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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand.

This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.

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In an area entirely filled to the brim with the "evil" Trump supporters ... new housing is going up, apartments, row homes, single family homes, it's all there.

Nobody really seems to care ... yet.

It's often very instructive to find out who is "behind" both promotion and resistance; because both groups will attempt to find ways to "play both sides" and get opposition moving.

> In an area entirely filled to the brim with the "evil" Trump supporters

Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

> Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left

IMO the right is not really the right that most of us remember, so it's not worth trying to reconcile their current ideology with the fiscal conservatives of decades past. The current GOP is unserious, their base consumed by conspiracy theories and driven by grievance.

>They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand.

They don't like my beds. There's something wrong with them! I can't be the problem! -Procrustes

Yes. It's the people's fault for not understanding markets. Couldn't be that markets are fundamentally structurally fucked by an inversion of the demo pyramid. Couldn't be that market participants are just delusional about how much other actors should have extracted from them.

The tragedy of the commons is a real thing. People focus on their own personal short term economic gain at the expense of long term sustainability and gain - even for themselves - because people in general find that longer term outlook difficult to reason about.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others we've tried. This short term thinking is one of its classic failures, because in many ways you're codifying the tragedy of the commons.

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