Unleashed entrepreneurs are driving a new space renaissance; safeguarding their freedom is mission-critical for the journeys ahead

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(My Substack (and HBL post) on affordability as an anti-concept had so many points that this one seems to have gotten lost. But it’s important enough to single out.)

“Affordability” is a term that evokes careful household budgeting and rational decision-making. But actually, the popular demand for “affordability” promotes the infantile, emotionalist, facts-blind mentality of “I want it—gimme!”

“Why should I have to pay so much for this?” means “Why should the government allow other people to outbid me on this?”

What makes prices high is us! Prices are high, in the inflated currency, because buyers have pushed them up.

You recall the Yogi Berra-ism? “That place is so crowded that no one ever goes there anymore.” It’s the same here: “That good is so expensive that no one can afford it anymore.”

In other words, there is no change in “affordability.” That’s a myth, a lie. The only reason you find the price of something to be “too high” is that other people don’t.

The supply of things has not gone down.

There are not fewer homes today than in the past. There is actually more housing stock per capita today than in 1970. Housing stock has more than doubled but population has increased by only 2/3.

So if supply has increased, why have prices gone up? Because of inflation. Demand in dollars has gone up. But that’s because people have more dollars. The extra worthless paper dollars we were all sent in the mail under the first Trump administration got spent.

Suppose the government wants to enrich us tenfold. They tell us to take magic markers and write an extra zero on all the dollars. A dollar bill is now worth $10 and $10 is now worth $100. Plus all your bank accounts must, by law, move the decimal over. So your balance of $1350.29 is now, by law, $13,502.90.

What a boon! But wait, there’s an affordability crisis. When gas was $3.00 a gallon, I could afford it. But now it’s a shocking $30 a gallon! I can’t afford gas. And that house I wanted to buy that was priced at $500,000 is now $5 million. I can’t accept paying over $1 million for a house, let alone $5 million!

You get the point, right. His teleological measurement system with money is based on what he remembers. He hasn’t adjusted his budgetary decisions to the 10-fold expansion of the money supply. When he looks at things to buy, his automatized standards are based on the old dollar, not the new devalued one.

So the anti-capitalists have learned how to make political hay out of this lag, the lag between pre-inflation habits and post-inflation facts.

The prices are high because you, average Joe, have more money to bid them up with.