sugar_in_your_tea, 9 months ago

You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted.

See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.

So the profit motive certainly has some benefits. It also has downsides, such as unequal Income distribution. But then, existing examples of communism/socialism also have similar problems.

So I think the discussion about economic system misses the mark. We can regulate capitalism to provide many of the benefits we want, so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there. For housing, we could solve the problems we see in a number of ways, each with downsides, such as:

• subsidize renting
• increase property taxes to reduce vacancy
• add a vacancy tax - probably harder to enforce
• build more public housing - I haven’t been impressed with section 8 housing, so I’m not bullish on this one
• rent controls - seems to backfire more than help because it removes the profit motive to improve rentals

And so on. Switching the economic model comes with huge costs and I’m not convinced it’s actually better than fixing what we have.