It’s daylight robbery all over again. In the late 1600s, King William III in England imposed a window tax with tax collectors literally walking around homes, counting the number of windows and sending the homeowners the tax bill.

The logical response was, of course, that many people simply boarded up their windows, throwing their homes into darkness. And some people say that it was this tax that coined the phrase daylight robbery because that’s what the tax was, robbing the common folk of sunlight itself. In reality, the term daylight robbery more likely came from brazen highway robbers who would strike in the middle of the day instead of under the cover of darkness. But whatever the origin of the phrase, I think it’s fair to say that a window tax, literally taxing people for letting the sun into their homes, is indeed daylight robbery.

The window tax, of course, led to Rickets and a host of other health issues among the community. And yet, the tax remained in place for over 150 years until the 1850s. Even today, if you go to England, you’ll see a surprising number of buildings with windows that are still bricked up completely. An enduring reminder of one of the dumbest taxes in history. But if you think that such idiocies can only happen in the past, I have a question for you. Do you use all of the bedrooms in your house?

Because a recent report right here in Australia has recommended that it’s time to start taxing underused bedrooms for the greater good, of course. Now to be clear, this is just a thought bubble from a research head at a company called Totality. Basically, a real estate research and data company. This is not a serious proposal being considered by the Australian government or any other Australian state. But nevertheless, this report and this impending tax on bedrooms has gone viral with massive mainstream media coverage, including from the taxpayer funded ABC and SBS and I smell a rat.

Because I don’t think the government plans to bring in a spare bedroom tax, but I do think that they’ll use the idea of a bedroom tax as leverage to get us to accept whatever other taxes they do decide to bring in. And here’s the kicker. As I’ve covered before here on the Topher project, your family home is already 50% tax. You’ve already paid your fair share and then some on your home. But the whole reason your home is so expensive in the first place and the reason that all new construction houses are three, four, or even five bedrooms is because of government.

Not only is this spare bedroom problem not actually a problem, even if it were a problem, it would be a direct consequence of the government’s actions in the first place. And the trap here is that the government will use the threat of a bedroom tax to get us to accept land taxes or other terrible ideas to fix this problem because those are less bad than a bedroom tax. Which makes this bedroom tax idea dangerous even though it hasn’t come from the government and even though I don’t think it will ever become law.

We’ll talk about how I expect this to play out in just a moment. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate this sort of no-nonsense analysis of what’s happening in Australia, then please head over to topherfield.net and buy me a coffee via the button that looks like this. And if you don’t yet have a copy of my books, DVDs, or any of my t-shirts, hoodies, and long sleeve tees, then head over to goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

So, we’re being told that we’re evil if we have underutilized bedrooms in our house. Now, most houses have only one or two occupants, but they have three to five bedrooms. And I don’t think that that’s any of the government’s business, but let’s entertain them for a moment and talk about why modern houses are typically so large. Modern homes have four or five bedrooms for the same reason that modern cars have five to eight seats, even though most of the time there is only one person inside.

It’s because building a car with fewer seats isn’t really that much cheaper when you consider that most of the cost of building a car comes from the fact that no matter what size it is, it still has to be fully engineered. Has to pass safety tests, emissions tests, have all of the expected equipment. It’s got to have wheels and tires and paint and a showroom and dealers. So, deleting a couple of seats and maybe making the car a little bit smaller really isn’t going to improve the price by enough to make people want to buy it.

The per vehicle costs that don’t change with the reduction in seats is why two-seater cars are actually a luxury item that people pay extra for and they’re not really an economy item at all.

The same is true of houses, which is why two-bedroom apartments actually tend to be aimed at luxury buyers, just like two-seater cars are aimed at luxury buyers. They’re not realistic options for most people because oftentimes they’re not even cheaper. And if they are, the reduction in practicality means that they’re actually worse value than a more expensive but substantially bigger house or car would be, even for people who live by themselves or drive by themselves.

And this is because by the time a developer or a builder has got all of their qualifications, their insurances, their permits, the financing costs, the approvals, the structural, energy and environmental stamps of approval. Not to mention these days indigenous heritage overlays and all the other limiting factors in the planning and the zoning, minimum land sizes, etc. By the time they’ve covered all of those costs, irrespective of what size building they’re going to build, it no longer makes sense to build anything less than the maximum that they can pack onto that 400 sq meter block of land in the same way that it makes no sense to not put five seats into a typical car.

And yeah, there are exceptions for certain market niches, but those are generally people who are willing and able to pay more for less because they like it that way. These don’t tend to be mass market solutions in the same way that two-seater sports cars are not mass market solutions.

And so government is the reason why two-bedroom single-story humble brick units are no longer being built in this country. They used to be everywhere, three or four to a block. Now you can’t find them. Government is the reason why developers are squeezing the biggest houses possible onto the smallest blocks you could imagine. Government is the reason why we have so many spare bedrooms in this country to begin with. But more important than that, it’s none of the government’s damn business whether or not we are using all of the rooms in our house and what we are using them for.

It would be a mistake, in my opinion, for us to enter into a debate about whether people are justified having four bedrooms when there’s only two people living in the house because that’s quite simply not within the jurisdiction of government. It is none of their damn business. It’s like your boss having an opinion about where you’re going to go on your annual leave. Sorry, boss. None of your damn business. My time off belongs to me. Sorry, government. None of your damn business. My bedrooms, my house belong to me.

Except, let me remind you, this isn’t actually coming from the government. This is just a thought bubble from an out-of-touch economist, or as Flat White dubbed them in The Spectator, an e-communist who thinks that just because she can measure something, therefore she can fix it with a tax. Of course, I’ll say it again. This isn’t government policy, and it’s not coming in as government policy anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.

This thought bubble has been given a suspiciously large amount of airtime in the mainstream media, particularly I can’t help but notice in the taxpayer funded ABC and SBS.

It’s like they’re either barracking for the idea or perhaps more accurately that they want us to believe that this is a live option that really is being considered. Why? Well, in my opinion, this is all a part of a negotiation tactic known as anchoring and adjustment.

If your car starts making a bad noise and you go into the mechanic and they say, “Wow, that noise sounds bad.” Could be your flux capacitor. Maybe your improbability drive is broken. It’s going to need a sonic screwdriver and possibly a new pan-dimensional shade of the color blue. This is probably a $3,000 problem, but I’ll have to do some investigations to confirm. So, you take a deep breath, bracing yourself for a $3,000 bill, and you leave the car with them for investigation. They call you back later that day with the good news. Turns out it’s only a $1,600 problem. Phew, what a relief.

They’ve manufactured a sense of relief whilst taking an enormous bite out of your wallet through anchoring and adjustment. Anchoring your expectations in something really bad and then adjusting to something less bad. Hairbrained ideas like this bedroom tax are useful to politicians not because they plan to implement those ideas but because we anchor our fears in those terrible ideas and they can manufacture a sense of relief.

They anchor your fears into the worst case scenario and then adjust to something better but still bad. Something which you would have fought tooth and nail had they simply done that thing. But now they do the exact same thing but you feel relieved while they do it because oh at least it’s not that other thing that your fears were anchored in. I think that’s the play here. I think we’re going to see the government come out and rule out a bedroom tax because it goes too far. But they’re going to bring in something much more reasonable.

And they’ll be applauded for it, for being balanced, for rejecting the extreme options from the fringe and finding something in the middle. Except it’s not in the middle. All of this, this whole spectrum, it’s all coming from the fevered imaginations of tax hungry politicians, communists, Marxists in disguise. And this particular bedroom tax was simply picked up by the mainstream media and turned into a frenzy for the express purpose of making the next socialist idea that does come from the government look reasonable.

They are manufacturing consent. And in fact, they’re manufacturing a sense of relief while they relieve you of ever more of your own hard-earned money. The fact is that we have every right to live in whatever home we decide suits us for reasons that only we ever need to know. We don’t have to explain ourselves. And as I’ve covered extensively here on the Topher project, we’re already taxed to death on our own homes. And by the time someone pays their mortgage off, they will have already paid the purchase price of their home in taxes to the government.

The fact is, a bedroom tax won’t fix the housing affordability or housing availability crisis for the simple reason that people building an additional bedroom on their new home didn’t create the crisis in the first place.

It’s government that is making affordable housing impossible to build. It just doesn’t make sense for builders or developers not to build that fourth or fifth bedroom on every single home that they build. And the government is the reason for that.

I want every Australian to be able to afford a home to live in. But people building additional bedrooms at the behest of the government aren’t the reason why other people are living under a bridge. One of these things did not lead to the other. Government is the cause of the housing affordability and housing availability crisis. But mark my words, government will use this hairbrained non-idea of a bedroom tax as cover to ram through some other less bad tax that will then punish us all for the crime of buying the homes that government forced builders and developers to build.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please, if you appreciate what I do, bringing you clarity and perspective from an Australian perspective, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching to the end. The algorithm loves you and so do I. Please like, comment, subscribe, share, and check out this video that YouTube thinks you will like.

And as always, think free.