So you are saying Cory is mis-using the term? I didn’t think I was confused about laissez faire economics until I read what you wrote. Here is a neat summary from the article that explains how Britain got to this point and I see nothing but intervention rather than free market:
“First, the government sold people homes it owned at a huge discount. Then it allowed the original buyers to keep the profit when they sold those homes to a private landlord at market price. Then the government artificially raised market rents by choking off supply – by making it impossible for councils to replace the sold-off houses. Then it paid those artificially high rents to the same private landlords in the form of housing benefit – many times higher than the housing benefit it would have paid had the houses remained in council hands.”
And now here’s the approach to the solution. Again, where is laissez faire?
" The coalition’s two most explicit interventions in the housing market have been to restrict supply and raise prices: the first when it cut, by two thirds, the grant given to housing associations to build new homes, and the second with its mocking parody of Right to Buy, ‘Help to Buy’, offering already well-off people cheap loans to overbid for overpriced houses they couldn’t otherwise afford."
