By making war on private property rights, the National Association of Realtors is making war on everything we are as Americans

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m responding here to a comment from Dave Phillips, who is to be commended in advance for bearing up to the strain.

I will invite President Gaylord to read and possibly respond if you promise to be a good doggy and engage in polite discussion (i.e., avoid inflamed rhetoric like “Rotarian Socialism” and “inane kleptomania”). It would serve no useful purpose to just piss him off. He is a reasonable man and would appreciate your sound reasoning.

Is he a reasonable man or a daffodil? Rotarian Socialism and kleptomania are exact and perfect descriptions of the way our country is run. If the man can’t bear to look at the world as it is, he needn’t bother talking to me.

“Everything the NAR does is anti-consumer.” I respectfully disagree. Defending mortgage interest deductibility (based on the current tax establishment) is very much in my favor as a consumer. Is it also self-serving? yes.

This is the seen and the unseen, classic Bastiat. You see a tax deduction and regard it as being to your immediate pecuniary advantage. You don’t see all the other taxes that are raised to make up for that deduction.

Worse, you don’t see that the NAR is not seeking your interests but its own: The deduction causes you to value housing above other investments, contrary to market forces, which results in your buying a home when you could and probably should be making more productive use of your surplus income. The goal? Commissions for NAR members, not your interests at all.

Still worse, you don’t see that the recession we are going into was caused, fundamentally, by overvaluing housing as a market good by means of tax deductions, credits, exclusions and deferrals. In five years you could be walking around shoeless, dining out of garbage dumpsters, but at least your mortgage interest will be tax-deductible.

In other words: You are a consumer in your every economic transaction, not just when you are paying your mortgage. Past lobbying by the NAR and CRA groups will result, at a minimum, in the pillaging of your retirement accounts. How is that “very much in [your] favor as a consumer”?

NAR has to play the game by the rules of Washington DC. If we could implement a different/fair tax structure that actually made sense, then we could get all puffy chested about policies like this. Until then, NAR should be commended for playing this nasty game as well as anyone.

You will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them. It’s the Two Wrongs Make a Right Fallacy, and that’s enough to shoot it down by itself.

What’s worse is that the obvious course of action for the NAR — were it interested in true justice for consumers, and not simply in stealing from them at every turn — would be to stand as the stoutest and most resolute defender of private property rights. The National Rifle Association is a good example of a national lobbying group that never betrays its fundamental principles in pursuit of legislative goals. The National Association of Realtors, by contrast, is just another pig at the welfare trough.

But the ultimate tragedy is that, by failing to defend property rights, the NAR undermines them. Our freedom in this country — and in every truly free country — emerges not from free speech, nor from free access to firearms. It is the freedom to buy, own, use, enjoy, sell and profit from the land we live on that undergirds all our other freedoms. It is the redoubts we can build to defend ourselves and our families from marauders — including brigands disguised as legislators — that make us free. The NAR is openly at war not just with our wallets but with everything that makes us what we are as Americans.

My take: Dick Gaylord and all the other NAR goons should come here to figure out what they’ve been getting wrong all along.