Long Live Free Construction, Damn It!

More Real Cement and Less Ideological Cement.

Stories about how we once ate bark to build our houses are amusing, but they are not instructive. Unfortunately, exact figures for Slovenia are not available, but comparable data from abroad show that housing is currently the least affordable it has been in the past 150 years. This means that experiences from the previous century are useless in this one, as building a house or buying an apartment was much easier back then than it is today.

The reason for the housing shortage and the long-term decline in homeownership among households lies in the misguided priorities of our governments. Instead of unleashing the creative forces in society and turning Slovenia into a construction site, it fights against creation and tries to solve problems through class struggle.

Because it dislikes entrepreneurship and private initiative, the ruling politics force us to choose between housing for young families, AirBNB tourism, or real estate investment—when in fact, we need all three for the future. Because it does not believe in the harm caused by excessive spatial and construction regulations, it searches for "saboteurs of the working people," blaming them for the housing shortage—our neighbors who dared to inherit, build, or even invest in more than one property. And it plans their expropriation with a new tax that, by exempting the first property instead of providing a general tax relief on its value, violates the fundamental principle of horizontal tax fairness—that people with equally valued properties should pay the same tax.

It is high time that, alongside the devalued concepts of sustainability, equality, and decarbonization, we inject some common sense into our housing policy.

A Thousand Times Nothing Killed the Donkey.

Let's make a provocative back-of-the-envelope calculation. Since independence, despite emigration, Slovenia's population has increased by approximately 130,000, while household size has decreased by half a person per household. These numbers mean that to maintain the same level of housing supply since independence, Slovenia would have had to build about 190,000 new apartments. This is not an argument against immigration—at least not useful immigration—but it is a motivation to consider whether our spatial and construction regulations allow for fast and large-scale housing construction to meet current needs. And a hint for those seriously considering this: "No."

If we take into account other factors, such as the shift in settlement patterns due to the centralization of the state and the ideological-political resistance to comfortable and economical personal transportation on beautiful and wide roads (which previously alleviated this issue), as well as increasingly stringent spatial and construction laws that have caused a real housing recession— leading to only half as many homes being built in the last decade compared to the previous one— then current housing prices are neither an enigma nor a conspiracy. They simply reflect the supply- demand ratio created by these restrictions.

There are simply too few homes. Politicians' dreams of vacant apartments that can just be fairly redistributed through taxation, solving everything, are as naïve as relying on abandoned railway tracks for a functioning transport infrastructure. For things to change, young people must stop believing that politics can solve this problem for them and instead demand that politics stop throwing obstacles in their way when they try to solve it themselves.

The answer to the question of how the shortage arose can be found in an ancient story about a father and son who tried to bring as many small items as possible down the valley on a donkey. Each kept piling on more until, in the end, the donkey collapsed and died. The moral of the story is: "A thousand times nothing killed the donkey."

This "nothing" that we have been piling onto the housing donkey every year since independence consists of spatial regulations, construction regulations, and government interventions in the market that prevent it from responding quickly enough to the population's needs. To enable fast and economical construction of new housing, we must abandon some harmful dogmas and practices on which the current complicated, expensive, and above all, dysfunctional system of housing supply is based.

"Let's Destroy All Nature."

First, we need to stop being afraid that we will "destroy all nature." I understand that politics scares us with the need to preserve at least some untouched nature for future generations, that farmland must be protected for self-sufficiency, and that forests are our greatest treasure. But these fears are unfounded. Slovenia is very large, and throughout millennia, we have managed to build on less than 4% of its land, including all buildings and infrastructure. More than 96% of our country remains unbuilt, and even if every household without a home tomorrow claimed 500 m² of land, it would require less than half a percent of Slovenia’s total area.

We do not need to ban dispersed construction, nor do we need to mandate the use of degraded land before releasing new land, nor should we pursue ideological environmental goals like the government's declared "0% net developable land" policy. The impact of home and apartment construction on these concerns is negligible. If we want cheap land in well-connected locations where it is economical to build, we must significantly increase the supply of developable land. And since this quantity is determined not by the market but by the state, all we need for lower land prices is political will.

Housing is Not a Human Right – A Shovel and a Concrete Mixer Are.

In the past, people could build homes according to their abilities—on cheap land, on their own, with the help of family and friends. Once the house was habitable, they moved in to avoid rent and finished construction gradually. Since then, we have managed to ban or significantly restrict all these useful practices. Due to social partners' demands to combat illegal work, we have banned family and friend assistance. Under the pretense of safety concerns, we have overregulated simple family home projects to the point where self-building, which was once feasible for workers with an eighth-grade education, has become too complex even for highly educated people—not technically, but legally and bureaucratically. Moving into a house without an occupancy permit is now strictly punished with fines, and state-owned utility companies even help enforce this by cutting off water and electricity "for your safety."

The previous generation was able to lower the cost of their homes with compromise solutions that are no longer allowed today. For example, if certain utilities were not available on a plot of land and therefore made it cheaper, people built rainwater collection tanks and septic tanks. They could choose cheaper insulation and heating systems better suited to their circumstances. Today, such practices are either blocked at the spatial planning stage, made difficult by the building permit process, or outright banned.

We are still among the wealthier countries in the region. Prefabricated houses from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia are still affordable for Slovenian households with an average salary.However, our construction regulations prevent us from building them. If you somehow manage to adapt such a house to meet all our technical requirements and it still remains affordable, then some last-minute bureaucratic nonsense will stop you anyway—perhaps a zoning requirement specifying the allowed color of the facade or the permitted roof slope and type.

And if all of this seems truly ridiculous to you, and you believe that a family should have a home of their own choosing and not one dictated by neighbors or people who lived in the region 300 years ago, then—they will explain to you that you are just a Gypsy from Rakova Jelša.

"Long Live Socialist Yugoslavia, and Down with Socialism!"

Young people today rightly ask why workers can no longer build their homes when they actually could in Yugoslavia. The answer is not socialism. Three out of four homes in Yugoslavia were not built by the state but by the people themselves. The Jazbinšek Law privatized only 160,000 state apartments—today, Slovenia has 865,000 apartments. The reason people were so creative lies in Yugoslavia’s informal construction liberalism. Older communists knew, unlike the younger ones, that socialism is something you talk about, not something you actually do, and that people need to survive the state’s care. Ironically, the former totalitarian system was less repressive about breaking irrational rules than today’s democracy—resulting in one in seven buildings being illegal at the time of independence.

It’s the Regulation, Stupid.

Today's spatial and construction restrictions are mostly written by detached ideologues at the behest of lobbyists. They are designed for a specific class of people who can afford them, while everyone else is blocked from home ownership by the ban on cheaper alternatives. If you disagree and believe these regulations are well-intentioned, ask yourself: How is it that the same people who regulate your carport for "safety" never thought to require fire escapes and alarms in school dormitories—still unregulated in Slovenia?

Our constitution states that the state creates conditions for everyone to obtain suitable housing. A housing policy in line with this should focus on the cost of new housing and evaluate all regulations by their impact on affordability.

Perhaps after independence, EU accession, NATO membership, and adopting the euro, it’s time for a new goal: enabling every Slovenian to build their own home by removing unnecessary obstacles and rewriting spatial, construction, and environmental laws from scratch—simply enough for everyone to understand. By doing so, we won’t just improve housing access but also boost demographics and social security for all.

Liberty Settlements: Reclaiming Land, Restoring Hope

The Five Delusions Driving Slovenia’s Failing Housing Policy

The amendment to the housing act focuses primarily on strengthening the public rental market and state interventionism in the housing sector. Both have been seen by the socialist government as remedies for decades—remedies that never work. Yet they are so fond of them that with every term, they increase the dosage, hoping that this time it will be different. Now, in addition to their traditional measures, they are proposing a ban on individuals using platforms like Airbnb as small businesses, stripping countless families of an important source of supplementary income. At the same time, they plan to spend billions on building vast complexes of state-owned apartments, designed to make people increasingly dependent on government handouts—primarily targeting second-generation migrants as one their main client bases. Let’s outline five main delusions of this snake oil for our housing market.

The first delusion crept into our housing policy from the previous system. Back then, some people received state-owned apartments, and many of them still believe today that in Slovenia, everyone got their own property thanks to the so-called Jazbinšek Law. But the numbers tell a different story. Under that law, 160,000 contracts were signed, yet Slovenia has 864,000 dwellings. For every Jazbinšek apartment, five private single-family houses were built before and during socialism. Today, two out of three Slovenians live in those houses. Our housing prosperity doesn't rest on "Tito’s" socialist apartments but on single-family homes that people built themselves.

The second delusion is the belief that we need to create a state fund of non-profit rental apartments, which would then “circulate” among those who need them. It hardly needs explaining that moving into a state-owned, non-profit apartment is like winning the lottery for the average Janez Slehernik; once there, he’ll stay forever and try to pass the right down to his descendants. As a result, circulation in practice never happens.

The third delusion is that the state will solve young people’s housing problems by building state-owned apartments with non-profit rents. With an average of 200 new state apartments per year and a generation of 17,000 young people annually, this is utterly unrealistic. If we consider that the average cost of the apartments currently being built by the national housing fund is now close to 300,000 euros per unit, a serious expansion that would shorten waiting lists within our lifetimes would be financially unsustainable—it would cost as much as building a second railway track each year.

The fourth delusion is the claim that there are too few non-profit rental apartments. This statement is based on international comparisons, which indeed show a low percentage of non-profit rentals relative to all dwellings. But this makes sense because from the equation “all dwellings = owner-occupied dwellings + rental dwellings,” it follows that in a country where most housing is privately owned, the share of rental housing will naturally be lower. Therefore, the percentage of non-profit rentals among them doesn’t tell us much. What’s more important is how many tenants are paying non-profit versus market rents. It turns out that for every resident exposed to market rent in Slovenia, there are three in non-profit or subsidized rentals. As a result, Slovenia is already at the top globally for the percentage of non-profit rental housing among all rental housing.

The fifth delusion is that by promoting the rental market, we’ll solve social problems. The rental market is a tool to increase population mobility, making us more competitive. A healthy rental market provides people with additional choices, not the only way to find a place to live. The last thing we want in twenty years is retirees with €890 pensions paying two thirds of it in rent because they remained renters their entire lives.

It's the Price, Stupid!

If we want a functioning housing market, we need to focus on one key goal instead of chasing utopian dreams and lofty ambitions: lowering the cost of building new housing.

To achieve this, we must eliminate everything that currently drives up prices—construction regulations, restrictive land policies, high upfront payments, expensive standards, and so on.

One way to do this without years of reform is by establishing “liberty settlements.” These would be to homebuilders what free-trade zones are to businesses: places where capitalism is given relatively free rein in construction. In these settlements, special building laws would apply, ensuring that building a family house could begin without initial costs and that self-building would not be penalized.

These settlements should be located near major urban centers because that’s where people want to live. They should be well connected to cities. All the land in these settlements would be owned by the state, divided into plots of a few hundred square meters, provided with basic infrastructure, and then leased for lifetime to any first-time home seeker who has lived in Slovenia for at least twenty years. The leases would be non-transferable, and the rent for the the entire lease would be so low it would be affordable to everyone. Just enough to cover basic development.

If a tenant wanted, they could reduce their costs even further by building one of the pre-approved, standard-designed homes on their plot. Such construction would not require a building permit; one would only be necessary for non-standard projects.

The state could cheaply acquire space for liberty settlements by reclassifying land it already owns that is currently non-buildable. A square meter of forest costs less than a euro, farmland around three euros—and the bureaucratic stamp to reclassify it as buildable costs nothing.

A Place to Call Home

In theory, liberty settlements are one of the few ideas that should appeal to both liberals and socialists. The concept includes state involvement and a social component, but it is rooted in capitalist ethics, private initiative, and greater individual choice.

In capitalism, what we create and pay taxes on is ours. No one has the right to take away our private property. This applies to our crops, our car, our house, and so on.

But what about the piece of land we own—or the stream that runs through it? No one creates nature; it belongs to everyone. So how can it be ours?

Ownership of nature is a right to use it, based on a social agreement. That agreement allows us to trade that right as if nature were truly our property, because history has taught us that this encourages stewardship and efficient use.

But this social agreement lacks consideration for what happens if we appropriate all of nature—what will be left for those who are yet to be born? Where is their place under the sun, and why should they be born tenants in a world that belongs to everyone?

If we resolve this by ensuring that every person has a right to their own small piece of nature—one they can find in liberty settlements—while rights to the rest of nature continue to be tradable, we maintain a working system of rights and give each person the ability to opt out if they so choose.

Proposal for the Establishment of the Slovenian Military Laboratory (LSV)

Honorable Minister of Defense,

The world around us is restless, and the European Union is adopting measures to strengthen the defense capabilities of its member states. Consequently, your ministry will receive increased funding, and proposals on how to allocate these resources will be placed on your desk.

I propose the establishment of the Slovenian Military Laboratory (hereinafter: LSV), which would have two primary objectives:

1. The agile development of innovative military technology using cutting-edge advancements in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, modular architecture, etc.
2. Ensuring cost-effectiveness and ease of mass production.

Benefits of LSV for Slovenia:

• As an integral part of the Slovenian Armed Forces, LSV could develop projects immediately, bypassing lengthy public procurement processes.
• It would be directly subordinate to the General Staff of the Slovenian Armed Forces (GŠSV), ensuring research is aligned with the specific needs of the military.
• LSV would not pursue commercial interests beyond those of the Slovenian Armed Forces.
• LSV would not manufacture equipment but rather design blueprints for mass production, enabling even technologically less sophisticated companies to contribute to national defense capabilities.

The initial annual budget for the laboratory would be ten million euros. It would operate on a "Skunk Works" model, employing a small team (maximum 15) of engineering geniuses. Salaries could remain average, as talent could be attracted through work on highly engaging projects, collaboration with like-minded technology enthusiasts, and the opportunity to contribute to their homeland.

I must emphasize that the most productive and innovative individuals are often not polished professionals with doctorates but practical problem-solvers—sometimes even self-taught—whom Steve Jobs famously described as "the ones crazy enough to think they can change the world."

I am willing to assist in the establishment of LSV and take on the responsibility of setting it up and leading its operations.

The Backlash Against Progressive Policies: Trump’s Appeal and Europe's Political Crossroads

Trump's speech in the USA is an illustration of the destructive effect of extreme leftism on society. Nine out of ten of his policies would not exist without the madness of the past decade.

The fact that a president can boast about:

• securing the national border,
• allowing women to compete in their own sports,
• preventing gender changes for children,
• hiring based on competence rather than race or gender,
• not releasing criminals from prison,
• allowing people to speak freely,
• ensuring that national energy policy is not changed radically by top-down decrees but rather gradually from the bottom up,
• preventing the state budget from becoming a feeding trough for NGOs,
• bureaucracy not being a constitutional category,
• not using marginalization as an excuse for tolerating crime,
• ensuring that public job is not a retirement plan...

...is a consequence of progressive changes dictated by a bored elite that the people did not want.

Time will show that, after a long period, we Europeans made the right decision in Ukraine. But this is only our first correct decision. If politics does not address the above-mentioned problems, people will elect one that will. And perhaps they will maintain solidarity with the EU and Ukraine, as in Slovenia and Italy; or perhaps not, as in Hungary, and Slovakia.

Cultural Marxism is as destructive as the Treaty of Versailles; it does not change societies but deepens divisions and radicalizes them.

First, we create the hunter, then we will kill the bear.

"It's now or never."

Slovenia and the European Union are at a crossroads. One path leads to historical obscurity, the other may awaken the sleeping giant within us. Our prosperity, our peace, our liberty, and democracy depend on the decisions we make today.

In the coming months, we will mainly be fighting against ourselves. Our greatest weakness will not be a lack of people, innovation, or natural resources—although we recklessly and cheaply surrender much of that to others—but rather a lack of political courage for change.

The birds on the wires are chirping about what needs to be done. We must increase the military budget, empower our DOGE, limit public spending, remove socialists and their "woke" NGO political commissars from positions of influence, stop mass migration, abandon harmful energy and spatial (radical green!) policies, and establish a united front against Putin’s Russia.

Without whining, we must accept the justified criticism of our former allies, while at the same time rejecting a dysfunctional "peace" plan that would foolishly expose our best military units and equipment in Ukraine without the protection of NATO’s Article 5. This plan would carve up and loot Ukraine, preventing it from developing its own defense capabilities and rebuilding itself. Moreover, it would impose elections to remove the disobedient Zelensky and delegitimize Ukraine’s government in territories occupied by Putin’s Russia, where people would not be voting.

If this is a peace plan, then it is better to have war with Russia now—when they are exhausted and we are unprepared—rather than in five years when they have rebuilt their army and their economy has recovered, while we, in the meantime, have not prepared for war but have been dreaming of peace.

Slovenia cannot be the first to cast stones, for we share in the sins. Since joining the EU, we have abandoned our own visions and become a kind of microcosm of Brussels. Because we have obediently accepted every foolish decision from there, we must now reform together with them. Our first goal must be to remove the socialist regime of Robert Golob, and instead of bringing in yet another new popularity-seekers, we must bring reformers to power.

And then, step by step, together- first, we create the hunter, and then we kill the bear.

Slovenia Intelligence Report, Februar 16th 2025

The multipolar world that is coming brings significant changes. What seemed like science fiction yesterday will be reality tomorrow.

The immediate, short-term consequences in the region will be that Kosovo will almost certainly be reintegrated into Serbia, as no one has an interest in defending it. In the medium term, Slovenia will fall into one of the spheres of influence and lose its political independence. If it ends up in the wrong sphere, this will also mean the end of democracy.

This is why next year's elections will be critical. If the socialist scenario from the previous elections repeats itself, it will be disastrous for our nation. In the times ahead, the country cannot be led by influencers nor can the Ministry of Defense be run by a real estate dealer (or a civilian, as has been the tradition so far). Instead, it must be led by the most experienced soldier in the country. Developing nuclear weapons might still seem crazy—but in reality, this is already a topic of secret discussions at the highest levels of several mid-sized European nations.

To those who still do not understand why the European leadership is so concerned- these changes are not just a passing trend caused by Trump but a long-term shift that Trump only accelerated. This trend—already two decades old—is American isolationism."America First" is an ideological victory for the Russian model of a multipolar world. It means that the U.S. will now focus on its primary interests—its own continent (Canada), its immediate surroundings (Greenland), and the Pacific—while leaving Europe to fend for itself. And when the world divides into three or four spheres of influence, if we persist in our current approach, we will be absorbed into one of them—or worse, into two— instead of establishing our own.

This leads to the most far-reaching transformation. The entire European welfare model is built on U.S. security guarantees. When the U.S. relocates its military capabilities away from Europe, we will be defenseless, vulnerable, and blind. And whoever we turn to for protection will provide it at a much lower quality and a much higher cost. No one will pamper us anymore, and defense spending will no longer be diverted into social programs. This means a radical reform of the European welfare state—or, in other words, the death of the European welfare model as we know it.