Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the

elites don't want you to know. You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.

Everybody, Tom Woods here. It is episode 2, 342 and I'm delighted to be joined once again by Brian Kaplan.

You know him from previous books like The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, I just love that

provocative title and great book we did an episode on that he's a professor of

economics at George Mason University and we're talk about his most recent book,

Build, Baby Build, the Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation.

Welcome back, Brian.

Fantastic to be here, Tom.

All right, this is an extremely timely book because if there's one thing you hear being said over and over again by younger people these days, the kind of people just starting out their lives who are, you might have been anticipating buying a house sometime

down the road feel like the situation is just hopeless like they'll never ever be able to buy

a house in this environment I think it's driving their attitudes about life in general.

I think it's that one ingredient, apart from other price inflation, but really housing in particular has led to a feeling of

despair among a lot of people. Absolutely. I mean I say probably the main thing that's

going on is that people feel like I got to live with my parents until I'm 30 that's the only way to go

through life which does obviously have big effects for marriage and fertility and everything else

well of course we want to get into what exactly and costs gone up and those have been passed on to the consumer.

There are a bunch of possible explanations, but you have a very plausible

argument in here that deregulation would make a substantial dent, in fact

you go so far as to say it's entirely possible that deregulation could cut housing prices by 50%. Now if you can make a case that that's a plausible

outcome you would think that all but the most died in the wool ideologues would say

well then let's implement it. Yeah so so by the way, so I do say something stronger than that.

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