So Canada has now allowed the forty year mortgage, which is lovely. Now the bank owns not half of your productive life as it did at the previous 25 year level, but all of your productive life. Yes all of it. And probably some of your children’s. And god forbid that at any point in the next forty years something should happen be it job loss, sickness, family problems, etc etc. Then all the money you’ve spent you’re entire life pouring into that money pit, including upgrades, repairs and maintenance, will be gone as the bank swoops in and forecloses. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the real estate market will just drop and you will spend those forty years paying off that massive mortgage in order to continue to own you’re now moderatly priced house. But none of those things will happen, it’s only forty years and its obviously clear sailing the whole way. Can’t you tell? Just squint. There you go.

And think of the freedom! Forty years where you can’t move, change your job, invest, educate your kids, retire. Good times.

So it’s now 90% of new buyers taking the Slave Plan Forty (as opposed to Ricky and Julians Freedom 35 where you just grow some dope and get your life back together. Live humbly, simply and as stoned and drunk as possible. Actually, their lifestyle is not only looking more attractive, its looking more and more like the only intelligent option!)

Anyway, this is clearly an economic device to extend the already burgeoning real estate bubble on the backs of the foolish middle class. Poor buggers will now be paying twice the interest they used to. “Experts” even predict more “mortgage innovations,” although upping forty year mortgages to fifty year mortgages hardly seems that innovative (Those masters of economics programs really bring out the high quality thinkers.)

So let’s have hundred year mortgages! Let’s bring back hereditary slavery! Hurray!!!

The long lie continues. When women’s lib came and got women careers people thought the double income would make families wealthier, instead housing costs increased to match so that double income suddenly just covers the house. So everyone works harder, thinking that is the way to get more. Again costs adjust and now everyone has to work extended hours just to get by. So everyone borrows more. Costs adjust. Mortgages are extended, people borrow more again. Costs adjust etc etc, et al, ad nauseum. Meanwhile, all this extra wealth gets sucked up by the banks and the poor get poorer, the kids are home alone and we’ve all worked ourselves into burnt out little husks that once resembled people but we aren’t sure anymore, we’re all too busy trying not to be homeless to check.

This is unregulated capitalism, and obviously it gets us nowhere. Banks are like a wild animal, they will eat you and your children and not give it a second thought. Like other dangerous animals they need to be caged. If we don’t cage this beast we’ll be right back in the thirties, having to pull out the ol’ shotgun and tell the bank man to get the fuck off my land!