I was listening to an interesting video of the rather flamboyant Jimmy McMillan of the rent is too damn high party campaigning for the New York Governor’s office and he brought to mind the recent insistent views of Katie Hopkins on last week’s Young Voter’s Question Time on BBC Three. I should say that I don’t agree with either person as the first seems to lack rationality and the second both compassion and ironically economic understanding.
These two are rather far a part I admit, but something in their radical and disagreeable views created a new idea for me. That perhaps “rent is too high” because “the market will bear” much more when the goods are a requirement to productive living and increase with the degree to which people are able to not buy and even exit out of agreements easily.
So the main economic factor needed to reduce the amount of rent (because it is too damn high) being paid on average is to provide sensible, comfortable and easily accessible alternative housing to as many people as possible from either the government directly or non-profit chartered organisations at a stretch.
My conjecture is that lowering the tolerance of customers (that’s renters) by providing alternatives to private rented accommodation will reduce the rent burden by reducing the amount the market will bear. After all the amount the market will bear is only the amount to which people will/need to pay in order to get the services.
Ironically it means the people who are right wing poor and middle class are inadvertently increasing their own rent by virtue of being indignant about government provided housing. I know plenty of normally sensible people who would like government housing to be as horrid and uncomfortable as possible in order to encourage people’s independence form the state. Of course economics bites them in the arse on that one.
Never let it be said that doing the right wing doesn’t move you left and doing the left wing doesn’t make you right. This is complex man.