• Maalus@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Oh so wait, so building a house isn’t free then since nobody is giving the land and materials away. So why do you expect a landlord to let you live for free if he had to pay to buy the land and build it?

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Nice to see you’re getting close to the core of the problem.

      Yeah, Land is owned rather than belonging to everybody as it used to be back before monarchs and as land ownership works in this system - any one individual with massive wealth can own way more Land than they need - it can be easilly hoarded by those with more money in a way that’s impossible for those with less money to overcome (short of a Revolution) and thus create cartels or even monopolies in Land in desirable places to live, a market positions from where they can extract as big a rent as they want since everybody else has no alternative.

      It’s from the massive imballance thus created by Law in the main, essential and irreplaceable, “raw material” for housing that the massive house prices we see come from, and landlords usually use their priviledged position in that highly imbalanced market to extract excessive rents.

      The whole situation is actually the very opposite of the “Free Market” you state it is - Land (and thus housing) ain’t like teddy bears and soap were a competitor can just enter the market and make more of it when somebody tries to corner the market, quite the opposite: it’s dependent on a naturally limited resource on top of which a trully ancient kind of legislation makes hoarding extremelly easy for those lucky enough to have lots of wealth, artificially transforming the limits of that resource into an extreme kind of scarcity.

      In this Not-At-All-Free Market, most landlords will extract excessive rents far beyond the value they add. If rents were not mainly based on exploiting a dominant position in a market dominated by hoarding and artifical scarcity and only paid for the actual service being provided by landlords, they would be tiny in comparison with the current situation and very few people would be critical of landlords.

      • BringMeTheDiscoKing@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Private interests are the ultimate autocracies.

        Let private interests amass huge amounts of resources and you have hugely powerful autocracies.

        Let these autocracies hire so-called economists to convince everyone that they will settle into some kind of optimal state if we just let them be and you have the current situation in the USA.

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Your point being what exactly? My landlord has spent his entire life working at a coal mine to buy a building that needed to be torn down. He then tore it down and built a modern one in its place. Since then, he is here all the time doing maintenance, packing the trash so it gets accepted, despite being over 70. But fuck him regardless according to you guys, since every landlord inherrited millions of houses, and if only you were so lucky, you would have given those houses to the poor.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Working in coal mine to save up to be a lord.

          Do you have many Dickinsian friends? Do they wear stovepot hats? Were they street urchins?

          • Maalus@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            See, you can’t even believe someone telling a real story. You need to ridicule, make fun of it, because you can’t fathom that people still work / worked recently in coal mines. Newsflash, read up on European coal mines. Read up on industrialized regions - Ruhr in Germany. Silesia in Poland.