House price fall "accelerating"

Generali

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

They tried, I'm old enough to have lived in "A land fit for heroes",

Was that post WWII? I know post WW1 there was the Homes for Heroes campaign to build 100k+ homes/year which worked very well for about 3 years.

John_Pierpoint

Many thanks squatnow and Generali, for your useful addition to my education.

On the subject of "land fit for heroes"; a bit of poking about on the net suggests that Lloyd George was first with the sound bite, but he might have said "a fit land for heroes to live in" during WW1.

I've never really understood how 4 years of madness killed millions, what were they dying for? In the few years after that war the "Zeitgeist" seemed to be "Lets get back to Edwardian values but with more fun". The war did not change much on the surface, but it did weaken the country economically.

The second time around, the generals and the civil service had learned a trick or two. Not much chance of it being over by "Christmas" this time. A command economy was put into place. It realised the importance of socialist principles for getting everyone to pull together. This time round a lot of civilians were in the front line and the USSR did most of the fighting. There really was a cause worth dying for. So it is not surprising when the German empire was found to be rotten to the core, that the "Zeitgeist" was "forward to a new society - never again". So "a land fit for heroes" was a useful slogan, even in a country with crushing debts.

Here is a link that I hope gives some more details of the economic policies at the time.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qN4NAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA459&lpg=PA459&dq=%22land+fit+for+heroes%22+%22labour+government%22&source=web&ots=J0ldhoyFL7&sig=1DJLzE2yFtVCLiMYWqixUDTYoSM#PPA459,M1
I sort of absorbed all this from my self employed accountant father, who was busy building a 3K house on a 1K plot.;)
It is hardly surprising that with a socialist government there was also a Land Value Tax, confusingly called "ScheduleA" (Probably the file used for land taxes for hundreds of years:rolleyes:), .

These ideas have not gone away; they surface again in this fairly recent document:
https://www.rics.org/NR/rdonlyres/E4136E7D-A332-4CEC-A454-588CBB37F6E9/0/FINALREPORT.doc
However the current love affair with overpriced real estate, makes it unlikely that a government will get elected on a platform of taxing land; and from experience of taxing gains (DLT), the latter tax is economically damaging as it simply results in land not being offered for development.

So wealthy land owners who can enjoy living on your rents, there is no need to worry that your privileges are under threat yet.:D