I have linked here to many pieces first spotted for me by The Browser, a well designed site which does nothing but identify interesting bits of work and link to them. Like the simple and superb Arts & Letters Daily but in a posher outfit. Why, in its early halcyon days it even linked to some of my own offerings here and elsewhere. There was no obvious ideological top-spin.

But then the mood … changed. It started to appeal to a more transatlantic readership, perhaps because the money to keep the site going was coming more from the USA than the UK. And, worse, a perceptible slant towards the sort of writing adored by New York Democrats and progressives/liberals came to the fore. Not that that is all bad. Much of it is still good. The slant is tedious, predictable – there is more than enough of that sort of thing about already.

Take this truly idiotic Browser summary of a piece not from New York but from our own Guardian:

Shocking report from London. Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about free markets, capitalism, society?   

Here is that piece. It describes at some length the fact that in London pressures on housing primarily caused by immigration, illegal or otherwise, are creating all sorts of ad hoc solutions. The journalist has been doing the rounds with some local government officials checking on informal shacks and other improvised or sub-standard dwellings that are appearing profusely:

"We don’t know where her toilet effluent is going to," Christine Lyons, the council’s planning enforcement team leader, says, peering anxiously to the side of the building.

Converted sheds have become an increasingly mainstream – if illegal – part of the London property market. It’s a logical development, given the explosion of property prices throughout the capital, and the huge shortage of supply. As central London becomes more expensive, people are pushed further out and rental prices even in Newham, which is the second most deprived borough in England and Wales, are rising fast.

Landlords are subdividing family homes into smaller and smaller units, haphazardly extending plumbing and electricity connections from the main properties into the garden sheds and garages, which they have no problem in renting out.

Newham’s mayor, Sir Robin Wales, is dismayed. "It’s big money. You get a few breeze blocks, sling up some crappy old shed in your back garden, and now you’re making hundreds and hundreds of pounds a week. It doesn’t take long for you to make a lot of money out of it, provided you are prepared to trade in human misery…

And so on. When Tony Blair allowed over a million Poles and other central Europeans to flock to London and the rest of the UK when Poland joined the EU, where did they all go? Now we know, but it’s OK:

Planning officials are less concerned about the large numbers of young men, often from eastern Europe, who share rooms and rents, saving money to take home. It is when there are families crowded into unhygienic conditions that they become more agitated…

Shocking!

Lyons is still occasionally shocked by what she sees. "Sometimes you can’t believe you are not in a third-world country," she says.

Well, what is a third-world country? A country with lots of people from the ‘third world’ in it. And when large numbers of such people come to parts of London, those parts of London may well start to look more like the newcomers’ places of origin. Why so surprised?

Anyway, my main complaint about the article is not the article, which is fine as far as it goes, ie not far enough to make the obvious point that far too many poor foreigners are now living here illegally and that no conceivable policy solutions exist for this fact, other than to strive a damn sight harder to stop illegal immigration.

Rather it is the Browser summary, as above. The article itself commendably does not mention ‘capitalism’ or ‘free markets’. Yet the Browser makes an explicitly sneering banal #occupy reference to them, as if they had caused the problems described in the article.

Let’s nonetheless answer the question posed:

Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about free markets, capitalism, society?  

First, it says that we are not too far off getting a free market in people – that’s what illegal immigration (or ‘economic migration’ as it is progressively known these days) is. Nursery school economics tell us that if more people chase after a more or less fixed supply of goods (here rooms in London) the price of those rooms will go up, and somehow the free market will start to find more rooms. Plus these immigrants don’t have much money to pay on rent, so the rooms they get will be cheap and maybe even nasty.

All these things are happening just as basic economic thinking predicts. Indeed, without people converting sheds into informal living spaces, where would these immigrants in fact live?

It is trivially stupid to expect any society to absorb an unending number of new people from beyond its borders without considerable difficulty. The national arrangements in any country are created by the people who have lived there for generations for their own benefit. Housing stocks represent a country’s investment in capital according to some sort of long-term rational basis. No-one can plan – or should be expected to plan – for a free-for-all.

In short, the answer to the Browser‘s snide question is that the article tells us that, as always, the free market and ‘capitalism’ are simply the mirror in which you see Reality. And whatever the problem here is, they are going to be the main way to solve it.

An honest Browser summary would have been:

Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about Labour’s reckless immigration policies aimed at wholesale social engineering of the British population?

But their prissy New York liberal sponsors and readers just might not want to see it all looked at that way.