I am surprised that my piece last week about the Housing Crisis in Canada is drawing so many reads. It started slow and then took off. The cause is clearly someone on Reddit picking up on it.
I have tried Reddit a couple of times. I found it not useful, as well as a bit confusing. Given the response to my piece, and the inadequacy of Twitter, oops X, these days, I decided to start a Reddit account again. I will see how it goes.
The comments on the article indicate to me a few aspects which could be expanded or clarified. I might even rethink a couple of my points. It is a big and complex subject.
The greatest discussion generated by the article was about the comparative situations in Canada and the USA. Much of the response was from south of the border. The word is, from a few people who seem to have direct experience of what they are talking about, that the housing situation is worse in Canada than in The States.
The housing situation is getting bad all over the world now. The cause is very well known; the financialization of housing. Since the global financialists are rampant now, this is why I say there will be no short for medium term answer.
I will elaborate.
The human race is up against the Klaus Shwabb, Davos, World Economic Forum crowd. We are going to live in neofeudalism, where we will own nothing and like it. This situation is to be achieved by bankrupting everyone, and buying up everything.
All this needs to be taken very seriously. This is the extreme, end stage of financial capitalism. The fincaps are the faction in capitalism which makes its money by owning all key resources. Contrarily, the industrial capitalists are the ones who extract surplus value from the labor of workers.
The financialists see increased productivity as a threat to their dominance. They see most of the human race as surplus to their needs. So they would like to get rid of most of us and partly deindustrialize the planet.
This is why they are behind the engineered covid virus and the obstruction of all efforts to curb it. They drive the ‘climate’ panic so as to cause destruction of food and energy production. That is what these things are about.
Of course they would like to eliminate most home ownership and all affordable public housing. Their chosen servants will have good housing. Everyone will pay whatever rent they set or the streets await them.
Of course, this is all conspiracy theory. Of course, they are behind the world communist conspiracy. Of course, this is all being organized by the Chinese Communist Party to defeat capitalism. And so on and so on.
Within western nations, there is not much effective opposition to these people. What there is mostly comes from the industrial capitalists, who are about as bad.
A core fact of how the world works, which few people get, is that industrial capitalists are usually in intense conflict with the financial capitalists. They are usually connected with nationalism in whatever countries they are in. They are less unified than the financialists, and usually more stupid, and so usually lose.
They usually view the human race not as a waste of resources, but as a resource. We are a big herd which they want to expand. But they also see us as a dime a dozen, our lives cheap.
If these people had it fully their way, the world would be one big company town. We would be living in barrack like housing schemes close to our employment. We would get minimal health care and would be expected to just die when we get too sick to work.
These kinds of people are more locally and national oriented, but they do have an international organization. It is called International Democratic Union (IDU). It is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its world chair is Stephen Harper, Canada’s own beloved ex prime minister.
Now, how do I use this information to explain three big topics which came out of Reddit discussions of my housing piece?
The topics are; why housing is so much worse in Canada than the USA, why Canadian health care is better, and why things seem more calm, sensible, and democratic in Canada.
As for housing; the basic fact is that banking is much more centralized in Canada. There are only seven banks, which tightly control the economy. They are pleased with themselves that they also ‘discipline’ the real estate market and do not allow the “mortgage backed securities” which caused the American housing crisis of 2008.
Thus there will be no sudden collapse of real estate values. People will be driven under, investors will buy up their properties, and the prices will be kept up. Because the banks are using their mortgage holdings to back up all their other loans, including internationally, if real estate values collapse then the Canadian economy will go through a collapse far worse than did the Americans in 2008.
Some astute commentators on my original post pointed out that the USA is a bigger country with more places for people to move to. In Canada, there are four big urban centres and you are stuck with these markets unless you want to go live in ‘fly in’ country.
As well, there is more opposition to financial capitalism in the USA than in Canada. There also seems to be more democracy at the local level. Thus there are more ways to find land and money for building things.
This leads me to why we have public health care in Canada. For historic reasons, Canadian culture really is more socially oriented than in the USA. But there is still a lot of American style industrial capitalism, with its ‘individualism’, which really means hostility to anything which gives ordinary people some power over their own lives.
We got public health care in the 1960s in Canada, but it was a big fight. It is also a more limited system than was established earlier in such places as the UK or Australia. The screwheads have never stopped trying to hinder it, discredit it, and reverse it.
The real left is kept pretty beaten down in Canada, but it is almost non existent in the USA. The only opposition to financial capitalism is Industrial capitalism, stronger in the USA than most western countries. Their biggest manufacture is the libertarian movement and intolerance for anything public, including health care.
As for the supposed leftish tilt of Canadians, and this apparent calm reasonableness, I have long supported a particular theory about that. It comes mostly from the early influence of the Quakers and similar religious sects.
English Canada was founded when the Americans booted the loyalists out of their country after the revolution. Most of them resettled in Canada. Many of them had not fought against the revolution, they were simply pacifists who refused to fight or declare loyalty to anyone.
Thus the term ‘loyalist’ was always a misnomer. And thus the loyalists were not trusted by the British colonial administrators of Canada. However, the ‘Quaker loyalists’ set a particular style of ‘progressive’ politics in the country which has continued.
They have tended to be focussed on their own communities and disdainful of partisan politics. They ‘spoke truth to power’ and insisted it do something for the country’s people. They were thus very ‘reasonable’.
This worked somewhat up until the present era. Canada got social programs, but usually cheap imitations of what other British commonwealth countries had achieved. Nonetheless, Canadian working people gained a higher living standard than in the USA.
Reasonableness does not work so well in the age of neoliberalism. Canadian left progressive people cannot get over the fact that, if they are not willing to cause serious trouble, power simply does not have to listen to them. Thus quality of social services in Canada are starting to fall behind those in the States, which is pretty sad.
The structures of Canadian government are very undemocratic. They were set up by British colonial administrators and never modernized. Local government is very restricted in Canada.
That is what I can say about the cause of the differences between Canada and the USA, which were concerning reddit readers of my earlier blog post.
To reiterate, there will be no ‘market’ solution for the housing crisis in Canada, meaning a crash. Things will keep getting worse. There is one thing which will finally end it.
The global, Schwabian, financial capitalists are serious about their neofeudal project. They want most of the population handing over everything they make as rent, or else living in the streets and hostels.
They are cunning enough and ruthless enough to make this work for awhile. They are stupid enough and fanatical enough to think this will work in the long term.
This will all end with the R word. This gets me to the part of the Reddit discussion about why I call my site “Adults in Charge”. The title has nothing to do with any political groups ideas about themselves.
There are plenty of dorks who style themselves the Adults, the grownups, in the discussion. Any term which would accurately describe them, they appropriate and use to describe their opposite. This is called ‘projection’.
Also the R word, in its abstract and collective forms, will be flagged by the “algorthms’. If I named the blog what I would really like to call it, I think it would get blocked immediately. So it is hard to think of a title, but I have to call the blog something.
Thus, I mean the title in a very sardonic sense. I mean that the small proportion of the population with a fully developed intellect, who always run everything anyway, have to finally mobilize to take power. This is definitely a topic for another blog post.
So, a few years on and the big R has happened. The Rs have begun the post capitalist era in Canada. I have already written enough in the previous post about what must then be done about housing, but here are some points which should be made clearer and stronger.
We do not want any kind of ‘crash’ of housing prices. What is needed is a write down. This means once the banks have been nationalized, mortgages are written down to what people can afford to pay off.
Property taxes are replaced with a land value tax, which taxes the market values, or in Marxonomic terms, ‘exchange value’. The tax level is set high enough that holding the land is impossible. The state buys the land for its ‘use value’ meaning what it is actually worth as a piece of ground to do things on.
It then leases the land back to the original owners, who had been living on it or running businesses on it. Investors get compensated if it can be shown who really owns the property and how they got the money to buy it. This will give us a sensible system of land tenure going forward.
Until all this happens people have to survive somehow. Increasing numbers of people will be in the streets, hostels, or nasty housing. Any effort to create enough good affordable housing will be obstructed.
The people who want to maintain this situation have a pretty good system of keeping this ‘dangerous population’ under control. They create a class of people with no attachment to society at all and use them as a weapon against other impoverished people.
Marx called these people the ‘lumpenproletariat. The political philosopher Foucault called them the underclass and described how they were created as a way to ‘discipline and punish’ the poor who are basically honest and decent. The Toronto city housing department calls them the ‘hard to house’, as though there are no very good reasons why they are that.
This class was created back in the 1990s by scrapping the systems of special housing and institutions which managed the destructive impulses of these kinds of people. Thus, any good leaders in a social housing complex, a poor neighbourhood, or a homeless encampment will be a threat to every drug dealer, petty criminal, or aggressive mental patient around. This, of course, makes it very difficult for these suppressed communities to organize effectively.
So we have a very effective means of social control and policing. An increasing part of the population will become subject to it over the next years.
I think I have finally exhausted the topic of housing in Canada during the era of terminal capitalism. I hope I have made clear enough that there is no solution for the problem within the present system.
As well, I have outlined what post capitalist housing policies would be like, which is a very important topic. If we do not know what we will replace capitalism with, we will likely end up with something almost as bad.
Now I want to write about something else, though I hope these posts keep getting good reads.