The Absurdity and Insanity of the “Business Cycle”

It’s so strange to me that housing would be so unaffordable in Australia when the damn country is like 9

The reason for the insanity in Australia is due to something called capitalism; specifically the much-lauded yet insipid boom and bust “business cycle” that characterizes this economic system. The prices are going nuts due to something called speculation. Basically speculators are buying up all the property and just bidding it up higher and higher to drive the cost up probably because as the prices of housing continue to rise, it is easier for speculator dicks to buy lower and sell higher.

A friend in Australia told me that hardly there are hardly any real home buyers in Australia anymore because no one can afford to buy a house to live in. Instead almost all of the homes are being bought up by speculators who simply keep bidding the prices up and up.

Speculators are the scourge of the market, honestly. They don’t do anybody any good. These markets they bid up and down are stupid. These “markets” are like giant gambling casinos in the sky. Speculation causes absolutely no real productive economic growth whatsoever. Speculators don’t even make anything. They are like a bunch of folks at the races betting on horses.

There’s absolutely no real benefit for the economy in any way and speculation causes a lot economic damage with its chronic boom or bust manic-depressive cycles which capitalist fanboys bizarrely love so much.

I think if aliens came here and asked about our economy, and we told them, “Well it’s a boom or bust, manic-depressive cycle where the economy gets really pumped up and a bunch of assholes get rich and then the whole house of cards falls down causing a tremendous amount of damage in real lost or destroyed wealth, widespread societal damage and probably a lot of injuries and deaths due to the stresses of an economic collapse.” We would crow to the aliens about how this insipid manic-depressive economy with its psychotic manias and immsierating depressions is the ultimate economic system designed by mankind.

The aliens would probably say,”Wow, what a stupid system. This is the best you beings can do? You call yourselves intelligent sentient creatures?”

The aliens would then shake their heads, say these people are not only nuts but they’re also apparently retarded, get back in their spaceships and leave us to our mad mercurial idiocy.

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0 thoughts on “The Absurdity and Insanity of the “Business Cycle””

  1. ‘The aliens would then shake their heads, say these people are not only nuts but they’re also apparently retarded, get back in their spaceships and leave us to our mad mercurial idiocy’
    Later i suppose the aliens would come back and colonize us all just . I hope that happens 😀

    1. I’m tempted to say this is specifically a problem with extreme wealth inequality (rather than capitalism per se), but then I think about all the normal middle class folks who obsess over “flipping” houses by tearing them apart and putting in cheap, trendy-looking fake stuff.

  2. It’s so strange to me that housing would be so unaffordable in Australia when the damn country is like 99% uninhabited. There’s more space there than you guys know what to do with. It has around the same land mass as all of the USA yet with a total population of just the NYC metro area. What the hell is up with Australian housing prices? Why aren’t enough units being built to keep prices reasonable? You guys are hardly running out of space.

    A friend in Australia told me that hardly there are hardly any real home buyers in Australia anymore because no one can afford to buy a house to live in. Instead almost all of the homes are being bought up by speculators who simply keep bidding the prices up and up.

    Australia is a land of strange contradictions. Really I haven’t been to that country but would LOVE to settle down there someday. However there are pieces of the Australian migrant dream puzzle which for the life of me, I cannot figure out.

    Aussies are some of the most laid-back people on the face of the planet (read: lazy). Basically, the whole continent of Australia is so far from everywhere important that no-one really wants to go down settle there except for third world refugees who travel on boats and canoes.

    Despite the abundant sunshine, government-sponsored health care and a myriad of job opportunities, for some reason, Australia is unable to attract high quality migrants. Even a shiftless office receptionist makes anywhere between AU$70,000 to AU$100,000 per year (US$50,000 to US$70000) in Australia, and that’s just for answering scripted phone calls. Come Friday afternoon, she’s likely to call in sick and head for the nearest pub where she’ll get totally drunk and start acting out with her “mates”.

    I mean given Australia’s abundant land-mass, it should become the next land of opportunity just the way America was in the early 20th century (and still is). For instance, why don’t we see the Australian version of a “Statue of Liberty”?

    There are scores of stories you can read online of Australia’s forbears, the English (also called “POMS”) giving the whole country a wide berth. I mean Great Britain today is such an overpopulated shithole of an island filled to the brim with Polish, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Ukrainians, Nigerians, Turks, Yugoslavians, Romanians and what not.

    One would think all of England, Scotland and Ireland have started packing their bags and collectively heading off South to the continent-island where they used to export convicts and criminals. But they simply don’t, at least not in that great numbers.

    As for Americans, I don’t think most can the difference between Australia and Austria 🙂 Even the damn Mexicans and Guatemalans aren’t really excited about migrating to Australia. I mean they take such great risks to cross the Rio Grande desert and give so much of their to human smugglers and traffickers.

    I know loads of people from India who emigrated to Australia to gain the citizenship but never became Australian. They just went there for a passport and now they’ve all moved back to India or some other true land of opportunity such as the US, Canada, UK, Singapore or Middle-East. Only thing they needed from Australia was a passport.

    I mean India is so damn fucked up, Australia should be like heaven in contrast, right? One really wonders why even greedy, selfish, materialistic and opportunistic dotheads are not that excited to settle down in a first world Western country where the quality of life is so good, weather so lovely and wages so damn high?

    I was backpacking around Europe recently where all the hostels, cheap bars and tent cities were FILLED with Aussies. I met tons of them and almost ALL of them wanted to settle down in Europe, and really hated going back to the country of their origin. I mean if you were from a third-world country, it’s pretty understandable but why do so many Australians really prefer living abroad. I made a very close Aussie friend in Melbourne and every time we talk, he’s always figuring a way to get out of “his shitty little town” as he puts it. I mean.

    Oh yes, I met at least TWENTY Australians in Europe whose visas have expired and they have no intention to go back. I mean they’d rather live in low-wage places like Czech Republic, Slovakia or Poland (where the average monthly salary is 500 Euros) rather than make more money in their home country! What the fuck – I just don’t get it!!

    1. SHI. Australia is going to suffer a huge braindrain soon.

      There are only two real reasons to stay in Australia. Family and community ties, and a good job and good pay.

      Family and community ties are static the world over, so that evens out. But once Australias economic 22 year boom ends, which is pretty much now, so, so many young Australians are just going to leave for elsewhere. Why work here and be a mega mortgage mug in crappy house, for crappy pay with a crappy exchange rate, when you can move to the USA, or Canada, or Europe, and with the same job, actually be able to afford a decent house and car.

    2. Oh, and I’m one of those seriously looking to leave.

      Australia isn’t a real country. It’s a tiny narrow backwater. IT just exists to serve a few plutocrats

  3. I live in Melbourne, Australia.

    The housing market is out of control, in a manner beyond what happened in the USA or Canada. The median house price in Sydney is a MILLION dollars. In Melbourne, not much less.

    EVERY house, and I mean EVERY house up for sale in my neighbourhood is marketed towards speculators. Nice modern homes with decent build and all the mod cons, are sold with nothing more than a rectangle superimposed upon an aerial shot showing the land size. All homes are sold to be torn down and subdivided.

    All of them.

    You see, it works like this. Parasitic specuvestor scumbags are keeping the prices of homes out of reach of those who, you know, actually need to live in them. They buy the homes, then tear them down and build shoddy townhouses or units or apartments with third world build quality which is little better than a tent. They then keep these crappy, tiny homes JUST within the level of affordability.

    So they pay up to $800K for a working class house, tear it down, and then build three or so crammed on the block, of terrible build, and sell then at $500K each. Price to JUST be affordable.

    It’s like some capitalist scumbag buying all the milk, then putting it into smaller containers, and selling those containers at a price they can just afford, after having prices the original containers out of the market.

    The real salt in the wound is this. In building the smaller, still expensive houses, they claim they are offering ‘cheap’ housing to us, and the government buys this! You see, the 800K house was torn down and a $500K option put in, cheaper yes? That 300mL bottle of milk for $4 is cheaper than the 1000mL bottle for $5, yes?

    Not only this, they get TAX CONCESSIONS for doing this. Buy a property at an inflated price, rent it out at a loss, and you can claim negative gearing, offsetting your loss against the income you make working your day job. Tax payer foots the bill.

    Capital gains? Another concession. Need more demand to keep prices up? Governent opens the borders to 400K people a year.

    It’s disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Those scumbags leading this country cheer the high house prices.

    Oh, and I haven’t even gotten onto the mass influx of Chinese investors pricing even Australians out, to funnel laundered money out of China (with a complicit Real Estate industry and government of course).

    Australia is screwed. Australia must HATE its young people as the investor class is working towards making homeownership a privileged luxury. This is the goal, to create an underlass of renters back in tenements, and little landlord rent seekers.

    Australias economy is going down the drain, but they’ll happily let the country sink to create this new class division.

    Now, it should be of no surprise to you, that the ONLY people who have done anything at all in terms of opposing this trend is the populist far right.

    The “Socialists” and the Left is too busy fighting racism, and for gay marriage. You would think those young Socialists against Capitalism, might mention this most outrageous examples of destructive capitalist excess. Nope.

    Then they whinge the far right grows in popularity….

    1. The housing market is out of control, in a manner beyond what happened in the USA or Canada. The median house price in Sydney is a MILLION dollars. In Melbourne, not much less.

      Why don’t you build your own houses? One would think with so much abundant land surrounded by natural greenery, beaches, lakes and waterways, the Great fucking barrier reef no less – Australians with their frontier spirit and rugged individualism would rather steer clear of all the plutocrats and speculative real estate scumbags – and live like a king of the castle.

      Australia has got like just 5 people for each square mile of the country and still you all want to live in and around Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide?

      What I wouldn’t give to live in the Australian countryside on my own trailer park out in the woods somewhere. Surrounded by kangaroos, wild dingoes, Taipan snakes and koala bears, sounds like my kinda paradise 😉

      Have you heard of a rented motorhome? An RV? You don’t have to even buy one, just rent one and take it for a joyride along the highways.

      1. Most of the cost of a new house, comes from the land and not the house itself. This is why houses are torn down so readily. The land is where the cost is.

        Now, you may be wondering why a country as large as Australia seems to struggle with space, even our roads are full….

        How can I put it. Imagine your Republican VOTER. Not elected official, not Trump or Christie, but just some schmuch voter. Now imagine a political party made of these voters, that is, thats the BEST you’ve got. Thats Australia. We don’t have a better class. It’s low class trash all the way up.

        So there is no vision, no plan. Australia is basically Melbourne and Sydney, and pretty much everything else is considered regional. In the Victorian state, Melbourne is a city, every other town is ‘country’ or just not considered much at all.

        Other nations don’t do this. In the US, cities with less than a million people are still considered destinations, cities, SOMEWHERE. Same in Europe.

        In Australia, unless you are in in the state capitals, you may as well be nowhere. Few jobs. You are considered to be ‘in the sticks’. No investment. No prospects.

        So its just the state capitals, particularly Melbourne and Sydney which Australians feel are ‘international’ cities.

        Hence the lack of space. The fact that space is so expensive for a nation of 22 million people that have a whole freaking continent to themselves is embarrassing.

  4. One big thing Robert forgot to mention: Most of Australia is a desert, hence the reason for high real estate prices.

    1. That’s not entirely true. They have extremely fertile land, mountains and waterfronts (lakes, rivers etc.) across most parts of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Northern Territories, Tasmania and Queensland. That still means a huge, uninhabited land mass. Only Western Australia and central Australia is deserted.

      1. They don’t HAVE that much land, ¾ of the land is reserved for the savages, when they recognized Aboriginal rights. We were sensible and limited the savages to tiny Reservations, for Australia, ¾ of the landmass is a Reservation where they’re not allowed to build!

  5. They’ll need tons of Desalination Plants if they experience an increase of population, OR just let in more savages, who have lower standards for the water they drink!

  6. Money has always had undue importance here in America. The Jamestown colony nearly failed because people who were supposed to raise crops were out looking for gold. Too many of us believe wealth is a virtue and simplicity a character flaw, let alone poverty.

    I’m not going to paint a group of people all with the same brush, but I suspect it. I met a house-flipper once; he didn’t believe in paying a decent wage.

    Curiously, the only repair one can do to a house, when going to sell it, that one can rely on making a profit on is painting it. So much of the economy is fallacious. The boom-bust cycle, in my opinion, is largely the result of borrowing money to show off with, then running out of suckers to take the process further into the future.

  7. Here in America many of our homes are as mobile as our industries. Otherwise, the rest of our housing stock remains one of several major exceptions to the purchasing-power theory of prices and wages–as famously revealed to the greater globe during our mortgage-backed-securities-foreclosure crisis.

    Even so, and notwithstanding the persistence of such captive markets as health care and health-care insurance, the comparative genius of the capitalist system remains its proven ability to distribute a wider array of goods and services into a greater number of nooks and crannies up in the creation than any other economic system that I can think of off the top of my head. This is why Liberals love capitalism at least as much as conservatives do. It’s just that Liberals practice a tougher love that seeks to rein-in the wretched excesses of “the crazed beast” via an odd assortment of economic “leash-laws” occasionally accompanied by environment “pooper-scooper laws,” to boot. Sure it’s crazy. But have heard about what’s going on in The People’s Republic of China these days?

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