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Your proposal is that the idea of rent, itself, is a negative?
Yeah that's an insane take.
- This is fun for a couple of reasons:
  That's not what I said nor what I believe
  You just commented complaining about me not giving reasoning, despite me writing hundreds of words clearly outlining my reasoning.
  Your reasoning? "Your insane".
  Stop being a hypocrite. It'd be great if you could both explain your position, while also not strawmanning mine.
  If you don't want to, that's fine too, but then you should stop dragging on a useless conversation and do something you want to do.
  
  I have to guess what you mean because you are not actually saying anything. If you're not interested in the conversation, don't have it.
  I don't know what "extract wealth from the working class means" in this context, because working class people aren't exactly real estate investors, so I guessed rent.
  This is what happens when you communicate with Twitter platitudes instead of actual thoughts.
  
  Is calling me insane an "actual thought"? You expect more from me than from yourself.
  Just because you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm not saying anything. Not to say it's not my fault, language is a two way street. But similarly, it's not only my fault, you shouldn't just assume that your misunderstanding necessarily means I don't have a position. Maybe you think you're infallible and incapable of misunderstanding, but I assure you you're not, and I hope you understand that.
  When you scalp land, you're reducing the supply of land. I assume you have an at least rudimentary understanding of supply/demand, so you know that reducing supply increases cost with no changes in demand (fun sidenote, demand for housing is actually increasing as population increases, so this effect is even more pronounced).
  This increased cost in housing/land will be felt by the working class. So as an externality of your profitting off increases in land value (caused in part by this scalping), the working class will have to spend more on housing.
  So owners get more money and workers get less money.
  What we see in societies that don't have this gross feedback loop is housing costs that remain healthily at 5-10% of median income. Our society is instead at 30-80%, and it's growing relative to wages (not just inflation).
  
  Imagine if we invented magic buildings that could hold more than one family. Imagine how many people could fit in a relatively small area.
  Why, you could fit like 1.6 million people into 33 square miles, like in Manhattan.
  If you let people build, it turns out they do. Zoning codes are the problem. And in Cali you know who votes for exclusionary zoning? Progressive liberals. Because terrible people live everywhere and believe every ideology.
  Answers are practical, ideologies aren't. Let people build. Let "neighborhood character" evolve as a neighborhood does. Gentrify poor neighborhoods and subsidize the rent of the otherwise-displaced til their wages match local COL.
  These are solvable problems. Blaming capitalism is absurd when capitalism was kneecapped over a generation ago.
  
  I'm not a liberal, for whatever that's worth.
  Sure, lets build more affordable housing, that's fine.
  You ignored my entire point though and went on your own ideological ramble there (one paragraph saying we don't need ideology and the next defending capitalism. Do you read what you write? Lmfao).
  Are you saying you don't believe supply/demand is a real thing? Or you just choose to ignore the impact that over 10 million housing scalpers would have on the U.S housing market?
  If it's neither of those, then I guess we're in agreement, outlaw housing scalpers and build affordable housing. We could get median housing costs down to a fraction of what they are now, just like other societies have that outlawed scalpers.
  
  Capitalism isn't an ideaology, it's an economic system.
  Supply and demand is a real thing and demand vastly outstrips supply due to lack of ability to build.
  But you don't have to take my word for it:
  https://danville.ca.gov/CivicSend/ViewMessage/message/153105
  
  I responded when lemmy.world was having issues, so my lemmy client couldn't find your comment and so it just responded at the top level: https://lemmy.world/comment/1975730
  
  Lemmy is a dope forum but I think we're smothering their servers a bit lol
  
  Agreed lol, though iirc they're getting periodically DDOSed, so it's not just normal usage spikes.

266 comments