When the state keeps the price down

...the state is the owner. Some Coloradans are learning that. I'm learning it too, so, thanks Jon Caldara for teaching me.

I am naturally averse to government schemes, and (like Supertramp did) I detest words that end Ibble. So I assumed there was a Catch somewhere. Caldara tells us: "Affordability" in a nonperishable widget means the widget is sold outside the market. And what you did not buy through the market, you may not sell through the market.

To the extent said market still exists, it is distorted: your housing stock isn't in the pool of supply. (You aren't in the demand-pool either but, since you couldn't afford it, you never were.) Everybody else now has to pay that bit more, which Colorado at least sequesters to your neighbours.

Vouchers and - let's be honest - loans would distort that market too. But, depending on restrictions, not nearly as much. You might be permitted to resell. Then you've got Equity: your home is an asset and the market (probably) works in your benefit. With an ibble-house, you sell "your" "$150k" home for $175k whilst your neighbour sells his $250k home for $750k. Sucks to be you!

All this wonkery stated, I ... still don't care.

If the State of Colorado owns this asset it can raise some cash by buying the home for $175k - because that was the deal, and it's the State; taking it off the Ibble programme, and selling it for real. A few dozen flips like this and Colorado just took in a few more millions. Oldest trick in the book, the book George Plunkett wrote about Tammany Hall. Except here the revenue goes to CO. (Ideally.)

Boiled down, this whole programme is a tax on new-home buyers (as opposed to buyers of existent stock) and developers of same. In the meantime, some people get to live in, basically, rentals, but at a fixed rate. As Front Range boondoggles go, this doesn't rank for me. The worst effect I can think of is the ibble homeowner whom some nu-Plunkett allows to sell at market-price if she kicks back some percentage to Totally Not Plunkett PAC. But now we've diverged from the merits of the Ibble programme and have entered the libertarian critique of programmes as such; the Waste-'n-Fraud is worse in Medicaid, nu?

Meanwhile Caldara performatively weeps for the sucker who squatted in a middle-class subdivision for years paying less than the rest of us did, probably not keeping up the place as much (because, again, the house wasn't hers). Because waaaah she didn't knooow. If it sounds like I'm calling shenanigans on Caldara's tears that's because - I am. Caldara cares for his own home and so do his readers; they just don't admit it.

Caldara did perform a valuable service, in his rantyness, by entertaining as he was explaining. So his article wasn't a waste of my time like (say) the average Richard Spencer article.

YEAH, HE'S STUPID 7/29: Forgot to mention that it's PJM drone Stephen Green trying to make Caldara happen, which should have been a clue. Hat-tip to that one, here's Caldara supporting the primary system in Colorado - you know, the one which failed. Read Ron Hawks instead.