This is like saying that if everyone had a small business it would destroy the economy. If you think a rental damages the economy, you have no idea what the economy is, or how it works.
Comment on Fucking leeches
MithranArkanere@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
phindex@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
flyingSock@feddit.org 59 minutes ago
Businesses buy and sell off each other and also create value. But sticking with the “if everyone did this” every one would run a one person business. Not efficient but would work. On the other hand if everyone is renting out houses, they can at most be renting out one (ignoring foe now second houses/holiday apts). Then everyone would be housed and paying each other in a circle. So, no, everyone doing what the post suggests can not work. All but the first house would be empty.
Akito@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Then it should be illegal to have no children, because if everyone had no children, we would literally go extinct.
iheartneopets@lemm.ee 4 hours ago
That’s just the first thing that came to mind, huh? Tell me you wasnt to control women’s bodies without telling me.
Joncash2@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
What? Your comment doesn’t make sense. If everyone did any profession solely we would destroy the economy. If everyone became doctors, there would be no engineers or pilots. We would still be doomed. A diversity of vocations are necessary regardless of which vocation.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Landlording is not a profession.
Handyman is a profession. Real estate management is a profession. Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
The economy can tolerate a finite number of leaches before dying. We currently have too many. The ideal number is zero.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
This actually applies to most all investments.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
ALL forms of making money from having money need to be abolished completely.
If you’re not creating/selling a product or providing a service, you’re not EARNING money. Furthermore, rich people getting richer through passive income is the #1 thing diminishing the returns from actually worthwhile endeavors.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, it turns out that a system that rewards people for simply having possession of something leads to behaviors that are harmful for society.
The problem isn’t landlords, that’s just the group that most people interact with directly. The problem is that our rules (primarily taxes) are setup to reward that behavior and to add burden to people who actually do work for their income.
If you’re a billionaire you can get your effective tax rate to single digits or zero. If you work for a living you pay way more taxes proportional to your income.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Getting a paycheck automatically means that someone has more money before a product, or service is delivered. So I’m gonna stretch this a little… If we like jobs that pay money then we gotta live with rich assholes. But if we want no rich assholes and truly everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount, then we need something other than capitalism. We need socialism. But how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
MithranArkanere@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Which is why buybacks need to be illegal again, and dividends need to be regulated and taxed better baed on factors like how much the company benefits the community.
And employees need to be guaranteed a proportional cut too, ensuring that better performance and higher company earnings always means they earn more, and not that they get fired and the one who gets a bonus is some random CEO who only kept trying to push bad ideas the employees kept fighting all the time.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s also not capitalism.
Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.
In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.
I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.
Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.
It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.
Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The fact that landlording is bad and not a profession isn’t the point.
The point is that @MithranArkanere@lemmy.world’s argument failed to convincingly argue that because it was logically fallacious:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
In other words, the fact that thing A would “destroy of the economy if everyone did it” is an emergent property of everyone doing it, which doesn’t apply to any single entity doing thing A.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes yes. Many people fail to accept hyperbole. You don’t need to explain that you don’t either.
poddus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
what’s the difference between real estate management and landlording?
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Real estate Management is about rent collection, property maintenance, coordination of finding new tenants, etc. There’s labor there.
Many single property landlords are also real estate management and handymen of their own properties. And that part of the situation is actual labor.
In common parlance, people will often conflate these. But I find this dilutes the harm caused by actual landlords, which are mostly large corporations that simply own property and collect income.
crowleysnow@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A landlord can pay a manager to take care of the properties they own for them.
A manager, on the other hand, cannot pay for someone else to “landlord” for them.
Landlording is about ownership, management is about labor.
srasmus@midwest.social 1 day ago
It has little to do with the “profession” and more to do with the distribution of goods. If everyone owned rental properties, nobody would live in these rental properties, meaning for lords to exist there must be serfs.
phindex@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
This is like saying that in order for business owners to exist there have to be people who want the products that that business provides. So what?
Gladaed@feddit.org 1 day ago
That’s true for teachers, too.
If it is a lifestyle that would destroy the economy if everyone had it, then that’s another story.
crowleysnow@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If everyone went to work every day for 8+ hours for the direct benefit of the members of their community, the economy and the community would both be incredibly healthy.
If everyone purchased the tools that other people need to live and work and decided to rent those out instead of doing their own labor, the economy and community would fail.
This should be incredibly obvious.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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