Hi Mark,

I think Keynesian can be a pretty broad term.

I suspect that what is going on is many people think “house prices are high, they are expensive” then they think “the prices are being bid up” then they think “if we reduce all the bidding the prices will come down”.

But this is a bit lazy to be honest – if prices were solely too high, we would be running around building too many houses to get that “return” on them, and then we’d experience what the US did. That hasn’t happened, suggesting there is more at play.

And then, when we think through it, if we are obsessed by affordability a CGT seem especially weird. As Coleman’s piece shows, we can expect rents (the cost of the housing service) to rise following the introduction of a CGT.

So I think it has more to do with a misinterpretation of what a CGT does than it has to do with a strict agenda.

“… But Keynes broke their fetters: here, at last, was theoretical doctrine
that not only obliterated the personal element and was, if not
mechanistic itself, at least mechanizable, but also smashed the pillar
into dust; a doctrine that may not actually say but can easily be made
to say both that ‘who tries to save destroys real capital’ and that via saving, ‘the unequal distribution of income is the ultimate cause of unemployment.’ This is what the Keynesian Revolution amounts to.”

From: http://cafehayek.com/2012/11/quotation-of-the-day-461.html

Or a worse spin, perhaps the real target of the Bernard Hickeys’ et al, is to destroy the notion of private savings, because they think the State must drive the economy in this mythical, and destructive need, for ‘equality’. It’s a political agenda here, nothing to do with economics (and economics be damned).

Sorry, a bit clumsy, not a lot of time … (I was driving solely to my last sentence).