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Except that student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. These ultra risky loans are being extended precisely because the government essentially removed all of the risk.

I was referring to Prop 13, rent control laws, federal tax breaks given to homeowners, and the numerous subsidized home loan products provided by Fannie, Freddie, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration. All of these were intended to make housing more affordable, but ended up jacking up asset prices to extreme levels.

I agree with you that zoning was never intended to make housing more affordable, but it's not the only policy in play.

This is the great irony of government intervention in the economy.

When they try to make housing more affordable, it becomes dramatically less affordable.

When they try to make college more accessible, it ends up raising the cost of tuition to astronomical levels.

When they try to correct a perceived injustice, it ends up creating real injustice by picking winners and losers.

When they raise the minimum wage, they put people out of work.

When they try to guarantee defined retirement benefits, they end up going bankrupt and robbing their workers of the pensions they were promised.

When they subsidize dying industries to "save jobs", they ending destroying more jobs than they save.

Yet despite these failures, people on both sides of the aisle seem to think that the solution to the problems created by government policy should be solved by additional layers of policy. It's a feedback loop of insanity.

I went to college at Illinois State University, which is in Normal, IL. The thought of there being a surf shop in a town that's in a middle of a cornfield with no water nearby just cracks me up.

> Capitalism is a prerequisite for lobbying. Regulations are not.

In order for lobbying to be effective, there must be a large and powerful government which can be lobbied to. The reason the farm lobby spends millions of dollars is because they get billions in subsidies in return. It would be more accurate to say that big government is a prerequisite for lobby, since a small government that merely enforces property rights wouldn't be worth lobbying to.

> This is bank propaganda. It's been debunked countless times

It's an empirical fact that Fannie and Freddie, which are government sponsored entities that buy the largest share of mortgages, lowered their standards significantly leading up to the crash in order to make artificially cheap loans more accessible to people who would otherwise be considered too risky to lend to.

> The bad loans were made by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Lenders originated subprime loans because the government guaranteed to buy them via Fannie and Freddie. If Fannie and Freddie hadn't existed, these bad loans would have never been made in the first place.

I self-manage since my properties are in the same small city that I live in. It's not the much work. I love AirBnB but you have to be careful with it - a lot of towns and cities have outright banned short-term rentals or at least made it very difficult to operate them legally.

Same, although I have four rental units and one AirBnB. I wasted years of my 20s trying to come up with a monetizable SaaS product until I realized that I could earn passive income through "boring" businesses like rental properties.

Now that I've had a taste of passive income through real estate, I've come to despise the tediousness of writing software. I can barely bring myself to do it anymore now that I don't "need" the income from my job to survive. My plan is to keep acquiring rental properties over the next fews and then quit the tech industry for good once I have enough to live comfortably.

> It amazes me that they didn't call his bluff. They could have said, "We'll let you keep some of your shares, so if this ever works out, you'll make some good money."

If they had said that, Neumann would have just continued to nuke the company until SoftBank's remaining $8 billion of equity in the company went to $0. SoftBank paid him off to prevent him from further destroying the company.

They're extremely easy to grow yourself.

Yes, it's effectively a higher interest rate on the entire loan, but my point was that you don't need a massive amount of cash up front to close the deal.

You only need 3.5% down with an FHA loan. To put that in perspective, a $300,000 home would only require $10,500 down.

There's a very simple solution to making the government less susceptible to regulatory capture - make it as small as possible.

You also see it in crumbling roads, ancient subway systems, shitty public schools, dumb regulations that make the market less competitive, "affordable" housing initiatives that make housing less affordable, pointless subsidies for farmers, and unsustainable pension funds.