Comment on Rent is theft

• Riverside@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society

  I’ve yet to find any serious study talking of “widespread corruption” in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.

  the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything

  Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you’re making stuff up:

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  housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant

  Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.

  You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone

  Again, as if bribes don’t happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t “bribe” someone to get a house, you’re just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that’s moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?

  But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg

  Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of “being a miner in Siberia” is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that’s a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren’t maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It’s not that people want to move to Moscow, it’s that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that’s really bad for many people. I don’t see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).

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