Glenn Beck: Banning corporate home ownership isn’t freedom — but neither is a rigged housing market
When President Trump announced his plan to ban large institutions from buying up American houses, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck was initially thrilled.
“A conversation is happening in our country right now about housing, about corporations being able to buy homes and whether they should be allowed to do that at all. And my first instinct is no, because the pain this is causing — and the pain is real,” Glenn says.
“Young families are locked out. Rent’s rising faster than wages, communities hollowed out, and you have governments all around the world who are pushing for ‘you will own nothing and you’ll like it.’ Meaning, somebody owns everything. You’re just a constant renter. You’re a serf,” he continues.
However, “every libertarian bone” of Glenn’s reacted to the news that Trump is toying with passing a law addressing this with a resounding “no.”
“Banning ownership is not freedom. It’s just not. … Once you decide who can own property, you’ve crossed a line that history tells us is not easily crossed back in the other direction,” Glenn says.
“But here’s a part that we have to be honest with ourselves about, because pretending otherwise is honestly how we lose the country,” he continues. “What is happening in our country right now is not a free market. You can look at it that way, if you squint really, really hard and lie to yourself every day.”
“We’ve built something entirely different from the free market,” he says, pointing out that in a real free market, “risk matters.”
“In a real market, price signals mean something. … If you make a bad bet, you lose. But that’s not what’s happening. At least not at the corporate level. Okay? That’s not happening in housing. Housing has been transformed into a financial instrument,” he continues.
“It’s not about a house for a family. It’s about a financial instrument. And this isn’t by accident; this is policy. It comes from years of zero interest rates, trillions of cheap dollars, government-backed mortgages, pipelines that are all securitized, regulatory advantages that favor the size or the lawyers and the leverage that you don’t have access to,” he explains.
“Our federal government didn’t just invite Wall Street into housing. It pulled it by the collar and said, ‘You are doing these things because it’s good for our re-election, and I’ll protect you if there’s a problem.’ That’s not a free market,” he says.
This is why Glenn believes the answer is not to outright ban corporations from buying housing, but to address the real issues that have created this situation.
“The problem is not corporate ownership,” Glenn continues. “The problem is privileged ownership. The problem is when government quietly rigs the game.”
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