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
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?
I want to learn how you would go from your current system, wherever you are in the world, to one without landlords. I’ll cut the bullshit and just openly say that I don’t think you’ve thought it through.
There are about a million pieces in the middle that are missing, and I promise you that none of them are pretty.
If there was a step by step plan with 100% certainty people would just do that obviously, but that’s a ridiculous standard to have.
There are many approaches to try and soften things: from political agitation for heavy taxes on multiple properties and inheritance taxes to rent caps and so on. Ultimately though, as is currently the case, the landed class will use violence the moment they feel sufficiently threatened and any movement that wants to succeed will need to be prepared to meet that.
Like you can and will be killed or gaoled forever if you resist being homeless sufficiently hard because a piece of paper says that someone has exclusive rights to land they’re not personally using. All the rights we currently enjoy were won through sacrifice. Unionists were killed for sick leave and holidays, people were killed for voting rights, people were killed to be openly gay etc. Dismantling these tools of oppression and violence will involve violence, it is naive to think otherwise but we don’t need to go there before offering peaceful redistribution.
I understand and absolutely agree with everything you’ve said, but I’m not asking for 100% certainty. I’m asking for A plan, no matter how absurd it is.
Every successful revolution in the history of the world has had an endgame. I’m not sure I see yours.
So at this stage where I live is very far from any sort of organised resistance to capitalism. Rebuilding foundational institutions of mutual aid and working class organisation such as food coops and unions is more productive than trying to march in the street for abolishing landlords. One activist was recently in the news for organising squatting which I think is rad, and he handled himself masterfully when dropped into a neoliberal shark tank on TV.
There are many laws that favour landlords: such as negative gearing, capital gains tax discounting, and absolutely fucked renters rights. Attacking these politically helps to build a movement and aids real people now. One political party is pushing for major increases in public housing, assisting them undermines the strength landlords have by reducing their power over homelessness.
I don’t have a plan for Australia to ban landlords because that’s far in the future, groundwork needs establishing first and that takes the form of spreading ideas, seeking consensus, aiding political allies, and participating in local coops and so on to build solidarity and class consciousness.
The end goal is imho a society organised around mutual aid, collective ownership of the means of production, and abolishing private ownership (not personal btw, your toothbrush is safe). There are any number of utopian visions for what that might look like but we have so much to do from now till then that overly fixating on a specific codified system is a waste of time. First people need to believe another way is possible and be empowered to build it.
Eh, the SocDems would probably point to Vienna’s social housing as something that’s going well and try to do something similar. But you’d need socialists in government to build a duck ton of housing, and fund repairs adequately. Some places that’s not too ridiculous of an idea, others would be nearly impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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