A Basic Theory of Middle Class Housing as a Function of the Concentration of Wealth

A basic theory of the troubles with the U.S. housing market of a non-technical nature might include the large phenomena of networking and the concentration of wealth with the few. Housing sizes became larger and more expensive challenging even the middle class to afford the huge, inefficient vessels.

I thought about this today walking along a nice neighborhood where new homes are going in for just a little more than 220,000 dollars. With interest maybe they would cost 300,000 dollars, I cannot say. They were of a two story boxy appearance without much yard.

As a college graduate and veteran with an honorable discharge, even though the service ended with the end of the cold war and peace instead of a shooting war with high pay, glory and benefits who earns just a little over 4000 dollars a year when I can find houses to paint, I realized that these homes would cost me a couple hundred years to buy if I could pay half of my annual wages on one. If I were to live 1000 years maybe working two hundred years to buy a home would be worthwhile.

These average big box homes are costly even for a middle class family with a 50,000-dollar annual household income. The housing developments are financed by bankers and a global business network able to buy and sell U.S. mortgages. The M.B.A. generation of arranging national business to their liking is paying off and wealth is being conce3ntrated while the middle class struggle, as did the lower working class in former decades before the latter half of the 1970s.

Ideally, advantaged Harvard M.B.A.s and their corporate employers, CEOs and shareholders should be able to exploit the middle class as readily as the working class and poor, and to accomplished that very larger homes, low mileage SUVs and vehicles costing 50,000 dollars should be the norm. The middle class then struggle to pay the price of housing they will lose with even brief periods of unemployment rather easily. Three decades of solid employment required to afford an expensive homes is becoming improbable even for the middle class.

Before the end of the 1960s the average CEO of a corporation earned 300 times more than the lowest paid worker. Today that CEO earns some like 3000 times more and the disparity is increasing. In the 1960s a man could be broke and unemployed, yet if he got an industrial job as were common he might buy a home within a year or two of starting work. Homes were a lot smaller then. With a nail gun I suppose I could make good winter housing with a couple of days work and three hours shopping at the lumber yard--yet one has zoning instead that add 30 years time required to finance a winter home. At least tenting is a way to keep the freezing rain away awhile as an alternative to being a quarter-millionaire and beloved corporate minion of dubious morality.

One must buy most of one's home construction products from the networked corporations. They would not like significant rivals to ordinary housing structures such as well designed stress membraned housing good for 30 years that when removed leave just a simple clearing in a verdant ecosystem that quickly recovers from displacement.

My grandfather bought a home in Eastern Washington in the 60s for just 4000 dollars, and raised quite a wonderful lot of vegetables in his garden. Today if unemployed and broke in middle age one has very dismal prospects for owning a home because they are just too large, and gardens may be zoned for illegality especially on front lawns. In Houston's suburbs even planting a pear tree might be considered radical although some have banana plants or plantains by their pools that live until the rare solid freeze.

The high costs of American homes may be a logical desire by the wealthy to maximize profits and make the middle class drudges to their borrowed 'castles'. Those M.B.A.s need to be put to work concentrating and organizing all that potential wealth out there after all, yet the collateral damages to the U.S. economy of forcing too large of homes and inefficient cars on America are substantial.

The middle class fails to build up substantial capital savings in the too large of home and car environment. They send hundreds of billions of dollars abroad annually to import fuel. The middle class in upgrading the Death of as Salesman lifestyle that has become totalized from polluted sea to polluted sea may be co9ntent to just save some money for retirement. The concept of capital for business investment falls commonly by the wayside.

If necessity is the mother of invention, the middle class paradoxically has no necessity and invents little. It may be comfortable in its wage slavery living within a deterministic economic environment. The middle class may be happy to live in a half million dollar home, have three cars, large screen high resolution televisions, watch the Seahawks be trounced by the Giants on television, and die without any savings. If the middle class invented anything the ubiquitous global corporations would soak it up anyway and the concentrated wealth flummery would reap new profit or sequester the invention if it was a rival to existing products.

How to create a new envi9rnment of inventiveness in the United States is not simply a matter of creating a better education system for the actual economic structure outflanks and repress intellectual virility. Inventions today increasingly are an evolution of existing corporate, pharmaceutical, chemical and biological product interests. The intense interest in biology for human health and life extension drives a desire to patent every kind of real and synthetic genome. Human interest in conserving living species and biodiversity pales in comparison as a global human-caused mass extinction is in progress that may undermine the ecosystem supporting all human life on earth. Neither do humans have an interest in developing moon facilities to build real space ships in lunar orbit from materials fabricated on the moon.

I should write something more about that; true space ships would use the entire ship’s hull for an engine interacting with various fields and particle-waves and potentials existing in space rather than with an Earth boating concept of an engine like an outboard fit on the back of a boat that propels it forward through the water…even the U.S.S. Enterprise had a dilithium crystal outboard/inboard motor kind of concept. A hull spaceship with field-drive would be too large and expensive to launch through the Earth atmosphere obviously. Until the moon is developed as a space-ship base and all extra-terrestrial bodies than can be inhabited have a population of 1000 people for research and self-sustaining terra-forming micro-environments sustaining life humanity will not be really serious about survival in this somewhat benevolent yet simultaneously dangerous portion of the galaxy. Disaster can occur very swiftly.

The U.S. middle class in its increasing position of luxury wage slavery exists simultaneously with a global economy that the Wall Street and Harvard M.B.A. network as used to maximize profits as well. The middle class and poor have a decreasing capacity to control their own economic destiny or to develop businesses that compete with existing capitalized networked corporate infrastructure. The notion that the interests of the wealthiest drive the most efficient form of capitalism or economic a democracy might create is absurd. The economic interests of all the people are a part of a complete economic tree in the modern world in which none may simple exist apart and alone as an island unto himself along with his family.

The modern economy of the United States could be compared to a plant or hedge with those at the top drawing their profit from those producing at the roots from the environment. The Harvard M.B.A. concentration of wealth at the top has increased the extraction of resources from nature that the roots process and moved it up bypassing the economic nourishment of the roots and middle class of the hedge. The logical outcome of killing the roots and middle of the plant in order to expedite concentration of wealth at the top is the death of the planet.

The economy is not so simple as that however. Inventions that are increasingly fractional advances of technological systems such as in biomedicine do not produce complete products. Complete product inventions like a light bulb or a telephone historically tend to be created by individuals creating something that works for-itself. With a closer relationship to nature and necessity inventors such as a Henry Ford might invent an entire assembly line process while today the middle class in their wage slavery without capital to invest in there own inventions much less defend a patent if interested in inventing something rather than investing their capital in the advantaged corporate networks that reinforces the doom of the middle class and poor produce fractional appendages to the corporate beast of controls servo-unit mechanism.

If smaller homes were ordinarily built in the United States people would have an option of economy. Perhaps high quality stressed membrane buildings with special insulating foam in anchorage Alaska suitable for low temperatures, earthquake survival and even quick spare library construction the middleclass would have the option of just spending 50,000 on a home instead of 300,000 dollars and save the rest for investment in inventions and business concepts of their own. Without capital to risk it is very difficult to get anything built. Guaranteed investment would attract too many investors and the cost of investing would rise offsetting profits. The difference between gambling and risky investments fundamentally lies within the intellectual skill set of the individual—his or her intellectual capital, instead of in an extrinsic material, social investment opportunity with assured return such as U.S. Government Bonds before an era of quantitative easing (Fed ex-lax of debt dumping upon others).

Many Americans have expressed an interest in buying lower cost, more efficient homes—and why not? A good ecofriendly yard and simple modular domes can create an efficient living space with –privacy and utility. Where is the profit in that for the bankers and developers seeking to extract maximum profits from the roots and middle class though?

The concept that the concentration of wealth will create the most efficient society politically, socially or ecologically is absurd. Unfortunately the paradoxes of the prisoners and diner’s dilemma wherein those that defect to procure their own self-interest rather than being gentlemanly and seeking on a team basis to bring about increased public good tends to drives the political and economic ad hoc collectives that make the economic decisions of national importance in Washington D.C. and Boston. The future of the United States does not seem especially excellent today as the Democratic Party is little more than lip service token opposition to the concentration of wealth—even Michelle Obama had a quarter million dollar a year health industry administrator job in Chicago before becoming the first lady. What were the chances that the President would have supported a plain free public health service for the poor that was staffed by public doctors and joined with the V.A. instead of requiring that all Americans buy health insurance from the wealthy global corporations fo0r home his wife worked? Probably none. The democrats in office has basically been the gay team cheerleaders of the corporate work environment seeking to make the military become soldiers of sin in order to better serve the bent upper classes of society.