I lived in Phoenix when the Arizona Republic was still a great American newspaper, a daily example of how good a mainstream media outlet could be if it worked from fact, not bias. The Copy Desk — the folks who write headlines and captions — was rich with poets and punsters in those days, which meant a lot to me, too.
Long gone. The paper was bought by Gannett and over the last decade has been infested if not infiltrated with ideologues. Even the smallest item is suspect, but major issues are always reported from the slant of one long-range agenda or another. For example, the repeated mentions of allegedly homeless schoolteachers and firefighters is part of a propaganda campaign to pass ‘affordable housing’ legislation. Soviet-style, the paper will run half-a-dozen glowing puff-pieces on a pet topic on one day.
That’s the bad news. The good news is, they’re really bad at it. Anyone schooled in rhetoric can see right through it. Here’s an example from today’s Editorial page:
News flash: The law of gravity wasn’t suspended in the Valley. In last year’s sizzling real estate market, home prices and sales kept going up.
And up. And up.
At least one of four sales was to a speculator. Prices skyrocketed 55 percent in 2005. Sellers raked in profits as bidding wars drove up prices.
And now, an astonishing number of people are startled to find that the law of gravity still applies to the Phoenix area.
Ignore the real estate argument, which is really no more or less stupid than the ones that erupt, Tourettes-like, from those afflicted with enbubbulation. What matters is that finance is not physics. Equating the two is specious. So much the better, the idiot editorialist doesn’t even understand the law of gravity.
So what’s the purpose? To gull the gullible — among whom the author might nevertheless be numbered — into believing that economics describes unavoidable events and relationships in the same way that physics does. Proximate masses must accelerate toward each other, the lesser toward the greater? Yup, and if a market booms it must bust, if Moneybags got richer then Penniless must have gotten poorer and the inexorable course of history in inevitable — even if we have to whore the whole damn newspaper to make it inevitable.
It’s an historic preservationist kind of Marxism, the Marxism of the Gilded Age. The Republic seems determined to transport itself back to the politics of Arizona’s pioneer days so it can get it right this time. In tribute to that Progressive spirit, the paper’s persistent propaganda won it the ultimate prize: A brand new streetcar system.
The best news is, nobody cares. The editorial is vastly stupid, and I can’t be the only person in town who will see this. But the Republic, like all newspapers, like all mainstream media outlets, becomes more irrelevant with every passing day. This is not inevitable. Nothing subject to human moral agency — free will — is inevitable. But the Republic, by remaking itself as a propaganda organ of a desiccated nineteenth century frontier socialism, accelerates its own decline.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
The Editorial Was Brave says:
There are economic rules and laws that operate with a degree of certainty sufficient to allow businesses, governments and individuals to use them to plan and create policy.
Of course, the X factor in economics is psychology. As long as people can be convinced to pour ever-increasing amounts of money into residential real estate and devote ever-larger resources into residential real estate as an asset class, prices will rise and people will buy far more real estate than they need for their own use. For a long time, the local media encouraged this and reported on the riches being made with speculative, highly leveraged real estate investments. But when keeping the party going relies on dipping into an ever-expanding pool of “greater fools” willing to pay more than the person before for the identical asset, eventually the pyramid scheme runs out of fools and prices begin to drop. At some point, a psychological corner is turned and people begin to shun the asset class everyone once loved. It’s not a matter of if, but when. It’s an economic certainty — and like all economic certainties it’s expressed as a probability — but it’s not something you’d want to bet your family finances against.
August 3, 2006 — 5:06 am
foobeca says:
“yup, and if a market booms it must bust, if Moneybags got richer then Penniless must have gotten poorer”
Name a single market that boomed that didn’t later bust.
The stock market and housing booms are essentially ponzi schemes where early investors profit at the expense of later investors (suckers) and nothing of value is actually produced.
If rents and incomes were going up, then rising prices would be justified. But rents and incomes haven’t been rising so why should house prices go up? This would be like yahoo stock suddenly going from $27 to $270 without revenues or profits increasing or the prospects thereof.
The housing and stock markets are not ponzi schemes when stocks produce real revenues and profits and when houses produce real revenue and profits in the form of rent or owner’s equivalent rent.
Houses don’t produce wealth. If they did, then we could all simply build houses and then sit back and let the house pay for our all our expenses. No need to work. The house will have an atm machine.
August 3, 2006 — 1:05 pm