In an opinion piece on Politico, housing advocates Cea Weaver and Paul Williams argue that “democrats would be fools to slash Biden’s housing plan.” At a proposed cost of $327 billion, that housing plan, along with other entitlements proposed by Biden, are part of “long-overdue expansions of the welfare state.”
Not surprisingly, the authors do not question either the morality or the practicality of the welfare state. They are driven by altruism’s demand that individuals sacrifice their interests and values to others. The authors see people in need, and their only concern is satisfying that need by virtually any means necessary.
As Ayn Rand noted:
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
The siren call of altruism goes beyond sacrificing one’s values to others. It also requires us to sacrifice our own judgment.
As an example, the housing plan would “invest” $80 billion for “cleaning and greening” public housing, with half of the money going to New York City alone. Not to be outdone, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octavio-Cortez have introduced a bill that would spend $172 billion on public housing. These proposals make no mention how public housing’s long history of crime, neglect, and unsanitary conditions will be avoided in the future. According to altruism, we should suspend our own judgment and trust the “experts.” We are supposed to ignore the past and pretend that this time will somehow be different.
Indeed, this is true of virtually every aspect of Biden’s housing “plan.” He is proposing little that is new. What he is proposing is spending tens of billions of dollars on programs that have failed in the past. According to altruism, we should suspend our own judgment and trust the “experts.” We are supposed to ignore the past and pretend that this time will somehow be different.
An orgy of spending is not going to solve the housing crisis. The crisis wasn’t caused by a lack of money. It was caused by the culture’s unquestioned embrace of altruism.