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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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Trump highlights the core of the problem.

I do not see the problem, literally. Housing as an investment is merely a curiosity, if the prices of houses crash, that will not affect the people living in their houses (unless they got terrible mortgage terms, in which case you can legislate to make them unenforceable).

I might as well argue that a breathable atmosphere will permanently ruin the market for bottled air, or that eradicating smallpox permanently reduced the demand for medical treatments.

Good things are good. Anyone arguing that actually fifth order effects actually dominate and make things net negative is, on priors, very likely full of shit.

Of course, a well-meant intervention like a rent cap will unleash the terrifying and incomprehensible alien deity that is kept barely contained by a complicated and humanly meaningless ritual, which only cares about prices being the supply-demand equilibrator. But this does not mean that high housing prices are moral, just that we must pay respect to the alien god and not mess with housing prices directly.

Establishing a land value tax is a good way to fix housing costs. Land has a supply elasticity of just about zero, high land prices serve no practical benefits. Tax it so much that owners will become indifferent towards owning land.

Of course, this will fuck over people who invested their pension fund in real estate. Great, I don't care. Investing in a supply-limited good of which people need a certain amount to survive is not an ethical activity. I am sure that when the French revolution came around, quite a lot of people went bankrupt from deals and marriages which they had been sure would be highly profitable. And when methamphetamine became prohibited, that likely also destroyed some people's life savings. Just be glad if there will not be beheadings, this time. (If you want to ethically invest in a product with a limited supply, buy bitcoin instead. People can live while using zero BTC. They can not live while using zero square meters.)