Heading back out into the world

I was inspired today to return to this blog, maybe because my subconscious is sensing I don't have much longer to express my policy and political ideas over lunch with my classmates, and will need a different outlet to process the things I have learned at HKS over the last two years.

I received an email about this talk :http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=8940&utm_source=Cato+Institute+Emails&utm_campaign=1bc6c1b8a3-CBF_American_Nightmare&utm_medium=email&mc_cid=1bc6c1b8a3&mc_eid=38bd0df18e

...with the following commentary: Typical Cato crap…


Typically a sentiment I'd agree with.  But at second glance (without having read the book), one of the central arguments of this book appears to be a relatively mainstream, neither-liberal-nor-conservative policy prescription (other arguments contained therein, probably not so).  


That is, if the author is in fact arguing that local land use policies constrain the housing supply and lead to the inflation of housing prices, I tend to agree.  Not that this would have prevented the bubble; some of the states that were hardest hit (FL, NV, TX) have the least restrictive land use policies, and that may have made a negative contribution to the overexpansion of homeownership. The land use policies weren't the problem there, the expansion of sub-prime credit was, but the expansion of the housing stock complemented the expansion of bad credit.  

What Iactually find interesting and depressing about this Cato talk, though, is not its policy content per se, but what it represents about the quality of political discourse in this country, where a relatively mainstream argument (see Ed Glaeser, a Harvard prof who advocates for expanding the housing supply) becomes polemicized with outrageous language pandering to a certain set of values and becomes essentially code for a whole other set of values, in this case conservative anti-statism.  Dems and Progs need to take back these kinds of policies and figure out how to talk about them in language that resonates as well as the language that conservatives have found to rile up the Republican base.  Reframe the debate, so housing policy isn't about heavy-handed government distorting the market, but rather about good governance laying out rules that lead to fairness and prosperity.