| I came across Henry Fudge recently, who is a former wealth manager, economist and I think startup investor. He did a video on the cost blowouts of the UK's HS2 [1] where, apparently, £5.3B was spent on a tunnel to take the train underground through a wealthy commuter town north of London called Amersham. It's not quite as wealthy as Atherton but still. There was no engineering reason for the tunnel. The money was spent by British taxpayers to protect the views of some of the wealthiest people in the UK. What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites. Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI). I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4]. So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5]. CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810... [2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory... [3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy... [4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... [5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca... |