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Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

As a contractarian libertarian, I agree, and in fact I am in favor of open borders. And Canada's age-demographic profile is terrifying, given that the baby-boomers are heading into retirement. We can use as many tax-paying millennials and gen-x'ers as we can get.

Perhaps you and I should get together and we can explain to a group of detached-house-owning baby-boomers/empty-nesters why liberalizing or eliminating zoning laws would lead to optimal land utility and that they should be ok with allowing row-houses in their neighborhood. And that would be an interesting conversation.

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No, land is a tool to make future generations be in debt to past generations. No sane person would give up their power. Only insane people who want everyone to succeed actually step down after they had their turn.

When I hear baby-boomers arguing against the numbers, statistics, and facts and saying things like, "don't touch my equity! You just have to be patient! It'll work out for you, too!", I sort of think about this - that this is a huge intergenerational transfer of wealth.

Of course some millennials will enjoy a windfall when mom and dad eventually downsize. Not all, by any means - but some.

I hope you're lucky enough to have some house-rich parents! It's always good to be an aristocrat!

To be fair, mostly the homeowners of that generation scrimped and scrimped and saved for their productive decades to get their home.

Without holidays, iphones, food delivery, cafe coffees, gap year, 'finding myself', international travel etc.

That generation (of which I'm not part, but have taken the time to hear the stories of) lived week to week scraping by on bare subsistence living so they could pay the mortgage, with interest rates of 7-18%.

So they strove and sacrificed for the defining decades of their life for that equity, and of course they want to keep what they worked and sacrificed so hard for.

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