Get tough with money addicts.

Most people assume that GDP measures how much wealth an economy creates.

It doesn't. GDP measures how many dollars change hands in a year.

In BC, in 2021, the largest number of dollars exchanged by far (19.6%) occurred in the Real Estate and Rental and Leasing sector (RERL), which consists of rents and house prices. These dollars represent not wealth created, but wealth extracted, for shelter, from the productive economy, which is where people perform useful work and make things. (Construction, a distant second, measured 9.66% of GDP.)

"Economics 101: Supply and Demand" is said to drive rents and house prices inexorably higher, and it is assumed that no human behavior is involved in housing prices rising at multiples of the yearly increase, if any, in working people's wages.

But of course it is individual human beings – money addicts, whose hoards of money can never be big enough – who demand ever-more outrageous prices for housing.

In 2017, according to Statistics Canada, "Shelter [at 26.8%] is the most important of the eight major components in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)." Ironically, CPI is one of the most widely used measures of inflation, and money addicts, in addition to excusing their behavior on the basis of "Supply and Demand", also blame demanding ever-higher housing prices on inflation, of which housing prices are the most important component.

To suggest that increasing the price of standing housing, and rents, be sharply limited by taxing the increase at nearly 100%, and that available housing be allocated not on the basis of how much money the highest bidder is willing to pay but, for example, by lottery, according to need (proximity to school, work, or medical services, for example), or on a first-come first-served basis, elicits howls of "Socialism!" and "Communism!", and government is cautioned by the sector hoarding the lion's share, as rent, of the wealth produced by our economy not to interfere with the "free market",

Deep-pocketed real estate holding corporations have plenty of money to flood the Legislature with lobbyists, and politicians are flattered to be taken seriously and to lunch by people with a lot of money.

The public, on the other hand, is free to gather on the Legislature lawn in the rain, make speeches, and if enough people show up, the government might issue a statement to the effect they will study the problem or identify funding to address 1/10 of the solution 7 years from now and of course do neither. Meanwhile, lobbyists' demands get immediate service in the form of money allocated and bills passed.

This is the privatization of profit.

The socialization of what stuffing 20% of this country's GDP into the pockets of money addicts costs is seen in decades of cuts to education, cuts to healthcare, leap-frogging rents, and relentlessly increasing homelessness, to the point where entire swaths of Canada's (and the world's) downtowns have become ever-expanding, fetid hellholes.

In this context we have rhetoric to the effect that our problem is not plunder of the productive economy by money addicts, but homeless people – angry, violent, addicted, social outcasts living on the street – no mention that rejected, neglected, discarded, despairing people living horrifying lives today are hopelessly alienated because whatever supports each of these individual people needed at whatever stage their lives went off the rails were not available because money addicts need more money.

Social or psychological services for dysfunctional and poor families, especially kids, go begging because human costs in the world defined by money addicts have no meaning. And here we are, paying the societal price of "saving money" – more accurately: stuffing money into money addicts' pockets – by neglecting the needs of individual human beings.

And then there is the issue of rent.

Financing by Ottawa to construct affordable workforce rental housing, after decades of unmitigated success, was stricken from the federal budget in 1993 because land speculators and real estate holding corporations need more money.