Capitalism is a wishy washy term here. Making bank is possible under a variety of systems more or less as evil as ours. It just depends on how gamified and legally privileged you are relative to others. Since the "others" here are not my peers or yours I find it necessary to make some distinctions. We were a country of laws that once applied to only people. But corporations are not people and you don't send whole corporations to jail when they kill people on purpose or accidentally. Or defraud the public for billions of dollars. You can't outbid a corporation jacking up 3 bed room houses to multimillion dollar levels for a lot of reasons. At zero percent interest rates they can do anything they want. You? You get to be homeless in a state that will eventually have no water to drink.

The American dream has changed from freedom to have your own religion, free speech, democracy, opportunity, to home ownership. One by one these have been stomped into the ground. The rate of stomping has increased 7 percent every year since 1987 to 2014 since the deregulation push, where after that, the rate has increased 21% per year. Freedom of religion is probably the last to go. The all powerful church burning people at the stake for conflicting views will eventually simply replaced by a jack boot taking undesirables away in the middle of the night like it did in places where corporations achieved total unified power. Give anyone enough power and this is always what happens.

The solution was always regulation. Since that is a dirty word for some reason we have to pay huge amounts of money for mortgages and rents with our land lords who are not people, but algorithms design to game the market millions of times more efficiently than you or I ever could. Perhaps you are a billionaire and don't care. If so I apologize.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Its about power creep in institutions that were a very long time ago limited to performing a known public good for a limited time (see canal projects), and then being disbanded according to a charter set before it was established. It did not matter if they were successful or not.

Where is the public good in ensuring we can't afford shelter? The American revolutionaries (I realize we tend to demonize these people for some reason now, hmmm) saw what the east India trading company did and were dead against that happening to them. What is going on is not some kind of invisible hand. The hand is quite visible and it is not afraid to throw you out of work, on to the street with no job, an expectation to compete against machines and no way to ever be able to afford sky high rent if we let it get that powerful.

I don't personally like the thought of living in a world like that envisioned by the movie RoboCop and the all powerful OCP. But we're pretty close already.

Thanks for allowing me to vent. I am doing this now while I can because I'm certain in the future I will not be able to.

My prescription to this problem is to bring back regulations rolled back rapidly since Ronald Reagan. I'm not suggesting that corporations be dealt with colonialist style. But allowing them unlimited power at the expense of pretty much anyone poorer than a billionaire will eventually destroy any economic, political, or even religious liberty people fought and died to protect.

Every generation has to decide: Do we like liberty or do we not care? Economic liberty, being able to afford a simple dwelling, is something that a lot of people struggle with. It isn't fair to give preference to companies that want to shake the rest of us down for in the name of stock holders. Besides the vast majority of them are also getting shafted also in ways that are not even easily identified. Only board members and majority holders have power. It isn't rare to find board members sitting on multiple boards. So there is way too much power concentrated in hands that work against the needs of the public.

I guess now that the switch in blackrock has been flipped from suck to blow we could complain about home prices crashing and destroying the majority savings of the entire public. It is hard to keep up I think..

So forget everything I just wrote. Home prices are falling and it is good for some but not for all (just like any other time). The rate of the fall and the rate of the rise is just not easy to survive if you are not backstopped by the Federal Reserve private bank.