Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home

Book excerpt: Get ready to have everything you’ve ever believed about housing and homeownership challenged. In Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home, authors Jack Ryan and John Tamny make a powerful case that the purchase of a home slows wealth attainment—rendering owners immobile in ways that further restrain their wealth chances—and that the act of homeownership deprives owners of the time and ability to do what they do best, which further dampens individual economic achievement. Thanks to the residential real estate pricing cartel, homeownership has become so costly that it has erected wildly expensive barriers to the very mobility that powers so much individual prosperity. As the cartel prospers, homebuyers and sellers alike suffer its rigidity. Ryan and Tamny call for the evisceration of realtor commissions—the only price in all of capitalism that has not come down even a little over the decades despite capitalism’s brilliant track record of bringing down the price of everything. Ryan, owner of a national residential realty business, recognizes that the very commissions realtors cling to are paradoxically harming them, all the while discreetly but powerfully shrinking prosperity for everyone else. In a book chock-full of insights from Adam Smith, author of the greatest economics book ever written, Ryan and Tamny make their highly original argument available for all as they reveal the truth about the housing market and homeownership.