I'm not sure what sort of call you think I'm making here, it's just an observation of the economic effects. If you've bought a house to live in and the market doubles then halves again, you didn't benefit from the rise nor suffer from the fall. The main losers for a drop in prices are speculators, the main winners are practically everybody.
However home owners that are not actually benefiting from higher prices are incredibly attached to their paper gains and so any policy that threatens that will be wildly unpopular.
> I'm not sure what sort of call you think I'm making here, it's just an observation of the economic effects. If you've bought a house to live in and the market doubles then halves again, you didn't benefit from the rise nor suffer from the fall. The main losers for a drop in prices are speculators, the main winners are practically everybody.
A person that moves from one city to another, a person that sells their home to go back to renting, a software engineer thinking of moving to nz for a job has now found that he might never be able to purchase a home. The effects on pricing are not in par with wages: someone downsizing their home will get a smaller difference, and someone upsizing has found it is cheaper. Real estate agents income drops, tax revenue drops, tourism drops, etc.
There are more circumstances that we can imagine and my point is that is very presumptuous to think all those people have been benefited. Lots of landowners would vote against it, and they get no compensation from the ones that voted in favor of restrictions. The principle is not to benefit a majority. If we wanted to do that, we would just seize things from the top 49% and give it to the bottom 51%. There is no fundamental value satisfied here but the capacity of landowners to get use the government to tell what other people can or cant do with their property.
I reiterate: this is not about what nz wants, its about what some people want.
> If we wanted to do that, we would just seize things from the top 49% and give it to the bottom 51%.
No, we wouldn't, because that wouldn't achieve it.
> I reiterate: this is not about what nz wants, its about what some people want.
Reiterate all you like, you're attacking a strawman of your own creation because nobody is claiming otherwise.
> a software engineer thinking of moving to nz for a job has now found that he might never be able to purchase a home
It'll be a lot easier for him after a crash in the NZ property market, doubly so if foreign money is pushed out leading to drops in the NZD on top of the crash.
"If you've bought a house to live in and the market doubles then halves again, you didn't benefit from the rise nor suffer from the fall. The main losers for a drop in prices are speculators, the main winners are practically everybody."
This was what I said and you haven't actually disagreed with that anywhere. Yes, there are some that will be worse off, but increasing prices harm more than they help. Decreasing prices help more than they harm. It's not possible to do nothing, because doing nothing is doing something by continuing the current policy mix which inflates prices.
Crashing the market is the only way to improve the situation, but is politically untenable because people are very attached to paper gains even though they don't actually benefit from them. The end result will be an uncontrolled crash in the market that will leave the government with no revenue with which to help those that are harmed by a falling market; deliberately crashing prices through appropriate taxation would leave most unharmed, but would extract money from those that had benefited from a bad situation to help those that were really harmed.
It's the right thing to do, but no government will do it.
However home owners that are not actually benefiting from higher prices are incredibly attached to their paper gains and so any policy that threatens that will be wildly unpopular.