KEY POINTS:
The onset of winter seems to have brought with it an air of surrealism - judging by the newspapers I've been reading since returning from a two-week break.
People who sensibly "invested" in a rising housing market are now deemed "speculators" - those of a certain "ilk" whose decisions to use 100 per cent mortgage finance at fixed rates and offset any rental losses against other income apparently puts them in the same category as the historic money-changers who must be swept from the temple at all costs.
People who borrowed large at 17 to acquire a car and outfit it with mag wheels then spent $6000 on a bed and refrigerator from Harvey Norman and a washing machine and dryer from Hill & Stewart and kept tallying up the debt to the extent they found themselves in such a spiral that they had to return home to live with their parents instead of being in their own house at 21 are portrayed as a salutary story for the rest of us.
These people - like those who resort to loan sharks for finance to pay their bills because they're giving far too much to the local church - seem to be members of the deserving poor whereas the investors who tried to pave a way for the future by acquiring a rental property are speculators.
It's a common enough story right now as we seek to explain strong house prices and growing household debt.
But I'm not sure that blame-seeking - particularly where one sector of society is demonised at the expense of others - is the right answer to these perceived problems.
In the case of landlords, the rationale goes that if we hit these people with capital gains taxes and/or legislate to ring-fence any rental losses so they cannot be offset to reduce taxable incomes, over-stretched investors will be forced to sell - thus the entry price for new house owners will be lower.
The rationale is an attractive one and no doubt suits those people who think it will result in some sort of biblical retaliation against those who dared to try to make a buck from property investing.
But if residential property prices plummet it will not just be the so-called "speculators" who will be punished.
When prices fall it will not just be rental properties that plunge but house prices across the board, resulting in diminishing on-paper wealth for people who already happen to own houses. This includes baby boomers who are planning to downsize to smaller homes to help fund their retirements or raise mortgages against them to help their adult children into their own homes.
If prices fall too far, other house owners - particularly first-home owners who acquired 90 per cent finance to get into their houses - might find themselves in a negative equity situation where their banks ask them to inject more capital or face higher interest levies.
The baby boomers will probably just stay put and (in some cases) let their adult children sponge off them until the market turns and it is safe to invest again.
Is this really the outcome we seek when we respond in Pavlovian fashion to the politicians' rumbles over an "out-of-control" housing market?
The behavioural patterns we do not address are these: too much easy money lent by banks, a tendency by young people to want to buy everything new instead of "doing without" till they can afford that first home (and not necessarily at 21!).
Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard has hinted at tackling the easy money issue by changing banks' capital requirements. Bollard also tried to make his own monetary policy interventions more responsive by proposing a mortgage interest levy.
But he was shouted down by the politicians and faced allegations that he was on an interventionist path.
What Bollard has yet to do is tackle the cost of commercial money.
Banks used to have differential rates for residential first homes and so-called commercial properties. Even now businesses, for instance, do not get working capital from banks at first-mortgage rates.
Under this scenario landlords would have to pay more for commercial finance, thus providing a brake on how much they were prepared to stump up to acquire extra assets. Banks also used to more strictly enforce rules on minimum deposits of free capital to put down on second properties - this again is an area that could usefully be looked at.
Finance companies and credit card companies used to more strictly enforce rules against excess borrowing so that young people could not pony up debt-serving levels that were beyond their means.
The problem with the current solutions that are being advocated in response to the perception that New Zealand is infatuated with the housing market is that they are geared towards deflating the market overall rather than simply reducing easy gains for investors.
Let's not punish those who are investing in hard assets without thinking through the consequences.
