Today, while clean­ing house, I came across a cache of older mag­a­zines ripe for recy­cling and spot­ted this head­line on a copy of the May 2006 Harper’s: “The New Road to Serf­dom: An Illus­trated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Col­lapse, by Michael Hudson.” Curi­ous, I looked inside, and sure enough found this item of star­tling prescience:

With the real estate boom, the great mass of Amer­i­cans can take on colos­sal debt today and real­ize colos­sal cap­i­tal gains–and the con­comi­tant ren­tier life of leisure–tomor­row. If you have the where­withal to fill out a mort­gage appli­ca­tion, then you need never work again. What could be more invit­ing–or, for that matter, more egalitarian?

That’s the pitch, anyway. The real­ity is that, although home own­er­ship may be wise choice for many people, this par­tic­u­lar real estate bubble has been care­fully engi­neered to lure home buyers into cir­cum­stances detri­men­tal to their own best inter­ests. The bait is easy money. The trap is a modern equiv­a­lent to peon­age, a life­time spent work­ing to pay off debt on an asset of rapidly dwin­dling value.

Most every­one involved in the real estate bubble thus far has made at least a few dol­lars. But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a land­lord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servi­tude of debt serfdom.

It doesn’t sur­prise me that this arti­cle left no mental trace if and when I came across it two years ago. Its sub­ject and style are so com­pletely of a piece with the the kind of eco­nomic arti­cles that one expects from Harper’s that I prob­a­bly gave it no more heed than I’ve given sim­i­lar exam­ples from this month’s issue (Wen­dell Berry’s “Faustian Eco­nom­ics: Hell hath no limits” and Kevin Phillips’s “Numbers Racket: Why the econ­omy is worse than we know”). In fact, if I’ve got one real crit­i­cism of the Harper’s edi­to­r­ial approach to policy sub­jects, it’s this: their authors cry wolf so often that it’s nigh impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the sig­nals from the noise.

And yet you’ve got to hand it to Hudson: writ­ing two years ago–one full year before anyone had really begun to wonder about the state of the real estate market–he got things exactly right. Check out his web­site for some of his more recent work.