Irish Examiner view: Home prices soaring, conscience, ambition all too absent

Our crisis is no longer about housing or property but rather one of exploitation

Irish house prices jumped by more than 13% in the last year, far, far ahead of any wage inflation. 

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt intensified his life-long campaign to win the White House in 1932, he gathered a Praetorian guard of policy experts to shape the arguments that saw him transform America by being elected president four times.

One was Rexford G Tugwell, who entered Harvard aged 14 and graduated four years later. In the early 1930s, he and Gardner C Means wrote The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a seminal book that dealt with the threat posed by the concentration of economic power. They warned of violent revolution, but revolution did not transpire in America. It did on the other side of the Atlantic — in Germany, with catastrophic consequences for the world.