Friday, July 22, 2011

Data stories: How more Americans are becoming renters

Data stories: How more Americans are becoming renters
And maybe we would be better off as renters...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The truth of renting is better than the lie of "owning" HOA-burdened property.

Anonymous said...

There is a libertarian mantra that "All Rights Are Property Rights".

In Libertarian Utopia, where fewer of us will own property, fewer of us will have rights.

It will be, as the Professor has described,

"repressive libertarianism," where certain people who call themselves libertarians invariably side with property owners who want to limit other people's liberties through the use of contract law. Property rights (usually held by somebody with a whole lot of economic clout) trump every other liberty.

Or, as The Onion predicted back in the year 2000, "The Future Will Be A Privatized Corporate Dystopia" (scroll down):

When every inch of space is privatized, it will cost money to walk from your living room to the kitchen...When we do log off the CyberNet, the very walls of our apartments will teem with droning media messages. Tolerating such in-home advertising will be the only way the average citizen will be able to afford an apartment at all. Only the wealthiest will be able to afford a quiet, dark room in which to sleep...To the powers that be, a citizen will be no more than a potential receptacle of consumption, only as valuable as his or her electronically catalogued personal wealth.

And then there's always George Carlin's monologue about The American Dream (video, obviously not safe for work or kids).