Make sense. In its inception, capitalism was putting work as the source of value creation. Rental is about asking money while nothing is produced.
The message is all confusing today because the people talking about the value of hard work are actually the ones who want to get huge returns from investment while paying as little as possible for the work done. Their end goal is to avoid working themeselves. Smith would despise them just the same.
Capitalism is based on the theoretical right of ownership in an era where only feudal aristocrats could own anything, in the present day and age many people in a capitalist society own their home and primary mode of transport and there isn't a law per-se that restricts anyone from even being allowed to own a home or car or horse or whatever other than being under aged.
The next step is the degree to which that right should be that you can in theory own a home, vs the right to own a home in fact. IE, the equality of opportunity vs the equality of outcomes. This is another dimension in which class struggle is in fact intersectional with identity politics, as that same equality of opportunity vs equality of outcomes struggle is what defines a lot of modern race and gender relation conflicts in the present day, or at least what did before the right decided to drag us all kicking and screaming back to the 50s, the 1850s.
In its inception, capitalism was putting work as the source of value creation
Huh? No, they put capital investments above labor, that's why workers get shafted
Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.
Land/capital shouldn't be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society's expense as it is.
Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they'll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it's quarterly private profit expectations.
The innovation of capitalism is that the right to own land or other capital assets isn't an exclusive right of the aristocracy. There is no law in letter which says you cannot ever own a home, and that is a new thing in the west. The next capitalist innovation was that you don't have to own something to have the rights of people who do own things, which was unheard of prior to the liberal capitalist revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s.
It's important to understand that things we take for granted in the present day did not always exist, nor are they necessarily guaranteed to keep existing unless specific effort is made to prevent them from being destroyed by the forces that want to go back, in today's day and age, that being the emerging class of inheritance billionaires who through various means are acquiring more and more outsized political power as well as more and more outsized ownership of resources, creating an in fact reversal of the liberal reforms of the feudal system which even Marx hailed as a huge and essential step in the right direction for the era it happened in.
That's what's wild- Adam Smith has been totally whitewashed by modern capitalists. They want to believe he is the exact opposite of Karl Marx, but their boy actually has many similarities with Karl that they choose to ignore. Kinda like how they ignore the parts of Jesus's teachings that don't vibe with their free markets and guns for all.
Yep. He had a lot to say about social welfare, how horrible poverty was, how shitty monopolies are etc.
I don't really want to rehab Adam Smith or crapitalism but when even the poster boy for the scholarly justifications for this system would be like "excuse me, what the fuck?" maybe alarm bells should be ringing?
Concept: pack a city council with commies. Use eminent domain to seize distressed/abandoned properties and convert them into cheap housing. Put into land trusts and administrate to provide at-cost/very low cost/no cost? housing to broke people. If you get sued over what a valid use of public domain is, turn the case into a fucking propaganda circus
“Capitalism has this HUGE THING in common with COMMUNISM! Your MAGAt hat (made in Jina!) will Never Be The Same!”
/checkmate
horseshoe theory deniers in shambles.
The rest of that fucking chapter is informative but smith does not seem to think landlords are a bad thing.
He is not against the concept in its entirety but throughout the wealth of nations he's quite critical of large and absentee landholders. In another chapter he points out how Tennant made improvements drives up rents which in turns discourages improvements for example.
He thinks of land rents as a monopoly and that monopolies are bad but I believe he imagines lots of small land holders competing to improve their land for their tennants and thus strengthening the nation by increasing how productive land can be.
This uh... did not happen, as I'm sure I don't have to point out to a comrade :p
It seems to be a mix, really. Houses for rent or resale get improved all the time specifically to increase the value. Apartments not so much.
Georgism ❤️
Well for Adam landlords immediately demonstrated the concept of capitalists being bad at capitalism.
It's less that Capitalists are bad at Capitalism, and more that Capitalism contains within it contradictions that lead to its own demise.
All systems will be morphed by the powerful to secure their power
To eliminate the problem you must eliminate greed which hasn’t seemed to work out considering it’s a sin
Okay.... What is your proposed plan to fix this problem?
Rent seeking should be banned unless there is significant continued investment by the owner.
That's an interesting proposal. I can see how that would eventually fix the problem.
I'll have to look more into it, but right now I think I'm on board.
Only allowing publicly and personally owned housing. Remove the concept of endlessly profiting off of dead labor.
I love how none of the people bitching about landlords, care to purchase their own home.
They'll sit there and give you excuse after excuse after excuse when pointed out...
Is one of those excuses that they can't afford it?
Homeowner here: fuck landlords. The entire concept of renting needs to die in a fucking fire.
Residential property taxes should be increased: doubled, tripled, or more. Jack the residential tax rate through the roof. Simultaneously, we need to create a commensurate owner-occupant credit, so effective property tax rate on a homeowner's primary residence stays the same (or even decreases).
If we increase the non-occupant property tax rate enough, renting only becomes possible where the property owner lives on site. "Landlords" of single family homes will be looking for any way they can to get their tenants listed on the deed, so the property qualifies for the owner occupant credit.
We can target an 85% owner occupancy rate. By statute, the tax rate and credit is raised every year if the owner-occupant rate is under 80%, and lowered if the owner-occupant rate exceeds 90%.
Land contracts, private mortgages, condominiums, and similar approaches will replace renting.
Banks would have greater incentive to cooperate with struggling borrowers, because as soon as they foreclose, their costs massively increase. They are similarly incentivized to get any foreclosed home sold quickly, rather than leaving it as a vacant blight on the neighborhood.
excuse after excuse after excuse
"i can't afford to" seems like a fairly watertight 'excuse' to me?
That's a pretty bizare straw man; I'm picturing it looks like this.
Come on, you can do so much better than that
Yeah OK this is dumb.
Average household income in the US (I'm assuming that's where you are) are 75k before taxes, after taxes is 58k.
Rent is a national average of 2100 monthly, so, roughly 25k annually. The average american household spends 270 weekly on groceries. That's 14k annually. The average american household spends 12k on transportation annually. The average american household spends about 10k on medical costs.
So -3K is what you're left with on average.
Accounting for only necessities, the averages mean that people can't afford to exist, let alone pay a down payment on an average house. 5% of the national average of 495,000 for a house is 24,750. If we're going off of averages is about 30k more than Americans make per household per year. And again in this case, since the average leaves us with a deficit of 3k just accounting for necessities, extending the timeline for savings doesn't do any favors.
People's bitching instead of doing what I did, promise my dad I will get out of pills in exchange of a job in his drill company. I already bought 5 housed and I'm not even 35.
I’d love to purchase my own house.
