Usually, the articles that get me fuming are very conservative; this one is anything but. This guy misses the point in so many ways, I don't have time to discuss all of them. I've never heard this strawman argument of his--that some say poor people aren't properly wired, behaviorally, to own property; that's not what (most) people are saying. Property ownership isn't the investment it had once been billed to be, its input costs are significant, and it's high-risk. He writes that we should quit "critiquing low-income buyers who may have made reasonable calculations in an upbeat housing market," but what "reasonable calculations"? Is it reasonable to presume that property values can only go up and up? And the low-income buyers had no monopoly on that delusion.
In contrast, check out these very good points.
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I'm not so much missing the point here as choosing to focus on another one (as the main one speaks for itself): while it's not a great source of resources, arresting tantrum-throwing kids doesn't strike me as an entirely bad idea. Do you think that kid will ever pull that again?
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If the Washington Post were non-profit, I would probably donate to it, to support journalism; as it were, it's a business, and I've canceled my subscription. Because when I get the paper, I feel like I have to read it, and it sucks up too much of my time. I just can't do it anymore.
It wasn't an easy decision-- I do feel bad mooching off the Post's online content (but I also mooch off the Times'), hence the non-profit hypothetical--but I also recognize that (a) not everything is online and (b) some of the Print articles that are available online are hard to notice and find on that medium. So I will (gasp) miss things that I'd rather catch. But that has to be okay, because I'm missing other things by letting the paper dominate the time I have to read.
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