Soothing words from a lightweight

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Oct 21

RE: Coming together to address housing crisis.  Op-ed by Ted McMeekin, a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister.  The Hamilton Spectator 20 Oct 21.

A characteristic of the progressive agenda is to handle an issue as “the moral equivalent of war.”  Ted McMeekin revealed this outlook with the repeated calls in his article that, to solve the housing crisis, “we must come together.”

I’m busy, and have no patience for poorly run meetings.  But Ted wasn’t inviting me, or you, when he said “we”; he meant privileged “stakeholders.”  His list of stakeholders included “local union leadership, all three levels of government, non-government organizations, the Hamilton-Wentworth Federation of Agriculture, Environment Hamilton, academics, and a diversity of advocacy groups, and others….”

The only stakeholders Ted didn’t invite are those 236,000 future Hamiltonians who will want to buy an affordable home that they like – not one they have to take.

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote about this tendency of what he called “The Anointed” to make decisions on behalf of other people.  These imposed decisions were in accordance with “The Vision” of the Anointed, and the Anointed suffered no penalty if they proved to be wrong.  Their mess was left for other people to clean up, if it ever got cleaned up at all.  The messes created by the imposition of “The Visions of the Anointed” litter the landscape of America, the former Soviet Empire, and Communist China, to name a few.

Solving the housing crisis isn’t hard.  Make more land available, and let the market work its magic.

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