Will Private Property Disappear in Our Lifetimes?

That's the provocative title of posting of Bill Bonner's Diary yesterday.

It's not Bill's prediction; it's a question posed by Doug Casey of Casey Research at a conference they both were attending on South Miami Beach.

No private property?  Even in the old Soviet Union and Mao's China, people kept some personal property.  Trinkets from ancestors, little things they collected.  The state, of course took real estate, financial assets and anything else that wasn't protected, hidden or buried.  The Soviet Union collapsed, of course, but the most valuable thing it stole was the belief in peoples' hearts and minds that they could control their own futures and their own lives, so that when the foot was taken off their necks, most didn't know what to do.  A few became the rich oligarchs that run everything now.

Still, when you consider the abject failure of communism in the Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, Venezuela, and anyplace it has been tried, it would be tempting to think that nobody would be foolish enough to think it would work now.  Unlike mathematics or engineering, where ideas that don't work are discarded, politicians recycle old failed ideas all the time.  Perhaps, charitably, the older generation who learned what doesn't work retires or "moves on" and the idiotic ideas like communism and socialism keep coming back.  Just look at the Bernie supporters or just about any of the rioters we see on the news since Trump took office.

Consider Bonner's analogy for the machinations of the central banks.  He uses the familiar example of a parking garage.

“You leave your car at a parking garage. You get a claim ticket. That is a form of money. It is not real wealth, but it represents real wealth – your car.

“Now, imagine that the parking lot prints up extra claim tickets. It increases the ‘money supply.’ It may even have a temporary boost to the economy, as people think they are richer and better able to spend. Now, several people may think they own your car.

“Of course, there’s only one car there. But the people in the financial industry who print the claim tickets can use them to take your car away from you.”

And they can use the same system to take your house… your stocks… and your bonds. This would be a hidden revolution. Private property would largely disappear. It would become the property of the Deep State elite who control the system.

Do you own your home?  In the sense that it's paid off and you're not making a mortgage payment?  If not, your mortgage may have been sliced and diced into one of those collateralized debt obligations, CDOs, like the ones that caused the last financial crisis.  These things get sold and traded among the big banks regularly.  They were considered low risk, very secure investment vehicles until it became apparent there were too many subprime mortgages added to them.

And the cronies in the finance sector may already have a claim on your house. But most houses are bought with mortgage financing. Banks lend you the same fake money that the Fed uses to buy stocks.

They create deposits out of thin air when they make a loan, using nothing more than keystrokes on a computer.

They never earned the money. But you have to borrow it from the bank… buy the house… and then pay back the bank. And if you don’t pay, the bank takes the house and sells it to someone else.

Years ago, people would celebrate when they paid off their mortgages. At last, they owned the house free and clear. Now they are taught to “manage” their credit… and refinance.

And with mortgage rates so low, why not?

Most homeowners never own their homes. They simply rent them from banks… paying all their lives for the roof over their heads and the flat screen in the rec room.

But wait. They also pay property taxes. In Baltimore, we now pay as much in property taxes as we paid in rent a few years ago.

Even our automobiles are now often leased or financed. We talk about “our” cars and houses. But many are no more ours than a rented bicycle.

They, too, belong to the banks – the finance arm of the Deep State.

From the purely practical standpoint, even if you have paid off your house, you still have to pay property taxes.  If you don't pay those property taxes, your house will be seized by the local government where you live and you'll lose your private property.  Anyplace you can live is subject to these taxes.  From that standpoint, perhaps it's fair to say there are no privately owned homes anymore; we think we owe them but pay a form of rent to the taxing authority.  

Rough estimates are that by running essentially zero interest rates since 2008, the Federal Reserve has transferred $8 Trillion from American savers into these banks.  That's the amount of interest that savers should have earned if real, market-determined interest rates had been paid to savers.  That money will never be gotten back.  It's part of the system that makes the Deep State able to own everything.