Over the past half-century, few ideals have loomed larger in the American mythos than the "security of owning a home" and the "freedom of the open road." In service to those ideals, the federal government—and to a lesser extent, state and local governments—has doled out trillions of dollars in tax expenditures, subsidies, and direct spending. From the mortgage interest and property tax deductions, to general fund transfers into the Highway Trust Fund and military involvement overseas to protect the country's oil interests, we spend lavishly to promote homeownership and to ensure that private automobiles remain as inexpensive and convenient as possible.

To some degree, these efforts are understandable. Commendable, even. Though it's far from the best investment, for many Americans home equity is the only significant form of retirement savings, especially as pensions are pared back and social security is under siege politically. Likewise, though we've gone far overboard in the construction of roads and highways in this country, the historical argument for the interstate highway system was strong on economic grounds. (The defense argument for the interstate system was secondary at best.) Since their inception, however, these programs have grown less and less effective as their costs have ballooned.

The case against homeownership subsidies has been litigated thoroughly in recent years. The housing market has been heavily distorted in favor of sprawl, mostly as a result of how skewed spending has been toward single-family homes, at the expense of multi-family residences. Most of the $80 billion a year spent on the mortgage interest tax deduction goes to families earning more than $100,000 a year. Encouraging greater amounts of investment in the housing sector means less investment elsewhere, and promotes zero-sum housing scarcity. And though we saw an impressive increase in the homeownership rate between 1995 and 2005, much of that gain seems now to have been illusory: