Listed $140,000 Below Its Value
Denver Just One Market Where Houses Sell For A Fraction of Their Worth
This headline, found on the AOL Homepage’s opening gallery, proves both how little we have learned from the current economic crises, and how much worse things may get because of that. A house can not, by definition, be sold for less than it is worth or for a price below its value. The price at which any object sells IS its value or worth. And the failure to appreciate that fact, was, and will continue to be, a major factor in creating today’s economic woes.

From home owners on Main Street to brokers on Wall Street, people insisted that things were worth what they wanted them to be worth, not what they actually were worth. Whether driven by greed, stupidity or a perverse sense of entitlement, that belief is deeply destructive and apparently still quite prevalent. If it were not, then AOL could not get away with this kind of headline.
Washington can pour another 700 billion dollars into the market and it will accomplish nothing if we do not all begin to re-think our own relationship to the things we own and what they are worth. Don’t get me wrong, I am no anti-materialist. But when our desires become so disconnected from reality that we actually create fantasy concepts of material value, then it’s not only our economy that demands examination but our core values as individuals and as a nation.
The sages of the Mishna ask, who is wealthy? The best answer is, “the one who is happy with what he has”. How so? Wealth is as much an internally constructed reality as it is a function of what we possess. If we feel rich, then who is to say we are not? But if we always need more, we will never have enough. And that feeling of never having enough compels us to inflate the value of what we have or to seek ways of getting more than we responsibly can, all as ways to meet that endless need.
It is at this point that an economic crisis becomes a spiritual or ethical crisis. And without delighting in seeing a whole new homeless population emerge, because “it’s what they deserve”, we better own up to our role in this crises. If we don’t, then far from the beginning of the end of our current troubles, the government bail out will be the beginning of its beginning.