>It is difficult to ski without skis. But most people don't buy skis, they rent them. Renting skis do not mean that no skis will be manufactured.
That's a ridiculous analogy. Renting vs. buying skis is like renting a hotel room vs. buying a condo when you spend a weekend in a different city. There's a good reason hotels are profitable businesses: no one wants to buy a home if they're going to spend 2 weeks or less in a location.
A better analogy is cars: what kind of moron would rent a car for commuting to work every day? No one, because it'd be a massive waste of money. Rental cars are for people who only need a car occasionally, or who are traveling by air and can't bring their own car with them. Otherwise, it's much cheaper to just own your own car, so you aren't paying tons of money to some company in the form of profit.
>Stocks and savings are equally a safety net against loss of primary income.
The 2008 crash disproves this, as does every stock market crash throughout history. Right at the moment you need that money the most, because the crash caused you to lose your job, your stock portfolio has tanked. This isn't the case with houses: if you own your house outright, you're safe (as long as you keep paying property tax, which is minimal in many places), and even with a mortgage, the terms of the mortgage are constant so you can budget for the payment and keep that much liquid cash on hand. Rent, OTOH, can change whenever your lease expires, or even at any time if you're on a month-to-month lease.
>The cost of housing (renting) would be much lower in a country without massive over-bidding on property.
And which country is that? Somalia? Every time I've looked at rents in Europe, they're much higher than here in the US, along with cost of living in general, even after our price inflation in the wake of the 2008 crash.
The simple fact is that, when you rent, part of your rental price goes to pay for profit for whoever owns the property. If there were no (or little) profit in it, no one would bother being a property owner. When you own something, you take the middleman out of the equation.
Do you also think it's a good idea to rent things like computers, printers, phones, furniture, appliances, clothes, cars, etc.?
