this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Profit is a byproduct of free exchange of labor. Most people wouldn't labor if it was net negative for them.
FTFY
Value is added regardless of whether the labor was freely exchanged.
That said: rent isn't a result of any labor at all
I agree, however, a good landlord who maintains their property and promptly resolves issues will have to invest an element of time and money into the process.
That being said, fuck landlords in general.
That job exists - they are called maintenance workers: plumbers, electricians, roofers, handymen...
What makes a landlord a landlord - and not a handyman - is the ownership of property and extraction of rent for its use. It is definitionally not the labor involved in maintaining it.
If landlords want to be paid for maintaining properties they can get jobs as maintenance workers.
The value of a landlord in theory is that they rent at a rate lower than what the mortgage would be, since the renter isn't going to own the property at the end of it. And in turn the renter is wanting short term accommodation. The issue is various conditions have led to home prices always going up.
I don't mean to sound rude, but this might as well be fan fiction.
Ok
Landlord is the role of owner, not maintainer/manager of the property. Sure, they can be the same sometimes (even then most of the actual work gets outsourced to professionals), but anyone can enlist the help of a real estate manager. We usually tend to call them janitors.
Also there are huge open funds specialising in real estate (for rent revenue, for dev/resell potential, or both) that have like a 100 property managers that just need to keep their tenants happy. What that actually means is that investors pool their moneys into a fund with fund managers that buys real estate, finds tenants that wound pay a higher rent under certain conditions (eg I want a huge concert hall in the center of our office complex), fund has the capital to make it happen & evicts the current tenants (unless they can match the rent of the place with a concert hall but without actually having it).
Well yes and no. Profit is a byproduct of profitable labor, not all labor. If you're hunting for food for energy, but don't catch anything (or catch less than you expended), that was labor but it was not profitable. Which is a criticism I didn't really point out before either, but my argument was more to say when there is free exchange of labor it is much more often profitable.
Exactly. Profit actually muddies intrinsic value added since the main driver is purely financial, not actual irl. And you can make a (steady) profit on/with things that don't add value.
What is intrinsic value?
Depends on the case, but for an average house the cost of building one. How the location affects pricing wouldn't change (land/space is still limited & some places offer things that others dont).
Its just that without rent invectives more houses would again be privately owned simply because less investment capital would bother with it & push the sectors profitability up.
Edit: if I misunderstood your question --> wiki/Intrinsic_value_(finance), wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value, wiki/Intrinsic_value_(ethics)
Ah I see, yeah I would disagree there is such a thing as intrinsic value.
I don't know if I agree with that, because of current governments goals of keeping house prices ever rising, land, even empty, would be useful for risk management. It also may lead to that land being used for very short term housing, aka AirBnB. It could also lead to psuedorent type arrangements where banks offer loans with much lower downpayments, but with extremely long terms.
What government has an interest in rising housing prices? Isn't their job the opposite of that usually? Im not familiar with that.
And regulators/government should prohibit such predatory practises as long loans (no central bank would even allow that atm anyway, not under Basel). Basically my point is that housing, healthcare, public infrastructure, etc should be non-profit imo (so, no dividends/profit payouts, only for r&d or lowering price points and profit sharing to clients).
A government who for decades has encouraged home ownership as the safest way of building wealth. A government who a massive number od their constituents are home owners.
Are they predatory? How else can someone live if they can't afford a down payment and can't rent?
I understand
Oh, yeah, politicians working for themselves, that's the exact same reason why taxes on rent are usually kinda low/treated specially.
Yes, really long loans are predatory or if you want to look at it from a different perspective, a result of a non-functioning system. Financial obligations tax mental health, trap people, make enormous cumulated profits on capital without any work & negligible risk.
Central banks restrict max durations on mortgages/loans as is (also like what clients minimal disposable income after loan payments must be each month, age, max ratio of loan to property value, etc). And yes, if nothing else changes, that is bad for young people trying to buy a house, start a family, central banks acknowledge that, but their job is monetary policy/stability, not social policies - the government is the one not doing their job.
Most people wouldn't labor 40+ hours a week for the wages they are getting if they had alternative methods of obtaining food, healthcare, and housing. There is no real-world "free exchange." You have to deliberately ignore the coercive part to pretend it doesn't exist, because it is obvious. People need to participate in the economy to survive.
I agree it is coercive, but not because of a need for food or shelter. That need is the natural state of humanity, there is no one imposing that need on you. There is no one coercing. But I absolutely agree there are plenty of other coercive factors.
Would you accept if I say "exploitative" instead of "coercive?" I just think for the economic model to price things efficiently, inelastic goods like being alive need to be external to the model. I disagree with describing what we have as a willing exchange.
There definitely can be exploitative factors, just like coercive factors, and housing for example to an extent is exploitative, as in exploited by politicians. But I don't think food sales are really exploitative.