Marxism won't fix a housing crisis

Marxism isn’t the answer

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Feb 24

RE: The private sector housing experiment has failed. Op-ed by Shauna MacKinnon The Hamilton Spectator 16 Feb 24. Shauna MacKinnon is a professor and chair of the department of urban and inner city studies at the University of Winnipeg.

You’d expect a Marxist to conclude that capitalism has failed, as Professor MacKinnon has done.  You’d expect a Marxist to say that only heavy intervention and control of economic resources by the government can solve whatever the problem is, as Professor MacKinnon said of Canada’s housing crisis.  Calling Canada’s history of housing construction an “experiment”, something easily discarded and undeserving of respect, to say nothing of being a false misrepresentation of the facts, is what you’d expect a Marxist with an agenda to say.

Actually, the housing crisis has been caused by government: by municipal governments for not making land available in unlimited quantities on which to build new housing; and by the Federal government for bringing in record numbers of immigrants without caring i there was housing for them or not.

American economist and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell has written about housing crises, which he first observed in Palo Alto in the 1970s, for over four decades. The cause and the solution are not hard to discover, unless you’re a Marxist out to proved that capitalism doesn’t work.

Get the government out of the way, let the free market work its magic, and the housing crisis will be solved quicker than by ham-fisted government intervention, the cause of the crisis in the first place.

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