Well put.
bdazman
joined 1 year ago
Please read on the rent of the land by Smith, and anything by Henry George.
You appear to be advocating for anarchist concepts of free association and contract theory, but I've seen no specific citations. Are there any you'd reccomend?
Landlord stans havent read Smith after a 200 year head start, what makes you think they will read anything?
Look at these fucking comments around us, it's clearly neccesary.
Risk doesn' t create value, what the heck are you talking about? I'll spin a revolver with a single round in it and fire, what fictional wizard signs my check?
Renters are the real ones at risk, being forced by an entire class of sociopaths acting in solidarity to parisitize their wealth. In a disagreement, landlords can commit asymmetric harm with impunity because legal defenses require capital, which the renting class lacks by definition.
Your "good" landlord only appears to be so because of the ubiquity of normal landlords. The handyman needed to help you that day cost pennies compared to what rent seekers steal, thats why they call it "passive income." In this case, you are describing work performed by a property manager, not a landlord, that created value to you. The landlord performed that managerial labor, and still pocketed disproportionally more value than he provided, because his earnings come from ownership, not from labor.
If its cheaper to rent than buy, why do landlords do it? Out of the goodness of their shiny little hearts? Thank you my lord for saving me from myself.
Landlords do not create housing. They destroy housing by turning what would have been a sold unit of housing into a rented unit of housing. They are directly incentivised to keep housing scarce.
Landlords out here in lemmy dot marxist lenninists comments deadass pretending their right to steal wealth is more important than ones fundamental human right to housing.
Let this be your reminder that "Landlords" do nothing of value. Anytime they claim they are, they are doing the work of an occupation that possibly does, like an electrician or developer or architect or carpenter or handyman or painter or realtor. Ticket scalpers don't create tickets. Don't let these antisocial freaks rewrite the dictionary, or excuse their own refusal to read anything about their own behavior.
If they try to cosplay as a pitiable person who only owns a house and doesn't want to be broke, tell them that their victims don't want that either, and only the landlord hates working for a living more than they hate parasitizing the wealth others. Their "ethical and reasonable" rent seeking is enabled by the threat of violence from the other "unreasonable" rent seekers, therefore acting as a single unified class.
They could have sold their houses to profit, but that's not enough for them. They must do their part to squeeze every drop of blood from that soil so that they don't accidentally decomodify housing even slightly by providing their smidge of housing to the captive market.
Read On The Rent of the Land. Fuckers.
Given that you claim schools of economic theory no longer exist, hypotheticals should prove useful (this is a silly thing to say).
Let's say you do ascribe to the theory that UBI under democratic socialism is an effective means of decreasing human suffering. What would stop landlords from simply increasing rents in proportion to incomes, as they are seen to do in places like SF, LA, and Seattle for example?
A policy reccomendation like a land value tax is something I think may possibly enable said ideological position, but you don't appear to be advocating for that.
Also, claiming that critics of rent control universally "feel" bad for the people they are rent seeking from is a strange position.
Opponents of rent control include the most dastardly machinations of corporate rent seeking. Opponents of rent control include real estate speculators who benefit from ever increasing property values due to artificial scarcity. Opponents of rent control include bloodthirsty businessmen who seek to pay unlivable wages lest the poorest worker be made homeless by the reserve army of labor.
Rent control makes it such that the only way a developer may increase their profits is to build more housing, a thing I believe you want to have happen.
You claim to talk about economic orthodoxy, yet you haven't even read Adam Smith?
There is a real difference between classical economics and neoclassical economics, and the disagreements between Smith and modern economists is one of the best examples of this contradiction.
So what gives? Where's the piss?
To quote the economist J.W mason from this article (its not dense like the smith quote, I swear) from 2019... In direct response to articles like the ones you quoted from the 70s and the 90s.
https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/
Among economists, rent regulation seems be in similar situation as the minimum wage was 20 years ago. At that time, most economists took it for granted that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment. Textbooks said that it was simple supply and demand — if you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it. But as more state and local governments raised minimum wages, it turned out to be very hard to find any negative effect on employment. This was confirmed by more and more careful empirical studies. Today, it is clear that minimum wages do not reduce employment. And as economists have worked to understand why not, this has improved our theories of the labor market. Rent regulation may be going through a similar evolution today. You may still see textbooks saying that as a price control, rent regulation will reduce the supply of housing. But as the share of Americans renting their homes has increased, more and more jurisdictions are considering or implementing rent regulation. This has brought new attention from economists, and as with the minimum wage, we are finding that the simple supply-and-demand story doesn’t capture what happens in the real world. A number of recent studies have looked at the effects of rent regulations on housing supply, focusing on changes in rent regulations in New Jersey and California and the elimination of rent control in Massachusetts. Contrary to the predictions of the simple supply-and-demand model, none of these studies have found evidence that introducing or strengthening rent regulations reduces new housing construction, or that eliminating rent regulation increases construction. Most of these studies do, however, find that rent control is effective at holding down rents.
EDIT_01: also, the hostility is because not everybody is a bystander in arguments like this. Some people are forced to live a grusome and crushing existence under our system of landlords rights to profit over peoples right to live.
EDIT_02: typos, apologies
What's the point? Seriously.
This is one of those weird pieces of economic theory that all the neoclassical people act like is settled science despite a long history of good faith studies and publications casting serious doubt.
Most rightwing publications nowdays parrot largely debunked austrian school nonsense as if other countries housing policies don't exist, or as if the ability of landlords to profit is more important than keeping people in their homes.
Straw man go brrr.
Inb4 neoliberal pissdrinking "economists" start claiming a lack of theoretical foundation for opposing the interests of the rent seeking class.
Read Smith, you charlatans.
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-xi-of-the-rent-of-land
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Surrendering control of your value chain increases profits how exactly? These illegal taxi companies are neither cheaper nor more efficient than bespoke delivery personnel even if you do the thing where you pretend they wont monopsonize and charge your business fuckloads for the "privilege" of using their service-- which they will.
Pizzas have thermally unfortunate form factors, and the illegal taxi companies have almost always had worse delivery times. It's just a loss for everybody who isn't a capitalist.