“The simple fact is that you eat better if you work better, even if you are all alone.”
So says the preamble to the NAR Code of Ethics, and I love those five words of it, at an absolute minimum.
It’s existentially true, obviously. I love the term for real estate in español for that reason – bienes raices, rooted things. So many contract disputes resolved with better word choices!
But the real truth of that observation is economic: Underneath all of the fake wealth of Wall Street securities is the real wealth of real estate.
Silicon Valley billionaires may not own a lot of dirt, but their investors do. Undergirding most mere millionaires, other than their own businesses, is a portfolio of commercial and residential real estate – three or four suburban tract homes, a triple-net drug store or two, strip malls, office parks, apartment communities, skyscrapers. If they don’t own the dirt themselves, their own investors or their REITs do.
The literal foundation all wealth is the land.
Hence: Husbandry of all wealth begins with husbandry of the land we are destined to live on.
This is the idea of stewardship, and it is the essence of the profit-seeking ideal: Better profits come from better stewardship. That much is an economics of isolation: No need for buyers, sellers, trade, currencies or even the idea of profit itself. The simple fact is that you eat better if you work better, even if you are all alone.
So I have some questions for the putative, would-be, wannabe stewards of the American economy. You can pick your own favorite corporate gnomes, but I am specifically highlighting Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Rich Barton of Zillow and Glenn Kelman of Redfin – them because they seem to me to be the worst possible stewards for Seattle, the city they have inflicted themselves on.
So first we note that corporate weenies of every pinstripe have denounced the “systemic racism” committed by everyone around them but themselves.
And we take account that many of them have promised flagrant violations of fair-employment laws to undo all the “systemic racism” they cannot document and have paid no fines for.
And we give a hearty salute to their bold promises to recruit new board members who are identical to them in every respect except epidermal hue. Hurray Team Poindexter!
But: As I have asked before: Have any of them publicly shed a tear for the exsanguination of the black middle-class resulting from this Summer’s riots?
But wait: Have any of them even acknowledged this Summer’s riots?
Of course not. How can you know that’s so? Because actually good stewards of the land – of the economy and of their own interests in it – denounced the riots as soon as they commenced.
Why did they do that?
Because under all is the land.
If you won’t defend the land you live and work on – the land you survive on – you will not keep it, not for long.
Ah, but that’s the long run, and in the long run – blah, blah, blah.
Here’s the short run: Big cities are losing big because of this Summer’s riots, and horizontal communities are bulging with refugees. It may well be that huge swaths of urban housing are being abandoned for good, but it is sure that the cities fueling this exodus are losing residential and commercial real estate value with every departing U-Haul.
Where are the stewards of that land?
Why won’t Bezos, Barton and Kelman defend Seattle, where they, their investors and their employees have so much of their wealth invested?
Does America’s economy have any reliable stewards left?
