There’s always something to howl about.

Blogoff Post #66: Ask the Broker: Homeownership and the poor . . . ?

From my sister-in-law:

Why isn’t there more opportunity for poor people to own their homes?

If you were to substitute the word “horses” for “homes”, the question would answer itself, wouldn’t it? Poor people rent rather than own because their income is too low, their credit scores are too low, or their debt-to-income ratios are too high. That much is not rocket science, and it would apply to any other expensive financed possession we might name.

People very enamored of coercive charity can imagine circumstances in which financially unqualified people are given homes — or are given heavy subsidies toward buying homes. But this can only happen by taking wealth away from other people — people who have earned that wealth and deserve every penny of it. Poor people might get more home than they have earned, but only because other people are getting less home than they deserve. This kind of redistribution of purported injustice is made possible only by force — and, by my reckoning, that force is the most vicious injustice of all.

But, even so, there are two persistent problems. First, people tend not to respect what they did not have to earn and deserve. This is nicely illustrated by the awful condition of free or subsidized housing all over the Earth.

Moreover, unless the problem is to repeat itself, the poor recipients of subsidized housing would have to be forbidden from selling it at its true appreciated value — lest it become unobtainable by other poor people in the future.

The poor do not buy homes because for whatever reason they don’t develop the attributes of mind, character and behavior that lead to homeownership. And, even if they were to be given free or heavily-subsidized homes, the restrictions that would have to be placed on the sale of those homes would prevent those poor people from profitably developing those same attributes of mind, character and behavior even after they have become homeowners — in name only…

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