What might have happened if the NAR had not caused this economic downturn? We don’t know. What we know is that the National Association of Realtors was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This post is grown from a comment left by Brian Summerfield, editor of Realtor magazine. Before I begin, I want to commend Brian for daring to show up here to debate this topic. I think he’s wrong, but the man has more guts than the people who pay him.

Now then: I said:

Doesn’t mean that banksters would not have come up with other flavors of larceny.

To which Brian replied:

Greg, you toss this off as an afterthought, but I see it as a key point. You say the sine qua non of the Great Recession was NAR, but it was in fact systemic flaws in the global financial system. Without collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps, there would have been no Great Recession. And NAR had nothing, nothing, to do with the creation of those “innovations” of finance.

As you, the reader, may have noted, there are people writing and commenting here who are more than unusually interested in philosophy — as a map of the universe and as a discipline of the mind. Brian’s argument turns on what normal people call “hypotheticals.” Jim Klein calls them contra-factuals, where I am apt to rave on about subjunctivity. In all three cases, we are talking about the same thing: We are making what we hope are logical claims about imaginary worlds, worlds not in evidence.

The universe outside our minds has an independent and prior existence, and the objects and events that comprise that universe are real and factual existents. When I make a statement about the real world — the universe of real things — my statement is subject to independent verification. The object I claim to see is either present or it is absent. The event I claim is happening is either occurring or it is not. Disputes about statements like these are possible only to the insane or to philosophy professors — but I repeat myself.

So: These things really happened:

1. The National Association of Realtors either wrote or lobbied for a great host of Rotarian Socialist laws devised to churn the residential real estate market for the benefit of real estate brokers and their salespeople.

2. In consequence, lenders issued a blizzard of highly dubious home loans.

3. Those mortgages were bundled by Rotarian Socialists on Wall Street into CDOs — collateralized debt obligations.

4. The risks associated with the CDOs were putatively offset by a type of securitization known as a CDS — a Credit Default Swap.

Brian’s subjunctive, contra-factual, hypothetical argument, quoted above, comes down to this:

If the NAR had not used rent-seeking legislation to induce millions more residential real estate transactions than otherwise would have occurred, nevertheless, lenders still would have issued millions of bogus mortgages, bankers still would have bundled those mortgages, and clueless European central banks still would have purchased the resulting CDS securities.

This is obviously a false claim.

By taking account of the events that really did occur in the sequence that they really did occur, we can see that steps 2, 3, and 4 could not have happened in the way they did without the instigation of the NAR in step 1.

Might other bad things have happened? You bet. But the bad things that did happen were set in motion by the National Association of Realtors — and by no one else.

Sine qua non means “without which not,” and that criterion excludes other considerations. The crimes the National Association of Realtors has consistently committed against consumers since it was first organized have finally caught up to it. What we are living through now was set in motion by the NAR alone, and these undeniably real events would not have happened in this way were it not for the craven, grasping, Rotarian Socialist corporate welfare of the NAR.

Moreover, this is the subjunctive, contra-factual, hypothetical question that really matters: What if the National Association of Realtors were the friend, and not the persistent, recidivist enemy of homeowners? What would have happened in the American economy if the NAR had fought against Rotarian Socialism in the legislature, instead of leading all the other corporate hogs to the welfare trough? Would there have been any sort of recession now, if the NAR had been a champion of private property, instead of being yet another regiment of over-dressed Washington welfare slaves?

But that question doesn’t matter at all, does it? They’re thieves. They always have been, and they always will be. They themselves do not believe Realtors have any value to bring to the marketplace, so they will continue to promote legislation that despoils consumers to the benefit of real estate brokers and their salespeople. They think we can’t actually earn a living without legislatively-sanctified theft.

Do you think the damage they have done so far is devastating? Wait until they’re $80 million a year richer.

In any case, as always: The National Association of Realtors was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession. The more we talk about it, the more rigorous the case comes to be.