Photo by Dave Francis
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37 Lose job – keep house
Let’s continue Tuesday’s discussion
around “you lose your job, you lose your house.” Obviously, I was
looking for better than that: namely, that everyone keeps an
appropriate dwelling regardless of employment vagaries. That is
practical stability. Housing swaps occur when the job moves too
far away to commute. Otherwise, keep doing what works; stay with
the house. When asked how we pay for this, I propose having
all of us pay for it. Think “happy family.” After all, we
are discussing neighborhoods, and neighbors appropriately help
each other. In the Tuesday post, the terms “large scale” and
“aggregate” indicate the cost saving when we do bulk things
together. They describe the underlying insurance principle
without using the word “fire.” The proposal here is
assuring housing for all.
Two objections have been raised against
this ideal of universal housing: enforced uniformity
(infringement on freedom) and disincentivizing stewardship
(facilitating laziness).
Dealing with Uniformity: A certain degree
of care is needed in our happy family. Many years ago, I read
that in Germany the government takes over a property if it is not
being privately maintained. America enforces building codes to
keep properties up to standard. It benefits neighborhoods and
individuals alike when we obey health and safety standards. This
does not require that our homes look alike. Code requirements are
not freedom infringing forced uniformity. We can have
freedom to inhabit a safe home without losing freedom to choose
the home.
Dealing with Disincentive: The people I
know want to carry their share and contribute to the
greater good. We naturally support community. Healthy people want
to work. They do not need to be threatened with dying in a lonely
alley if they lack skills. Using housing (or other basic needs)
as the only reason to work plays on fear and underestimates human
dignity. Let us take the fear of death out of the discussion of
housing supply and then extend the reasoning to the other human
needs as well. We work for the greater good, not for raw animal
survival.
We have described distributing
housing supply, or consumption. When natural disasters destroy
several houses, the consumption economy flexes to reallocate
housing.
In dealing with creating the
supply, or production, there is also economy of scale. When
factory closings suddenly destroy several incomes, the production
economy flexes to reallocate human earning power.
The above two paragraphs use macro
terminology so that the required flexing will occur at the group
level where it is an adjustment, not at the individual person
level where it is catastrophe.
For these reasons I am proposing that we
decouple housing issues from employment issues to the extent that
a hole in one does not create an unnecessary hole in the other.
Of course, housing supply and demand are related, but they should
not be coupled at the person by person level. House insurance
provides that a hole in housing supply does not drop someone out
of the job market. Job insurance provides that a hole in
employment does not drop someone out of the housing market. Each
side (consumption and production) can flex separately on a
community level to provide stability and continuity. The
community is part of finding a house and also of finding a
job.
There is room for growth, especially as
we apply this logic to all the Human’s Needs
discussed before. Keeping all people usefully occupied is more
complex than keeping all the apartments occupied. However,
American society has reached praiseworthy levels of basic
cooperation called the social safety net. My idealized simplicity
takes examples from what our community is realizing already. Here
“realizing” means both “becoming aware of” and “achieving.” We
have achieved so much that we are encouraged along the rest of
the progress journey to freedom from want.
Being For Others Blog copyright © 2020 Kent Busse
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