The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:
Have you ever bought the house you were renting when your landlord put it up for sale?
Yes - 15%
No - 85%
That's more than I was expecting, albeit on a low turnout so not entirely reliable as a statistic.
It doesn't really matter though, because it illustrates a general point. The Home-Owner-Ists maintain that somehow magically landowners create land values, and that tenants are merely supplicants who should be grateful for what they get.
If that were true, then no tenant would ever wish to buy his own home.
By crude analogy, I - like most people - would be useless at repairing a car, and most mechanics are pretty useless at company paperwork (as pointless as it might be). So I take my WVW Golf Mk II to the garage for service and MOT and so on; in turn, the garage owner goes to accountants like me to have his accounts and tax returns done. If I had to repair my own car and he had to do his own company paperwork then all Hell would break loose.
Not so the landlord: cut him out of the equation by buying your home and nothing bad happens. The contribution that you - as worker, taxpayer, consumer and voter - make to the local or national economy - and hence the desirability or otherwise of your neighbourhood - is entirely unchanged whether you are a tenant or an owner-occupier.
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That dispute over whether that dress was pale blue/gold or deep blue/black having been settled, let us return to the other *hot topic* of last week.
I have watched Maddona's BRITS tumble a couple of times, and to me it looked staged. The clue is that the backing band never missed a beat and played one extra line empty in anticipation of her standing up again. And I bet the cloak was well padded.
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