I don't understand why Vancouver has become the second most expensive city for housing in the world, after Hong Kong. Yes, I hear the usual excuses: foreign ownership, popular city, beautiful city, lack of available land for development. The solutions are every bit as lame as the excuses. No one has addressed the obvious, the elephant in the room. This is because of unbridled, unfettered, rapacious capitalism. Every since Milton Friedman and his ilk our governments have gradually ceded control of our countries over to faceless and heartless corporations giving them carte blanche. No obligations to the poor, nothing about community development, nothing about affordability, nothing about the environment.
And absolutely nothing about controlling the market. Why not control it? Why not demand that real estate and housing costs be lowered to an affordable level while raising the minimum wage and other low pay to a respectable level that people can actually live on?
I do not know much about economics but I do know that we are rapidly approaching critical mass. The gap between the wealthy one percent and the rest of us cannot go on widening without retribution. The quality of life to which we have grown accustomed is under siege. Our governments are distracting us with fear of foreign wars and terrorism while pulling the rug out from under us.
We cannot go on treating the economy like an entity, perhaps a demigod, or worse, a liberated genie, apart from the people or apart from the environment. If it is not brought down to a human scale and if the protection of the planet and fundamental human rights remain in the background, as an afterthought then I think we really should start being afraid, not of ISIS, but of our own government. Fear will give way to anger, fuelled by love and then comes the revolution? Oh, if only it were so easy, Grasshopper.
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