[ivewonyoung]

> Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity

I can easily live a full and meaningful life without owning gold, drinking cocoa or eating mustard. Those aren't essential and have decent substitutes.

Electricity is essential, just like housing and it's very highly regulated.

[mhb]

That's overly reductive. I was hoping that the specific commodities weren't going to be the focus, but I guess that was naive.

If you're going to use "housing" as an umbrella for its substitutes, let me do the same. Instead of wheat, beef, pork, cocoa, sugar, etc, let's call that "food". So now food is as essential as housing. Why doesn't the housing complaint against speculators work for food speculators?

[quantpunk]

The argument is either intellectually dishonest or you just really haven't thought this through very deep and are just puppeting this neoliberal bullshit.

We could start with I have traded wheat futures and could hedge with future contracts on all those commodities. You can't trade single family home derivatives in the same way because it is not the same.

This is unthinking market religion stupidity and the result is going to be a massive over correction towards socialism. You don't help free markets with this bullshit. You are helping to destroy them in the long run.