While clicking back and forth, I stumbled across a cretinous - not to mention rude - Home-Owner-Ist responding to a comment of mine on the ASI blog:
Mark Wadsworth: If you are going to count "below market" rents in social housing as a subsidy, then you also have to account for about twenty times as much in subsidies to owner-occupation.
literate3: There is no polite form of reply to a remark as stupid as that. I paid for my house out of my savings from my after-tax income.
The first sentence is just an insult, ignore that.
It is irrelevant how you raised the money to buy your house*, what you paid the previous owner was the value of the subsidy you expected to receive and when you sell it, you will be selling it for the value of the subsidy the net owner expects to receive/which you will have to forego. It's a Ponzi scheme.
The land value = the value of the future subsidy.
And I did not say that most people didn't pay for their houses in cash, I was pointing out what they were paying for, so he is throwing in a completely irrelevant factoid. It might more be pertinent to note that actually people pay off their mortgages out of the money they save on rent.
This bleating about "I bought my house out of taxed income" is a classic KLN and completely irrelevant, it's about as dumb as saying "I paid for my car out of taxed income, so the government should get everybody else to pay for the repairs."
So the second sentence is crap as well, which leaves us with precisely nothing.