Standard wisdom says if you want less of something, tax it. There's another part of the tax equation that's standardly overlooked. Real estate is the one class of assets which we're taxed on merely for holding. Keep a closet full of gold bars, no tax (not unless and until you go to sell them at a profit) - not on the gold bars. But there's a yearly tax on the closet, if it's part of a building you own! Government has every incentive to encourage wealth to be put into real estate instead of other asset classes, because government collects a yearly tax just on the part of your total assets which is real estate.

The real estate bubble, thus, was in reality (whether or not planned as such) a way for governments to increase total tax revenue, even while making a big show of "cutting taxes."

This also suggests that what we want more of, we should encourage government to tax. If the tax potential is large enough, government will damn sure figure out a way to see that we get more of whatever the taxes are on. Those who want more religion, for example, should encourage government to tax it.