Tired of that rundown shack you live in — for which each month you must cough up the rent money or a mortgage payment? No doubt, you’re chomping at the bit for the chance to move into clean, spectacular, state-of-the-art government housing.
Well, you’re in luck! That is, if you live in New York City.
You see, on Tuesday evening, Sean Hannity informed his Fox News audience that Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ mayoral nominee, has a “plan to slowly eliminate home ownership in New York City.”
“If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full decommodification of housing,” Mamdani declares in a 2021 video for the Gravel Institute. “In other words, moving away from the status quo, in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market.”
He says, “We’ll have to go beyond the market.”
That “has to be” the solution? Why? Because Mamdani’s socialist/communist dogma dictates that government should be the provider of all shelter? The “decommodification” must be “full” and complete. No private home can be permitted to be bought or sold . . . or lived in anymore.
Surely that would solve our problems.
The democratic socialist suggests that the government “gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership,” urging the city to “fully commit to a new era of social housing . . . using our wealth to build beautiful, high-quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone.”
Yes, taxpayers, get ready to invest in the sparkling future of public housing. Cabrini-Green here we all come!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “The Big Decommodification”
Socialists do not understand the Problem of Economic Calculation, and ascribe any failure of socialism either to exogenous forces or to a failure of some participants to be sufficiently virtuous. In case of the former ascription, obviously they argue for resistance against those external forces. In the case of the latter ascription, they argue that participants simply must become more virtuous.
But the point made by Gossen, v. Mises, Weber, Brutzkus, v. Hayek, &c is that some of the information essential to economic coördination is intrinsically decentralized, and more still is nearly impossible to centralize, so that — even if all people were brilliant and of saintly nature — only a system of decision-making that put choices into the hands of those in possession that information can in fact work. The only functioning system of which we know is a genuine market — not a pantomime of a market, but a real market with clear rights of control including rights to exchange, so that resources naturally move to where their value is greatest.
Centralized decision making sans consequences, aka centralized power, has only always been corrupting because it has only always been run by humans.
Can we make Gracie Mansion public housing?