“You will own nothing, you will have no privacy” whose idea is that?

General Discussion
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I’ve been thinking about what I assumed was a top-down assault on private property mounted by the Davoiserie. But a few developments lately have made me wonder whether this might be a grass-roots concept.
I just heard about an …idk, would you call this kinda thing an “organization”? Called,Touro, through which people rent out their own cars. They just make their cars available through this group, a visitor to the town can pick up the keys, drive it, return it to the designated lot in a few days or a week.

And I’m writing an article about short term rental of homes (STRs) which has recently been codified in our township—s usual, as a result of one Pa township’s struggle to make them illegal. Hamilton Township Pa won its case that STRs need not be allowed in single family residential districts, but that set off a spate of municipal ordinances in other townships codifying in what districts STRs WOULD be allowed—for a license and inspection fee, of course! I live in the Poconos and our entire township is now for rent! And the homeowners associations are frantically trying to amend their covenants (for which they need a 67% yes vote by members, mostly to clarify that anyone who wants to do it has to pay the HOA, too!, but sometimes to regulate STRs more strictly that the municipalities have done! Legislation so often has the effect of proliferating the very phenomenon it was meant to control. It’s a laffriot!

Two yers ago I wrote an article for “The Pennsylvania Lawyer” magazine: “ Deed Men Walkin’! Can HOAs save single family zoning?” (May 2021) Then, I thought they COULD, because homeowners in “planned communities” are a wealthy demographic and a geometrically expanding one. Homes in planned communities are about 4% more expensive than other single family dwellings; in my state and nationwide, it’s difficult to buy a new home that isn’t deed-restricted. So, I thought they COULD, but ended with a question s to whether they WOULD save single family neighborhoods . Now I answer my own authorial question: HOAs could save the system but they won’t. . Because the owners will be thinking, “Maybe I’D like to make some money, too…”

Doesn’t this attitude toward their homes and cars represent something of a sea-change in people’s attitudes to private property? And to privacy?

Homes used to be regarded as most people’s biggest investment, but it was a long-term investment, and part of the “ROI” was y’know, living there, in a private, quiet, and spacious home. For decades. Oh it would increase in value, it always did. But in the meantime you would do anything to preserve its exclusively residential character. And cars? I don’t think most gents woulda wanted a buncha random strangers in theirs. If a man’s home was his castle, a man’s car was his…his…well, let’s just say it was like an appendage (h/t @TrinityWaters !)

What I’m asking, dear polymaths, is was this switch from ownership to usership ENGINEERED by the scheming elites of the WEF? Or was it already taking root at the popular level?

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Perhaps it is an unintended (?) consequence of the Political Class offshoring so much wealth-creating, job-supporting productive industry.

People are getting stretched economically – especially the once-dominant “Middle Class”. Yes, who really wants to have strangers sleeping in their beds and driving their expensive imported automobiles? The answer may be people whose declining real incomes are increasingly falling short of their aspirations.

Cuban families used to do a thriving business renting out their wives & daughters to Canadian sex-tourists. When times are tough, people do what they need to do to survive – even if it really offends their basic principles.

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I think much of it is Grooming via the Government Schools . The schools are communist institutions .

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Yes. And since writing this I’ve had an epiphany:
what does this remind me of, this everything-is-for-sale ethos?
It reminds me of what we heard about Prague after the Soviets pulled out. A city of treasure in art, furniture, crafts, heirlooms…precious things a century or more old, in private hands…priceless, nobody would ever have thought of assigning them a monetary value—until the wheel turned, the world changed. The meaning of value itself changed. Suddenly these personal treasures were nothing except what they could fetch at market. Prague was for sale, and it cleared out fast.
And now a similar change is happening with OUR private property. The wheel has turned, the revolution has happened. Down is up, up is down.

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Y’know, I think the first salvo concerning subversion of the schools was Creationism vs. Evolution and the Big Bang. Does anybody else remember when THAT was the hot debate? (And no not the Scopes trial, I’m not THAT old !) So when would this’ve been? Early “80s,maybe?
I remember one teacher being quoted as saying “Basically, what’s left to teach?” if they werent allowed to…well, really, just to not teach the Bible—really to ridicule the Bible, since you could believe in divine creation, and in evolution, without rejecting Genesis. I believe most seminaries at the time taught that.

But public school teachers suddenly felt it was their sacred geas to disabuse children of the image of a pair of huge Hands modeling creatures outta clay, in one week! (Come to think of it, I don’t think even most Sunday School classes propounded that. As I recall, they had to do with children’s behavior in quotidian life.)

And my “science” class in grade school was devoted to facts about the existing natural world. For grades 1-3, that was challenging enough. No “indoctrination” was going on. Unless you count the morning Bible readings and the oxymoronically named “school prayer”, but those primarily served the same purpose as the teachers’ authoritative “No talking!” They meant: settle down, we are open for business.

In short ( I know,: too late!) there ws no religious anti-science indoctrination going on in public schools then, and there never was any jingoistic nationalist propaganda going on in public schools before “critical race theory”. It’s the same kinda ginned-up “crisis”.

Recently I saw some Leftist “educator” quoted as saying, with shocked incredulity, they it was actually possible for children to get to their teens without knowing George Washington was an “enslaver”.

Yeah well sadly it’s also possible for them to get to college without knowing he was our first president.

Now, THAT’s a “crisis in our schools”!

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It may represent a sea-change, but then one must ask whether the sea is changing from below, like a tsunami, or above, as driven by a hurricane. One of the most powerful top-down trends of the 20th century, which began to take off in the aftermath of World War II, went into high gear after World War II, then blasted off for deep space after the collapse of the global Bretton Woods financial system in 1971 and the advent of floating currency funny money around the globe, is the “financialisation” or, more recently, “securitisation” of everything: transforming the tangible into paper and now, electronic book entry “assets”, which are traded incessantly on a global market and serve as the foundation for a tower of financial derivatives (futures, options, swaps, etc.) that dwarfs the underlying assets by a huge factor.

As you noted, for a long period of time, housing and the land it stood on represented a large fraction of the wealth of most households, but while it was usually considered a relatively safe store of wealth and an asset that could be passed on to the next generation, it was not seen as get rich scheme except for those lucky enough to find themselves in the path of a real estate boom, such as farmers on the periphery of rapidly growing suburbs around cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

But when the funny money era dawned, all of this changed. People grasped for anything that would protect them from the depreciation of the currency they earned and held, and real estate was an obvious choice. First of all, many were already in the market, owning property, and seeing it appreciate faster than inflation, and second they could “invest” in it with high leverage afforded by a mortgage with only 15–20% down payment and a fixed rate of interest being paid in ever-shrinking currency. This is when the real estate bubbles started to take off in and around many big cities and grow to absurd levels.

Now the house was seen not as shelter and store of value, but a speculative investment, and more and more people were motivated to get into the game before they were priced out (“FOMO”—“Fear Of Missing Out”), and off to the races we went with balloon payment mortgages, floating rates, zero-down-payments, “liar loans”, sub-prime mortgage-backed securities in “tranches” rated AAA by august firms, etc. Then, in 2008, the music stopped and…and…and, a few years later the music started back up and here we go again. The music is already beginning to stop for commercial real estate this time.

In such an environment, is it irrational for many people to conclude it’s better to “own nothing” since a dispassionate analysis of the current landscape brings them to conclude they already “own nothing” now? Many “property owners” are leveraged to the hilt, living paycheck to paycheck to make payments, possibly looking at a “reset date” coming up when their interest rate may increase by a factor of 2 to 5, paying the state property tax which can be raised or reset at any time without any recourse and if, unpaid, will result in seizure, and subject to capricious, intrusive, and expensive regulation by “homeowners’ associations” and government pointy-heads who may decide the swamp in your backyard is a “navigable waterway”.

If this is ownership, does renting and paying a landlord to worry about all that crap sound like such a bad idea? Or a hobo’s bindle and a dry place under the bridge?

When the foundations upon which institutions are built are shattered, the institutions crumble. Destroy the money as a store of value and unit of account in which contracts can be written and enforced, erode property rights and the rule of law, and make every aspect of ownership contingent on the whims of politicians, judges, and their greedy tax collectors, and people will think that property ownership is a scam. And they’ll be right.

Tear it down, and they’ll leave.

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That’s all so right. I hafta laugh now when people talk about the “crisis” of rising interest rates. They musta been born yesterday, literally. “ Soaring”—at 6%?

Interest rates on mortgages used to be around 9%. Oh you might get a deal, a few %points under, but 9% was about what everybody could expect.
So what made people think they’d be better off with “adjustable rate mortgages” (ARMs), where the rate you paid would go up or down with prevailing rates?
WTF made them take out SECOND such mortgages on their already mortgaged homes?
Wellsir, they did. And interest rates went to 18%.
Doesn’t anybody else remember that?

I think you’re saying when the value of money itself isn’t stable, people will rush to cash in on any asset they have, in case things get worse? True. But, also they have to come to NOT regard the goods, the benisons, which they do own, perhaps inherited or were gifted, as value-LESS, like the Czechs’ family samovar or lacquer boxes.

It’s my impression that your answer to my question is that the phenom I’m writing about IS top-down. I hope so; maybe that means it can be reversed at some point.

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I paid 10.5% on the mortgage I got on my first house in California in 1973, and I considered it a good deal, regardless of it being an all-time high at the time, because I expected things to get a lot worse, which they quickly did. This was a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage, which had essentially disappeared from the market by about one year later. I paid that mortgage off in 1985, at which time the valuation of the house had increased by around a factor of five from my original purchase price but, thanks to California’s Proposition 13, my property taxes had not.

When the inflationary mindset takes hold, people will rush to get rid of depreciating cash as quickly as they can in exchange either for goods for immediate consumption (in countries with hyper-inflation, grocery prices would go up several times a day, as quickly as they could be posted), or as a store of value for the future which is safe from depreciation of the currency. On the large scale, this results in bidding up the price of real estate, farm land, natural resources, and stocks in companies with assets in these areas or income streams considered safe because they are essential. The risk, of course, is people taking that course in a “modern, developed” society are pinning targets on their back for confiscation by predatory governments who may tax their “illusory” “gains” due entirely to currency depreciation and even, as some of the more edgy slavers in the U.S. have floated, taxing “appreciation” of assets even before they are sold or generate any income to pay the tax.

The classic book about inflation and the inflationary mindset is Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies, which recounts the great inflation in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. What is particularly enlightening is how the psychology of actors in the market changes as the curve rises toward the sky and how politicians, financiers, industrialists, labour leaders, farmers, and the general public can mis-disgnose what is going on and act in ways that seem irrational from the outside but make perfect sense to those gripped by the frenzy.

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