Comment on Can't afford California housing? Try living in a tiny sleeping pod. All 4 feet of it

• PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The rhetoric of free markets, which allows abuse and monopoly, is to blame for government intervention.

  The housing market is a good example. The free market rhetoric favors allowing rent to rise into the stratosphere. Better the price be too high than rent control. Once market influences are distorted, so the rhetoric goes, all sorts of bad things are gonna happen.

  So prices keep rising, more people keep becoming homeless, and the government eventually says enough: rent control. And it works for a bit. People that would’ve been priced out now get to stay. Yay!

  But it doesn’t work in the long run. It can’t work in the long run. Over time, the distance between what prices should be and rent control increases. Landlords know damn well they can get more if they do literally anything other than rent their rent-controlled homes and condos. So, when a vacancy shows up, it’s not listed, something else is done with it. (I believe in New York back in the day, landlords would turn apartments in apartment buildings into condominiums).

  And goes the story of housing and rent control. And it’s often used as an example of government inefficiency and incompetence.

  But the counterfactual is never discussed: what happens when everyone is homeless, apartments with sky-high rents are are vacant or only inhabited by those wealthy enough to afford them? What is the free market response to that? It doesn’t have one and everyone knows that. Neoclassical economic prescriptions are not a solution to anything. They never are. They cannot be. The purpose of a business isn’t to solve social problems; Friedman said as much. It’s to make money, generate profit, increase revenues.

  To the extent these pods make money in a rent-controlled area, they are innovative in a soul-sucking, misanthropic, neoclassical economic sense. And what’s retarded about making money anyway? Are the rich and wealthy retarded?

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  • No1RivenFucker@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The housing market is just about one of the least free markets, so it seems like you just have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about, which makes sense considering all the stuff you say

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    • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Okay. What’s the freest market? I’m ready.

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      • No1RivenFucker@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Software/digital goods, probably.

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