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.