Buying a Dogbox is a Psychological Death Trap

Neither major party in Australia wants house prices to come down.

Both want you to take on more and more debt to afford a worse and worse property.

If you’re living under the delusion that the government cares about housing affordability, you are deeply mistaken.

The government doesn’t care about housing affordability, what it cares about is self-preservation.

Government has become an entity unto itself.

A savage feasting on the carcass of the taxpayer.

For Australia to ever disband itself of this savage, it must go back to the fundamentals of what makes any economy exceptional.

An exceptional economy is formed from exceptional individuals.

It truly is that simple.

Exceptional individuals are the bedrock of an economy because they are close to the base layer of what an economy actually is:

The transmission of information and agency across space and time.

The greater velocity of that transmission, the greater the ease with which exceptional individuals can focus their efforts around solving problems without people getting in their way.

When exceptional individuals solve a problem people care about, everyone wins.

The consumer gets a great good/service and the individual makes a profit.

They take that money and expand their operations.

They hire people, pay their employees money, and provide their product to more and more people across the country, and across the globe.

Those employees use their salary to do all sorts of things: feed their family, buy shelter, pay for leisure activities, etc.

In economics this is called the multiplier effect: money filters down through the economy and gets spent in different ways to different people, but it originated from the business owner solving a problem for consumers.

Now, I want you to imagine what would happen if instead of that exceptional individual starting a business, they had a million dollars of household debt.

They yearned for greatness, and individual sovereignty, but they felt trapped: on the one hand, they could pay 50% of their salary towards rent, or on the other hand, they could use the government’s first home buyer scheme to purchase a modest 2 bedroom dogbox for $1.1m.

Both look like pretty poor options, right?

They’re being strangled at both ends.

Renting sucks.

Owning sucks.

But, you know what else sucks?

Their propensity to take risks goes down the drain.

They are trapped financially, but psychologically they are also trapped.

Starting a business, particularly a business in the real-world (not digital) requires capital.

Capital that they might not have available because they are paying so much in rent, or so much on a mortgage.

So instead of taking that shot on goal, instead of swinging for the fences, they play it safe.

They never take that 12 months off to start a business.

They never even have the capital to try.

They live a life of quiet desperation, wondering what could have been.

And society never witnesses their greatness.

Consumers never get access to their goods or services at a cheaper price point.

Employees never get hired.

There is less innovation.

There is less transmission of information and agency.

Instead, the economy inherits another debt slave.

Another by-product of a property ponzi scheme that strangles all entrepreneurship.

Squeezes the passion from individuals’ eyes and sucks the youthful blood from their veins.

But who cares, huh?

Innovation is out, debt maximisation is in.

Productivity is out, debt maximisation is in.

Exceptionalism is out, debt maximisation is in.

Housing affordability is out, debt maximisation is in.

And we will all be worse off because of it.