RE: E-commerce and the Broken American Dream

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RE: E-commerce and the Broken American Dream

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jacobtothe in Silver Bloggers • 7 days ago

Starter homes and retirement homes were largely pushed off the market by the real estate bubble of the early 2000s. People who bought land with a home cheaply made themselves rich knocking down a perfectly good small house and building a mansion on the lot instead.

Housing developments in suburbia with HOAs ballooned in that same timeframe, saturating the market.

Older neighborhoods in cities were often targeted by eminent domain law abuse as "blighted" so they could be bulldozed and sold to developers.

I remember elderly friends of my parents who had a post-WW2 neighborhood house with 2 bedrooms and a single bath, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen on a compact main floor. There was an attic for storage and a basement with laundry and a workshop or sewing space that could have been an extra bedroom. It wouldn't meet modern code for egress windows, but that kind of issue is relatively easy to remedy, especially compared to total demolition.

Greed is a constant in humanity. However, the political and legal incentives of the time incentivised especially short-sighted and destructive behavior. Zoning laws, artificially low interest rates with easy credit, and the assurance of federal bailouts if it all happened to go wrong rewarded greedy behavior at every level.

Sure enough, it all went wrong. Now we have consequences including high inflation rates raising prices, and a distorted market of durable goods failing more and more to meet consumer demand. But we can't have the illusion of prosperity torn away when the baby boomers rely on their real estate as a major part of their "investment portfolio," so that bubble and the stock market must be propped up with easy credit, and never allowed to correct. So we have the "K-shaped economy" distorted by politicians trying to support their corporate cronies and aging voters while everyone outside those groups suffers, and the popular "alternative solution" seems to be more of a command economy because "the free market failed."

7 days ago in Silver Bloggers by jacobtothe

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denmarkguy 5 days ago

I don't know if there was a specific point at which it happened but it seems like we somehow measure everything in terms of dollars, including our sense of self. We even measure happiness in terms of dollars. And it seems that we have created a system that if you somehow prefer less and a simpler life, you are regarded as some kind of social pariah. Like it is almost Un-American to not spend every cent you have on goods and services.

Zoning laws are crazy in most places. I was having a somewhat lengthy discussion with one of my cousins in Denmark — he actually lived in the US for 3 years — any pointed out that through his lens of perception as a foreigners, zoning in the US seemed exclusively designed to maximize profits rather than to optimize housing people. I can't say us how I disagree with that assessment.

We have since given up on finding a smaller place not for price reasons but for simple availability reasons. There's just nothing going, and on the rare occasions that there is it's usually snapped up by some Private Equity Firm as a knockdown to rebuilt as a luxury property.

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jacobtothe 5 days ago (edited)

A lot of zoning laws seem to be tied to gentrification, racial discrimination, and early 20th century progressive goals of eliminating "slums" and "blighted neighborhoods" without considering what it would cost to house the now-displaced minorities, or else no real concern for them. The left and right alike were often openly racist toward Jews, blacks, and poor European immigrants like the Irish. "Modernization" often meant destroying their growing communities.

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denmarkguy 5 days ago

Without looking at the political side of it, the *sociological" side seems to suggest that we have created a very "ME focused" society. Nobody considers the impact entirely ME actions has on others, on the community, or on the surrounding community/environment. "Rational self-interest" is fine, but obsessive self-involvement can be very destructive...

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jacobtothe 3 days ago

Rational self-interest requires recognizing the boundaries of others and respecting them in order to receive reciprocal respect. Reciprocal universal principles are the foundation for real morality, necessary, albeit insufficient on their own.

People who claim altruistic motives, especially in politics, usually trike me as hiding their greed and libido dominandi behind a veneer of "concern for the community." The proof is in their use of coercion. It is an asymmetric, non-reciprocal relationship of usurped authority.

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