Bringing Adam Smith Into the American Home: A Case Against Home Ownership

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.

Author: Jack Ryan, John Tamny
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 04/16/2024
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.50w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9798888451946

About the Author
Jack Ryan has been described as the renegade of the $3 trillion residential real estate industry. He is the co-founder of REX--the digital alternative to the Realtor(TM). Jack began interacting with the US Department of Justice and State Attorneys General Offices in 2018. He has successfully pointed out that the price-fix engineered by the realty industry is a cartel larger than OPEC in terms of the amount of money transferred from middle-class Americans to industry. His commentary had been published in the Wall Street Journal and by prominent antitrust organizations. Jack has founded other successful companies and has served on the boards of private and public companies. Prior to these business activities, Jack taught at Hales Franciscan High School on Chicago's south side. Before joining Hales Franciscan High School, he was a partner at Goldman Sachs & Co where he worked from 1985 to 2001. He participated in both investment banking and securities trading activities. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College summa cum laude, and Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School with honors. He currently resides in Austin, Texas.

John Tamny is president of the Parkview Institute, editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior fellow at the Market Institute, and senior economic adviser to mutual fund firm Applied Finance Group. He frequently writes about the securities markets, along with tax, trade, and monetary policy issues that impact those markets for a variety of publications including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and RealClearMarkets. Tamny is the author of six books. His latest is The Money Confusion (All Seasons Press). Others are When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason (Post Hill Press), which was released in 2021, Popular Economics (Regnery, 2015), a primer on economics, Who Needs the Fed? (Encounter Books, 2016) about the central bank's onrushing economic irrelevance, The End of Work (Regnery, 2018), which discusses the exciting evolution of jobs that don't feel at all like work, along with 2019's They're Both Wrong: A Policy Guide for America's Frustrated Independent Thinkers (AIER).