Hey there, toothy-grinned, glad-handing Realtor: How’s the world treating you?
Business is not so good? Your house is worth less than half of what you paid for it? Your kid has three degrees but can’t get a job?
Are you looking for someone to blame for your troubles?
Guess what? There really is a mastermind of evil in the American economy. A vast parasite, a vampire king, with an insatiable appetite to devour everything that used to be known as “the American way of life.”
Are you being preyed upon by banksters? By Wall Street tycoons? By Chris Dodd and Barney Franks?
Those are the folks we like to blame, when we seek explanations for the Great Recession.
But who is really at fault for your miseries?
The sine qua non cause of this disaster — of the national economic malaise and of your own personal financial situation — is… wait for it…
The National Association of Realtors.
It’s the NAR that obstructs consumers’ access to market alternatives to old-fashioned real estate brokerage.
It’s the NAR that insists on subsidizing homeownership at the expense of other, more-productive uses of capital.
It’s the NAR that manipulates the tax laws to induce thoughtless consumers to overpay for homes they never would have — and never should have — bought in the first place.
It’s the NAR that makes war on the rights of Americans to use and enjoy their real property as they choose.
It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.
The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.
The NAR’s legislative initiatives are uniformly criminal in their objectives. The purpose of all economic legislation is to induce by force an outcome that would not occur in the absence of that force. This is crime, no different from a mugging.
As the author of every state’s real estate licensing laws, the NAR mugs consumers by preventing them from doing business with whom they choose — on the terms Read more