It's not about regulation, it's about replace-ability. Food prices stay low because corn is corn, regardless of who grew it - it fills the same need. In many cases, even food that's not a direct match is still a perfectly valid replacement (ex: I need to eat 2000 calories, but it doesn't matter all too much what food is providing them).

This is utterly untrue for real estate, which is about as non-fungible as you can get.

You raise an interesting point regarding fungibility…I wonder that with growing insitutional involvement, whether housing may move down the spectrum and may become more fungible… probably not by much tho

Yeah, I think that's an interesting point - if the goal is just to have a roof over your head close to where you work, institutional involvement may be able to help there (large apartment complexes and high rises are the old school methods of creating housing units that are mostly the same as each other).

I think the issue is that housing is intrinsically tied to real estate, and real estate (at large) likely won't become much more fungible. Land is just really complicated, and the uses for it aren't all that exchangeable.

>the American dream of owning a home is socialist…US mortgages are guaranteed by federal government..

"socialism" =/= government intervention.

The government created the programs that gave massive tax breaks to the boomers who bought homes.

Quite reductionist…

Having one element of a nation state being characterised as socialist doesn’t not equate to socialism… the world is not black and white..

It’s not really socialist at all. It’s in the governments best interest to have owners of properties. This leads to improvements making the capitalization of the country larger. It also develops more property tax capability.

A governments 2 main assets are its people and its land. Ensuring that people have ownership of the land ensures the people will continue to support the government as there’s mutual interest. So subsidizing loans via guarantees isn’t socializing so much as the government investing in itself and protecting its assets.

The response, above, lists pros but no rebuttal to why government-guaranteed mortgages are not socialist.

In a free, capitalist market, private providers would price and provide mortgages. This is not happening here..

For some Americans this may be difficult to digest since there may be cognitive dissonance…how can an American ideal be characterised as socialist.

Right but it isn’t due to charity. It’s in the governments best interests to do this. It is acting rational.

A socialist government would either ensure everyone qualifies or it wound instead build large dehumanizing concrete towers to stuff thousands of people in, block after block.

The subtext, from the statement above, is socialist government decision making is irrational while capitalist governments are rational.

Having traveled across many countries in Europe, I have seen governments with socialist traits make rational, sensible decisions. Again, while I agree that a capitalist government is probably more effective than most communist governments, the world is not black and white.