Let’s get rid of private housing.

I joked about something similar in a previous post, but home ownership appears to turn people into pretty vile caricatures of humanity.

I’m not convinced that de-privatizing housing would be beset by any fewer problems than the current system, but being that what we have now is irreparably broken it’s probably a worthwhile policy experiment, even on a mass scale.

Remember: there is no such thing as a natural market. All markets are government-created, very nearly, and certainly this is the case in our modern society. Don’t allow free market mythologizing to contaminate your beliefs about the inevitability of certain relatively-new societal developments.

Also don’t buy into the myth that the market determines what’s the best housing for people. The market only determines on what and where the few at the top can make the most profit.

For instance, there are nearly no houses out there for people like us: childless couples who want a large shared office room separate from the living room — in fact, we’d be fine with no living room at all.

Ever find a house like that? We haven’t, and we’ve looked at everything from $500 a month rent to $5,000 a month in about a half dozen cities over a ten-year period.

And people like us are an increasing share of the market — 20 to 30 percent depending on which stats you examine.

Tell me how well the market is working?

I keep an old copy of Firefox around in a VM.

Fire it up sometimes to see what’s been lost, to see how much functionality used to exist and is now excised. And of course I use a lot of older OSes at work — the same story there.

I was talking to my girlfriend today and discussing that we have it particularly tough because we’re from a generation that remembers when computers worked for us rather than actively fought us and harmed us.

Computers and OSes (and I’m including in this tablets and smartphones) now exist to abuse you — to track you, market to you, steal your private data and sell it on, and are only secondarily in the business of performing your requested computing tasks. This is a largely-unrecognized sea change in the human relation to everyday computing.

Most younger people don’t mourn this because all they know is being the product.

I remember when I was not the product but rather the one in control and I liked that much better.