07-19-2017, 06:40 AM
The best way to get maximal short-term profits as a landlord is to defer improvements as long as one can get away with it. Such is the profit motive, something that does not deserve unqualified faith, as it can as easily bring out the worst in people as it can bring out the best.
There were good reasons for promoting home-ownership in America. Children brought up in owner-occupied houses were more likely to succeed in school. Home owners had less reason to go out on the town, which means that the habit of thrift associated with getting a down-payment for a mortgaged house would remain after the mortgage was underway. Thrift creates savings; from savings comes investment; from investment comes capital; from capital come well-paying jobs.
Except for the mindless conformity, I think that we are going to like the 'Next Fifties'. I'm guessing that what many of us disliked about the 1950s, the last High, will not return because it won't be 'modern'. Thus there will be no more support of the male chauvinism and the last stage of Jim Crow practice of the 1950s than there will be for polio.
There were good reasons for promoting home-ownership in America. Children brought up in owner-occupied houses were more likely to succeed in school. Home owners had less reason to go out on the town, which means that the habit of thrift associated with getting a down-payment for a mortgaged house would remain after the mortgage was underway. Thrift creates savings; from savings comes investment; from investment comes capital; from capital come well-paying jobs.
Except for the mindless conformity, I think that we are going to like the 'Next Fifties'. I'm guessing that what many of us disliked about the 1950s, the last High, will not return because it won't be 'modern'. Thus there will be no more support of the male chauvinism and the last stage of Jim Crow practice of the 1950s than there will be for polio.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.