Fiction, Of Course

A family member went to a neighborhood party, and at around fifty, found he was the youngest person there. The neighbors pointed to a wooded area across the street and held forth that the owner of that property should not be allowed to develop it. Toby took the other view: that it was the property of the owner, and he should have be allowed to develop it. "If you offer him money that he wants for the property and you all want to go in on buying the property to leave it wooded, that's different." But these people weren't buying. It made no sense to them. Toby even said, "You wouldn't have your property now if some landowner didn't sell it to you." Still, they saw no moral problem in going to the Board of County Commissioners and having it passed by law that the landowner could'nt develop his land and forget about compensating him for his loss of control of his land. Does Toby live in community of psychopaths? It seems that way. For sure, they have no conscience when it comes to that landowner.
The present economic crisis was directly caused by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1976 which allowed the government to force banks to make mortgages to people who could not make the monthly payments. In addition, mortgages in some parts of the country such as New York and California were phenomenally high because of people like those at Toby's cocktail party. They were people who liked the woods and fields around them - who doesn't?- and went like spoiled brats to their county boards and got laws passed so these lands couldn't be developed. This caused land to become much more expensive as there was much less land available for development. It also essentially stole land from property owners as they lost control of their land. This was not only depriving property owners of their civil rights, but it was a process that cheapened the value of human life. At the same time, it increased the values of the homes already built, and it increased the narcissism of the spoiled brats who used the government to walk all over the rights of other property owners. The brats also got onto county boards so they could directly rule over other people's property and use it to their advantages as if it were their fiefdom.If this hadn't happened, there would have been more land available for development. That means land would have been cheaper since more would be available. Conservative economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that in such areas the cost of the land was much more than the cost of the houses. To buy a detached house, which is what most people want, it is necessary to buy land to build it on. House including the land it was built on would not have been so expensive, even prohibitively expensive as many mortgage holders found out. Thus, the 2008 and continuing economic crisis was caused by government forcing the banks to make mortgages that couldn't be paid. Many of those morgages were so large because government, again, had taken land out of circulation thus driving land prices up artificially high which raised house prices artificially high which many, many Americans weren't able to afford - look at the foreclosures!- and the economy is still in a crisis. It is still in a crisis because the government refuses to get out of the economy. It will continue to do so until you and many others realize what a poison government is and vote it out of our lives.
But of course this is just fiction.