But seriously, it's a complicated topic and there's plenty of room to get things wrong. Just have to plod ahead...

Speaking of plodding, yikes, another long PDF to read. When will I find the time to read the Republican playbook, "Painting the Map Red"? I have a huge pile of stuff to get through, due in part to you. Gee thanks.

I think it's appropriate that we're both trying to avoid value judgments. If I'm right about the problem, it happened because of a longterm failure of judgment--of good intentions gone awry. We think of economic aberrations like the "Tulip Craze" and "Dot-Com bubble" as rapid events because they happen before our eyes, but it's also possible, in theory, to make generations-long economic mistakes, and those are always harder to discern.

When I muse about the imperfections of free-market capitalism, it's from a basic respect for its power. My criticisms aren't that it's a weak system, but rather that because it's a very strong system, any abuse of it or mistakes in using it can have serious consequences. A social system to a social primate with a gift for technology is just another tool to use, and as always, we can use our tools for good or bad; and we have a knack for finding ways to turn tools into weapons. Abuses of FMC like the "robber baron" mentality or Enronesque outrages are strongly analogous to irresponsible gun use in that both are abuse of a technology in a way that harms people.

(No surprise that support for gun control correlates with a desire for regulation of the economy, is it?)

So while it's appropriate to rage against abuse of the system, in the case of real estate speculation I think we have a tragic case of a mistake in using the system. If we learn from it, the lesson would be that there are some things too important to play games with; that the power of FMC should be used with restraint in some areas of life. Lots of people got rich across many decades from speculating in real estate, but we may soon discover that there was a hidden cost, and the bill is now due.

In other words, maybe inflation is never a good thing, and inflationary wealth is a dangerous illusion. Back to FMC basics: It's about investing in productivity, not gambling on passive appreciation and the infinite elasticity of demand.