Our hero, Phineas Harper – architecture critic, Guardianista-in-chief, and the sort of chap who probably apologises to chairs for sitting on them – has lately stumbled upon the concept of “the market”. This came as something of a shock, rather like a Victorian missionary discovering that the natives have been running a perfectly functional economy without once consulting Islington.

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You see, Phineas has just realised that house-builders are in the game for – brace yourselves – profit. Yes, those ghastly firms that put up houses actually expect to be paid for it, and (cover the children’s ears) they sometimes make more money when they build the sort of houses people want to buy instead of the eco-cred cob-and-hemp yurts favoured by Phineas and his mates down at the collective pottery kiln.

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This revelation hit him while he was reviewing Persimmon and Barratt – two companies that, between them, have done more to put roofs over British heads than every bien-pensé housing charity since the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Phineas is appalled. Appalled, I tell you. How very dare these firms respond to consumer demand? How dare they build three-bedroom semis in places people can actually afford, rather than the mandatory 400-square-foot “micro-flats” that Phineas believes will save the planet while simultaneously teaching the working classes to live like battery hens with better branding?

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He sputters that developers “externalise” costs. Translation: they don’t build exactly what a north London architecture critic would build if he were briefly possessed by the ghost of Leon Trotsky. Apparently, the real problem with Britain’s housing crisis is not the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, a piece of legislation so utterly deranged it makes the Soviet five-year plans look like a model of flexibility. No, the real villain is… capitalism. Who’d have guessed?

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Phineas waxes lyrical about “community land trusts” and “co-operative housing”. Splendid. Nothing says “solving the housing crisis” like handing the keys to a bunch of well-meaning amateurs who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone 200,000 homes a year. The last time Britain tried building houses without the nasty profit motive, we got tower blocks that looked like filing cabinets and fell down if you sneezed on them. But never mind history – Phineas has Feelings.

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Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Persimmon and Barratt are delivering actual houses to actual people who want to, you know, own a garden and not share a vegan composting loo with sixteen other trustafarians. The horror.

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One suspects Phineas’s ideal solution is for the state to nationalise the entire construction industry, appoint himself Supreme People’s Commissar for Tasteful Brickwork, and then wonder why nothing gets built except a queue. Because that’s the magic of markets, old bean: they’re vulgar, they’re greedy, they occasionally produce the architectural equivalent of a Crocs sandal, but they do – unlike every bright spark who’s ever had a “vision” – actually manage to build the bloody houses.

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So here’s to Phineas Harper, the man who looked at the British housing market, saw that it was finally starting to work, and decided the correct response was to scream like a vegan discovering bacon. Keep writing, lad. Every time you do, another reader quietly resolves never to let the likes of you within a mile of anything sharper than a felt-tip pen.