this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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That's close to the truth, but not quite. Supply and Demand distort the price around a central Value.
Not really, the fact that something is purchased doesn't mean the "risk" or "liability" created the Value behind it.
You found it useful, ie renting allowed you to fulfill the Use-Value you needed, shelter. You appear to be using Subjective Value "Theory," ie the idea that Value is a hallucination different from person to person, which is of course wrong.
I think we have different definitions of value and I will not pretend to be an economic theorist, this is out of my depth. My argument comes from a very practical perspective of supply and demand. There is obviously demand for renting property otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
I do think that capitalism at large creates an economic barrier and if one is below the barrier it is difficult to build capital and if you’re above the barrier it is easy. Picking on just land-lording is only picking at one instance of some larger systemic issues that capitalism brings with it. This will not change unless the government adds regulations that add “fairness” to pure capitalism.
This is an impossible dream. Capitalism demands that the majority of people are perpetually in an underclass (with some shuffling of who specifically is in it). You can't have an entire population of small business owners, most people need to be wage-laborers or some equivalent.
I didn’t say anywhere that regulation will make it work or make it better, I just meant that it will certainly not change without some form of regulation.
I’m also not claiming that capitalism is perfect or even good, all economic theories are idealized, I actually don’t think there is a magical system with a simple set of rules that will actually work. The real world is complicated and messy and has exceptions all over the place.
I think there probably is some mixture of free market and socialist ideas that do work, and most countries work like this today.
It really frustrates me when people talk about "mixing capitalism and socialism." Whatever thing you're talking about is not what socialism is. Socialism is not when the government does stuff. Socialism is not when the government uses taxpayer money to fund social services or welfare. Socialism is the workers controlling the means of production.
Eclecticism doesn't work, it imagines that it can pick out the best of everything, but in reality it ends up either being fundamentally dysfunctional because you can't just decontextualize things from their theoretical framework and have it all work out, or they just end up being one thing with a partial veneer of other things. Almost every country you thought of when you wrote that comment unambiguously has nothing to do with socialism, they're just versions of liberalism that believe in some level of welfare, etc.
It really frustrates me when people talk in absolutes, is there no room for nuance and grey area? I didn’t claim what socialism or what capitalism is, but it’s definitely true that today's economies do borrow ideas from various economic theories. How is that a controversial statement at all?
Some things aren't compatible, and trying to combine them results in having one with the skin of the other. Liberal democracy, for instance, is incompatible with monarchy, and we can see in the UK for instance how the liberals kept on gaining ground until the monarchy became totally symbolic (a very expensive symbol, but a symbol nonetheless). If the workers having democratic control of the means of production precludes capitalists having plutocratic control, it's very simple. Put in the same environment, these two forces would bear what Marxists call "class antagonisms" towards each other and struggle until one was subordinated to the other.
The US (we'll use that example because I know it the best) does borrow ideas from various economic theories, those being various sects of classical liberalism, Keynesianism, and the odd bit of Austrian School or Christo-fascist policy. That is to say, different sects of capitalist ideology. You do not see policies based on Marxian economics or anything of the sort, it's just empirically not how US policy gets written, and that shouldn't surprise you.