From: charless@sco.COM (charles stross)
Subject: Re: hypocritical Guvmints
Organization: The Somewhat Contagious Operation, Inc.
Distribution: alt
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 10:07:59 GMT


In article <24049@castle.ed.ac.uk> fofp@castle.ed.ac.uk (M Holmes) writes:
>egpv29@castle.ed.ac.uk (JHenderson) writes:
>
>
>>Extra peeve: Home owners expecting to be bailed out of the mortgages
>>which they can no longer afford. Owning a house is an investment -
>>sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down. If these same
>>homeowners had sold their houses for a massive profit I don't suppose 
>>they'd be falling over themselves to put some extra money back into
>>the kitty, would they? Fuck 'em, I say.a
>
>I think I can help you here Dr. Jeremy. You see  it's essential to the
>Economic Recovery which is in sight just around the corner where
>conditions are right and confidence has been rightly restored by the
>re-election of the Tory Guvmint, that house prices are once more set on
>their rising path.

[ entertaining rant deleted to save bandwidth ]

Been there, done that. I had a mortgage once, while the bubble was 
rising; when Nigel Lawson had his famous `blip' I got clobbered -- 
my repayments doubled in three months. On the other hand, I got
wise, sold up (ahead of the bust :) and used the profits (which
weren't as big as you might imagine) to do something useful (i.e.
to go get a degree in something that interested me enough that I 
could enjoy doing it for a living).

In this day and age I am somewhat weirded out by the attitude
home-owners seem to have about you if you aren't voluntarily
up to your neck in debt for a heap of concrete and rubble. When
I carried out my one and only experiment in buying instead of
renting (for all of 18 months) it was for the simple reason
that rents were high compared to the cost of buying, and as
prices were going up at 30% per annum it looked like a self-
financing venture. _Then_ I got round to working out how much
money I owed the Building Society. Taking into account the
interest payments, I was down to repay two and a half times the
purchase price of my flat. Yet if I tell someone today -- even
in view of what's happened to the market -- that I am renting
through _preference_ they look at me as if they've just noticed
that I've got two heads. I've noticed that people seem to define
themselves in three ways -- by their costume, by what they do
for a living, and by their house-buying status. Well that's fine,
but I wish they wouldn't try and define _me_ in those terms!
They're way too cramped!

Here's another idea about why the gummint is so keen to get
people buying their homes; it's a bloody good way of making 
them keep their heads down and work, work, work without the
opportunity to sit still for a moment and ask themselves
what they're doing it _for_. People who ask questions
sooner or later start to make trouble by asking politically
inconvenient things like, ``what's so important about owning
a lump of stone, anyway?'' and ``why can't I spend all that
money on having a good time instead, or better still just
work a bit less and have more time to myself?'' If you can
keep them chasing the mirage of home ownership for the
most productive decades of their working lives, so much the
better. Oh, and it pumps loan-money into the economy via
the building trade; I've heard estimates that the total amount
of credit available as a result of the UK housing market
is something staggering, like #300,000,000,000.

And now the gummint is trying to shut down the local council 
housing services -- sources of the cheapest accomodation
in the country -- by making them sell off their properties
to people who can't afford them anyway. Makes you wonder
what's going on, doesn't it? 
-- 
Charlie Stross aka charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals.