

I visited the Green Party website for the first time in age today, nothing quite as funny as seeing Catherine Delahunty on the front page claiming 1 in 5 New Zealanders experience disability (it being pretty obvious that she is one of them), but one of the pin ups of the Green Party is British radical environmental moonbat - George Monbiot.  Monbiot is an advocate of all sorts of compulsion, including banning patio heaters, replacing gas pipelines with hydrogen, abolish superstores, cut airport capacity, as well as calling for an end to economic growth.

His latest missive is his brilliant solution to the high cost of housing in the UK - make people rent out their spare rooms.  Not rooms they define as spare, but ones that the Great Leader George Monbiot has deemed as excessive.  He thinks that people shouldn't have spare bedrooms, that there should be a housing footprint.  That means a couple in a four bedroom house should rent out two rooms.  Spare rooms should be occupied by people seeking housing.

Monbiot is such the little central planner control freak, that he believes pensioners should rent out spare rooms so people can live with them and provide home help and assistance.

He seems to have completely ignored the simple point that most people like to choose who they live with and to decide what to do with their own property.   He has decided there are enough homes around if only people used less rooms.  Are there limits to this bullying wannabe thugs willingness to stomp over the rights of others?

Nothing says more about his complete contempt for property rights, lack of any understanding about personal achievement and reward for effort and value than this statement:

While most houses are privately owned, the total housing stock is a common resource. Either we ensure that it is used wisely and fairly, or we allow its distribution to become the starkest expression of inequality.

A common resource?  How much of a communist is this man?  Its "distribution"?  Who "distributed" it?  If you buy land and build on it, who "distributed" it?  It is as if he thinks some holy economic father dishes out money and resources, and all that is needed is someone to reverse it.  He either doesn't know or willfully blinds himself to how the diffuse ownership of property is due to millions upon millions of decisions by billions of people who buy, sell, earn, consume, destroy and build, in spite of petty thugs like Monbiot who prefer the Khmer Rouge approach to government - do whatever it takes to reach a final solution.
He wants to tax empty rooms.  He is just a thieving little religious evangelist who deserves no more attention than the hate filled Westboro Baptist Church.
Monbiot has no respect for property rights or individual rights at all.  He is chief priest of the high church of environmental armageddonism.

Of course, the Green Party gleefully links to him approvingly on regular occasions.  Will it soon be promoting housing footprints?  Is not the Green belief in planning laws to promote high density housing based around railway stations a form of embracing this agenda?

Ed West in the Daily Telegraph calls him a fascist and carefully explains why.  It is about time that Monbiot was ignored for the raving lunatic crank he is.

Meanwhile, Tim Blair points out that Al Gore achieves five rooms per inhabitant in his home.

UPDATE:  Some have said Monbiot doesn't actually say force people to share their homes, but what does this tell you:

He says of housing footprints: " Like ecological footprints, it reminds us that the resource is finite, and that if some people take more than they need, others are left with less than they need".  Zero sum economics.  Sheer utter nonsense.  As if you cannot increase housing capacity without destroying something valuable.  Even ignoring land, he's forgotten airspace or is that precious too??

However, he carefully shrouds his iron fist in his glove by saying this:  "none of the major parties wants to pick a fight with wealthy householders. So it’s up to us to give them no choice, by turning under-occupation into an issue they can’t avoid. It cannot be left to the market, as the market works for the rich."  He doesn't intend to persuade anyone, he wants to give "no choice" he doesn't want the market, he wants to use force (the only alternative).   It is semantics to claim otherwise.

Monbiot's suggestions about council tax discounts are besides the point.  Council tax is a charge for individuals using council services with a relationship to property prices to have some reflection of income.  As a libertarian I'd scrap council tax altogether, because all council services can be funded by direct or indirect users.  The council tax discount is virtually irrelevant in any case, as it would be a small fraction of the annual cost of housing.

Monbiot does have a four bedroom house and this great hero lives in it with his daughter and two lodgers.  His own choice is a shining example to us all of course.

14 October 2008

Greens take from the wise to pay for the foolish

The Greens are all in a funk about the Nats proposing to drop Labour’s “subsidise the wasteful” policy of paying for homeowners to insulate their own property. Their approach to this issue speaks volumes about what it thinks about incentives, rewards and penalties. Stuff reports on Jeanette Fitzsimons moaning about how she thinks it is a huge return on investment - which of course makes you wonder why people wont do it themselves.

Now having said that I support insulating state houses, as it increases their value for a future sale, but that isn't going to happen soon.

If you own your home, you either bought one with insulation or had it installed yourself, in either case you paid for it – with your own money. It’s called private property, a concept the Green Party has remarkably little time for. Presumably you did it for all of the good reasons the Green Party outlines, it saves money on heating, reduces risks of dampness and the related health problems (and damage to other property). In short, it can make very good sense to have insulation. However this is where the Greens, freedom and responsibility separate.

Choosing not to have insulation is a valid choice. The Greens don’t think it is, so want to bribe those who choose not to install insulation. What they don’t get, because they believe the state is some sort of benevolent Santa, is that the money to pay for this bribe comes from those who did choose to install it (and those who didn’t).

It is NZ$1 billion, not a paltry sum, over NZ$650 per household (more when you strip out state and council housing), a fair contribution to paying for installing insulation. That money could be returned to those who have and have not got insulation, and they could choose if they prefer insulation or prefer new clothes, a holiday in Australia or to invest it. Choices the Greens would disapprove of, because nothing is as important as the religion of “reducing emissions”.

So the Greens want to penalise those who have made a “good” choice and reward those who made a “bad” choice. Why? Jeanette Fitzsimons gives this banal explanation “This will keep people in worthwhile work during the recession, reduce power bills, improve health, especially for children with asthma, and reduce our climate change emissions”

Worthwhile work!! Because the way YOU would have spent your money wouldn’t have been for worthwhile work, those shops, that business you own, the airline and hotel you may have bought a holiday from – that isn’t “worthwhile work”, no.

National has made the right move. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for those who don’t see value in insulating their properties anymore than they should be paying for new carpet, better heating, new hot water cylinders or curtains. The Greens should butt out of the decisions that property owners make about their own properties, and if they want to help people get insulation, give them their taxes back, instead of rewarding those who can’t be bothered paying for insulation themselves.

Their press release that the Nats plan to keep homes cold and damp speaks volumes of their statist centrally planned mindset. The message kiddies is simple, if you own a house YOU are responsible for whether it is cold and damp. If you depend on a politician to fix it then you are too stupid and irresponsible to own a home, and if your child's asthma is exacerbated by it, what kind of a parent are you? The sort who votes Green and Labour to get other people to tell you what to do and give you money to do it I suppose.

03 September 2008

The worst possible reaction to housing prices

Centre-left governments are funny with their contradictions. When property prices are rising beyond inflation, and people's family homes (and investment properties) are enjoying comfortable capital gains, governments are happy for people to enjoy the fruits of this. Indeed in New Zealand with property rates funding most local government activities, local government enjoys not only the fruits of property revaluations to increase rates, but they increase rates ANYWAY, so that local government revenues grow significantly faster than inflation.

Of course whilst property prices appreciate, there is concern about those unable to afford to buy a home. This is a public policy concern sufficiently that governments intervene in different ways including:
- Providing special schemes taking taxpayers' money to subsidise deposits for first home buyers;
- Using taxpayers' money to subsidise large scale new housing developments and new "eco towns";
- Using taxpayers' money to further inflate the cost of new housing, by building new subsidised rental housing (state/council housing).

Now there is an understandable concern about people being able to have housing, but by taking taxes off of everyone, subsidising people to enter the property market further inflates that market, producing a rather vicious cycle.

So what has the UK government done more recently. Property prices on average across the UK have fallen by around 10% in the last year. This creates problems for those who have 100% mortgages in areas of low forecast growth, so many thousands now have "negative equity" where their mortgages are worth more than their properties. These are part of the credit problem, whereby financial institutions lent money to those who were barely able to sustain buying property, and are now unable to shoulder the capital loss in the short to medium term.

This is painted as a disaster, which it is for those with negative equity, and isn't positive for those relying on property capital gains as an investment. However there is another side to this story.

Those not currently in the market can see an opportunity. With significant price drops, the catchment of people able to buy homes increases - though this is partly relative to the availability of mortgage finance. However, in effect the situation is self correcting. It SHOULD lead to less government involvement in the housing market as it has become affordable.

No. The UK Labour government couldn't let that one go, so what has it done? It is now letting local authorities buy up properties under mortgagee sales, it is also allowing councils to underwrite bad mortgages - in effect is propping up the market using taxpayers' money. The same taxpayers of whom some are suffering from decreasing property values and others who are seeking to buy - they are indirectly subsidising the market. A market where only part of the population benefits from this and many others lose.

It is a massive taxpayer subsidy to property owners, and it is vile and counterproductive for the UK as a whole.

Ross Clark in the Times damns the Brown government's moves saying "why should you want your taxes used to bail out feckless homeowners who borrowed too much during the boom and, worse still, the greedy banks that lent it to them?".

He points out that mortgage lending in the UK has dropped by two-thirds in one year, from £17.2 billion in July 2007 to £4.3 billion in July 2008. So while the market corrects itself, Gordon Brown wants to prop up those with an interest in part of the equation, because he figures the swing voters are in that category. The poor feckless lower income people vote Labour anyway, so screw them.

As Clark concludes:

"To force taxpayers to rebuild a stock of council homes now in a falling market is not just perverse; it would also rank alongside Gordon Brown's sale of gold reserves at the bottom of the gold market in 1999 as one of the most crass cases of public investment ever.

There are few problems so bad that a government cannot make them ten times worse by intervening. The housing market is no exception. Much as it will cause pain to those who bought too late into the dream of home ownership, the only sensible policy is to stand back and let the market find its own level."

The Times editorial today also sums it up:

the most fundamental objection to the housing package is that government has no legitimate function in targeting asset prices. The most direct way to assist first-time buyers is to allow an overvalued market to find its own equilibrium. There is no reason for the Government to seek political salvation by populist appeals to the economic interest of existing homeowners.

Indeed, and in the meantime some may be looking to snap up some good buys!