By Mary McFadden : 48hills – excerpt
Emphasizing supply intentionally ignores what drives demand: tax subsidies for multi-billion-dollar corporations
Apple still gets huge tax breaks that promote the economic inequality behind the housing crisis. Wikimedia Commons image by Andrew Hitchcock.
Zelda Bronstein in her article, Supply Sophistry, is completely correct in her examination of the many flaws in the supply and demand argument as it pertains to housing. It is worth noting that supply and demand doesn’t really apply to anything.
The supply and demand mantra has infiltrated all our economic debates and permeates our housing discussions even as it leads further and further away from economic justice. This myth is propagated by those who profit from entrenching it into our assumptions. Nothing has ever been a direct supply-and-demand relationship because a host of conditions—slavery, labor devaluation, tariffs, taxes, global corporate conglomeration—make consumerism an indirect relationship…(more)