“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Literally Adam Smith. I dont even need to get out the Mao quotes.
The problem isn’t the scale the problem is the class dynamic.
Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.
Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.
It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.
So here’s a story from other side of a coin. When I got married I decided to get a small house in the suburbs as my work is remote so I can work from anywhere. But after getting a baby me and my SO decided that we would live near my in-laws house to help with taking care of my baby for the time being. So we rented a house near my in-laws and to keep the house occupied I decided to rent out the house for a cheap price. It’s basically half the market price. Soon enough I got a renter. Being too trusting of others I decided to not ask for a deposit because the people renting are basically a friend of a friend.
But after they finished their rental period when I came to the house it was basically wrecked, they destroyed the toilets, one of the doors, and generally left the place in shambles. It’s amazing what kind of damage you can do in a short period of time, and the amount of money that I spent fixing the damage is more than the rent money that I got.
Yep, my deal with my landlord is if there’s anything that needs fixing I’ll fix it myself and if I spend any money I’ll just forward him the invoice and he’ll deduct it from my rent. Although others don’t have the same situation as myself, I think there’s a place for landlords to exist.
Yeah, damn those tenants who use their legal rights to actually get their landlords to maintain their own damn property. They’re just mean. If only all tenants just did free labour for their landlords, the world would be a better place.
Something almost exactly like that happened to me. I bought a house so my money wouldn’t be stagnant and didn’t wanna live away from my parents yet so I rented it. They totally fucked up everything in it.
Should have sold your house. Another person could have bought it. Being the owner, they would have more respect for it since it’s their loss of it gets wrecked. Adding another house to the market also increases supply and makes houses more affordable.
Your landlord also should have sold his house and you could have bought it instead of paying his mortgage.
The ethical use case for rentals is short and medium term for travelers and people who are in a place for a few months to a year.
Selling your home is not a solution. “Being the owner they would of had more respect for it” is a ridiculous notion to abide by. People will wreck their home as owners just as much as renting. You can easily just argue to have the tenant pay full cost for rent, pay full down payment and then maybe he would have respected how much he was paying for his living solution.
Do you not understand the costs of buying and selling a home? Having to deal with banks and lending? You think this is the solution every time someone or a family needs to make a living change?
The guy tried to rent out his property at a reasonable price because he didn’t want to go through the other route. Even without the absurd costs of closing and dealing with mortgage lenders and every party involved, the volatility of the housing market is enough to make people insecure.
I can tell the majority of people here aren’t home owners and hate landlords like some evil boogeyman but they’re conflating a single or 2 house owner with a renting conglomerate. Selling your home so there’s more homes on the market as a solution is equivalent to turning the water off while brushing your teeth to fight the dwindling supply of water.
Selling your home so there’s more homes on the market as a solution is equivalent to turning the water off while brushing your teeth to fight the dwindling supply of water.
Fucking EXACTLY. Every drop counts, not running the water uselessly for 4 minutes a day saves enough water for you to survive a full day. Sure there are people wasting more water and we need to spend more energy reducing their waste, but just because someone is worse than you doesn’t mean you’re “good”.
So you expect me to buy another house when my kid is old enough that I don’t need help from my in-laws and spend much more money after the housing price goes up.
My landlord is in a similar position as mine, soon after he bought the house I’m staying in he got assigned to work abroad for five years and decided to rent the house for cheap. I did the same expecting the tenants would act like me.
Man people hate owning property here. Selling your house because you needed to change living conditions for a while is wild. Besides the absolute volatility of housing markets and prices, just the cost of buying/selling a home is a ton. Renting is an easy way of what you did.
No way do these people think selling your home was the right idea in your position. And it’s not entitlement to want people to take care of property.
Landlords gonna landlord. You’re literally the guy in the meme “owning other people’s homes and complaining about it”
Basically you wrote a story where you’re the good guy who out of the goodness of his heart rented his only house at HALF MARKET VALUE just because you love the poor and want to help them. Then an EVIL NON LAND OWNING tenant moves in and destroys it for no reason. And you didn’t even make any money. What a disaster. Thankfully for your landlord you’re a good land owning tenant. If only all tenants were like you.
Dude, I’m literally renting the house for a couple of years before I move back in after my kid is older. What the fuck do you expect me to do? Do you know how much I rented the house at? Only for 2 months cost of the mortgage for a year.
Let me sum it up for you simply, if you bought a house for some price and then you need to move for a short time like 3-4 years, why the fuck should you sell the house?
So let me get you straight. If I needed to live somewhere else for a short time like 3 years. I’ll need to sell my house and then buy the same house again after 3 years for 50% more price?
No? Why would you need to buy the same house again?
Also you’re getting mad at the exact evil that makes renting the only option for some - the shitty housing market. It just so happens that landlords exacerbate the shitty market by being economic parasites. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned you are as a landlord, the concept of renting is parasitic.
It’s not the problem but it’s part of the problem. Obviously the problem is giant corporations buying up tons and tons of homes, basically hoarding property, and renting them for near-mortgage prices. But that doesn’t change the fact that the concept of renting out property, renting out a home, is parasitic.
Lol, no nuance here. Landlords are the devil. I try to inject some moderation once in a while. We have a rental, it’s in fantastic shape. We’ve never raised the rent. We’ve spent so much on improvements and repairs we’ll not see a profit on it for the next 3 years. Tax write off? Sure… but nonetheless landlords are the devil. Doesn’t matter if we worked out asses off to afford it.
E: what follows is people willing to subscribe to luxuries like entertainment, but complain about fair prices for necessities. Why bother being decent when you get shit on anyway.
I would argue that owning additional property in an environment where there is a housing shortage is implicitly unethical even if you’re trying to run it ethically. Only argument I can think of against that is that you’re keeping it from shittier landlords and corporations. But still, denying others the opportunity to grow their wealth through property ownership causes poverty on a mass scale. Not any one person’s fault, but still.
We charge well under mortgage rates for rent. It’s affordable. I hate to throw this out there, but our intent is never to “extract” the max profit from someone. If someone wants to rent at the upper extent of their ability to pay it’s not what we’re forcing on someone.
The only reason you own a second house is for profit. A profit you are doing directly from an other individual. You can twist that how you want, it’s the reality. You are doing it respectfully and are providing a service. But an artificial one.
You’re still extracting wealth from the tenant, and the tenant is only losing money. You’re still preventing the tenant from building their wealth through property ownership.
The ethical thing to do in this situation would be to sell the house to the tenant at a price proportional to the rent, minus what they’ve already paid in rent to this point.
Sorry I genuinly don’t follow. If I were to rent out at cost, that means if the tenant were the owner, they’d have to pay the same cost as well. So they’re losing the same amount of money either way.
And how would they be building wealth through property, if the property value doesn’t rise? They would buy the flat for say 50k$, and then own 50k$ worth of property
minus what they’ve already paid in rent to this point
I think you’re assuming that I would be paying off a loan with their rent? By renting at cost I meant their rent covers maintanance/upkeep
So they’re losing the same amount of money either way.
But if they own the property, they can potentially get that money back as the value of the property increases. Property is an appreciating asset, at least in the current US housing market, which is the frame of reference I’m coming from.
And how would they be building wealth through property, if the property value doesn’t rise?
The property value almost certainly will rise, as long as the property owner maintains it properly.
I think you’re assuming that I would be paying off a loan with their rent?
I was assuming that, yes, but it’s sort of besides the point. The fact remains, any money a renter puts in, they can’t ever get back. The property owner however, being the one in control of the appreciating asset, can grow the money that they collect from the renter by investing it back into their property, increasing the rate at which it appreciates.
Edit: in the imaginary scenario where property value never changes, the tenant is still paying all the costs of homeownership, without the benefit of homeownership, ie, owning an asset which has value and can be sold. In this scenario the landlord is simply a middleman who is hoarding an asset.
It can be fairly priced, but that doesn’t really change anything I said before. It’s not how the property is run that’s the problem, it’s that it’s owned by someone who isn’t living there during a time where that, on its own, creates problems.
Why do you think any business does what it does? That’s an absurd assertion that anyone would do that for nothing. We take good care of our tenants because we like having good people there, and that’s worth a lot. We play the long game. Your /s is useless after that post.
Yeah, profit is legitimately a problem, this guy Adam Smith wrote about it in a book and then Marx wrote a whole series of tomes doing a more comprehensive analysis about how it is unsustainable and to the detriment of humanity.
Yeah, youre a member of the rentier class, not the capitalist class.
The critique is actually different for rentierism vs capitalism, even most capitalist economicists hate rentierism. You’re collectively a parasitic class even to the capitalists because you increase their operating costs indirectly for no benefit. Earnestly no offense, as class analysis is about understanding structures, not moralizing.
You still benefit from extractivist class dynamics. Unless you’re going to be in the red even after selling the properties you own, even if you’re charging so low that you lose money in the short term. But I’m guessing that on aggregate over time you’re gaining money in the short term.
It is more than my opinion, it is literally the academic concensus on the subject, including pro-capitalist economic theorists in the consensus. You’d literally have to go back to the divine right of kings being an intellectual position taken seriously to find a consensus in support of rentierism.
Now, of course, feel free to be an anti-intellectual about it. Your opinion as someone who hasn’t read a lot of political economic theory is just as valid as the mainstream academic concensus among economicists and political economicists.
Food stamps. It definitely would be nice to have a government owned food bank. This is a bit of a weird one because the line between luxury food and necessity food is blurry and complex. It certainly is a system that is also in need of reform
Electricity?
About half owned by the government why I live, the other half is highly regulated, companies dont really get a choice of what to charge. It’s also illegal where i am to cut off electricity during winter months where it really is 100% a need. If they don’t really get to choose who there customers are or how much they charge, aren’t the real customer the government? I think this would be a pretty good model for land ownership.
Fuel?
Not really a basic need, I haven’t used any in a couple years. The car cartels are certainly a huge threat to people’s basic freedoms.
I absolutely agree with you about grocery, energy, and fuel companies being evil. But most companies aren’t grocery, energy, or fuel companies.
That said, I still hate capitalism. But for the purposes of this discussion, landlords are listed among the worst because they’re part of the select few who withhold basic human necessities over profit.
Fuel is NOT a basic human need, especially in countries where gas stoves are extremely uncommon or banned from being used in new houses (which includes most of Europe). In fact, in most of the US electric stoves are also by far the most common type (with the exception of California, NY, Illinois, and New Jersey).
Fossil fuels as a “need” is manufactured, it’s completely artificial, it shouldn’t even be legal to install stoves or heating that require gas. The US and Canada also shouldn’t have shitty car-dependent infrastructure. The only reason we have these problems is because of propoganda from fossil fuel corporations promoting garbage like “gas stoves cook better”… whatever that’s supposed to mean… or lobbying to keep cars as the only viable form of transport for the past hundred years.
Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is still evil. On the employment end they’re still extorting people because below a certain level, in the current society, money becomes a basic human necessity.
But for the purposes of this discussion, from a consumer perspective, most businesses in the world don’t trade in human necessities. Landlords, grocery stores, hospitals, energy companies, and a few more are the select few who do.
You’re literally my parents. They were long term landlords, bought properties for nothing in the 90’s rented them for 20-30 years and then sold them. Most properties were long term rentals, people lived there for 5+ years, one lady had 6 kids in 10 years in one of their houses. Rents in their area are ~$1200-2000, my parents were still renting at $700 because the place was paid off and the people living there had been there for nearly a decade.
Side hustle landlords ain’t the enemy, it’s the corporate landlords that are the true problem. Unfortunately the people being oppressively fucked don’t see a difference and it’s hard to blame them.
Hope your side hustle works out for you and I hope you stay one of the good ones.
EDIT: My parents both have full time jobs, having rentals wasn’t a job for them. They rented to pay the mortgage and pay for upkeep. The long term plan for them was to sell the houses and retire, not live off rent for perpetuity. They rented the properties at a rate that allowed them to pay the mortgage off quickly and pay for landlord repairs (roof, HVAC, water heater, septic tank, etc).
So what’s the consensus on landlords who do it as a side hustle
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Literally Adam Smith. I dont even need to get out the Mao quotes.
The problem isn’t the scale the problem is the class dynamic.
Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.
Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.
It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.
So here’s a story from other side of a coin. When I got married I decided to get a small house in the suburbs as my work is remote so I can work from anywhere. But after getting a baby me and my SO decided that we would live near my in-laws house to help with taking care of my baby for the time being. So we rented a house near my in-laws and to keep the house occupied I decided to rent out the house for a cheap price. It’s basically half the market price. Soon enough I got a renter. Being too trusting of others I decided to not ask for a deposit because the people renting are basically a friend of a friend.
But after they finished their rental period when I came to the house it was basically wrecked, they destroyed the toilets, one of the doors, and generally left the place in shambles. It’s amazing what kind of damage you can do in a short period of time, and the amount of money that I spent fixing the damage is more than the rent money that I got.
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Yep, my deal with my landlord is if there’s anything that needs fixing I’ll fix it myself and if I spend any money I’ll just forward him the invoice and he’ll deduct it from my rent. Although others don’t have the same situation as myself, I think there’s a place for landlords to exist.
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Yeah, damn those tenants who use their legal rights to actually get their landlords to maintain their own damn property. They’re just mean. If only all tenants just did free labour for their landlords, the world would be a better place.
What a fucking joke.
Dude, if you get to rent a place for half the market price, just try to be a decent person okay?
Something almost exactly like that happened to me. I bought a house so my money wouldn’t be stagnant and didn’t wanna live away from my parents yet so I rented it. They totally fucked up everything in it.
Should have sold your house. Another person could have bought it. Being the owner, they would have more respect for it since it’s their loss of it gets wrecked. Adding another house to the market also increases supply and makes houses more affordable.
Your landlord also should have sold his house and you could have bought it instead of paying his mortgage.
The ethical use case for rentals is short and medium term for travelers and people who are in a place for a few months to a year.
Selling your home is not a solution. “Being the owner they would of had more respect for it” is a ridiculous notion to abide by. People will wreck their home as owners just as much as renting. You can easily just argue to have the tenant pay full cost for rent, pay full down payment and then maybe he would have respected how much he was paying for his living solution.
Do you not understand the costs of buying and selling a home? Having to deal with banks and lending? You think this is the solution every time someone or a family needs to make a living change?
The guy tried to rent out his property at a reasonable price because he didn’t want to go through the other route. Even without the absurd costs of closing and dealing with mortgage lenders and every party involved, the volatility of the housing market is enough to make people insecure.
I can tell the majority of people here aren’t home owners and hate landlords like some evil boogeyman but they’re conflating a single or 2 house owner with a renting conglomerate. Selling your home so there’s more homes on the market as a solution is equivalent to turning the water off while brushing your teeth to fight the dwindling supply of water.
Fucking EXACTLY. Every drop counts, not running the water uselessly for 4 minutes a day saves enough water for you to survive a full day. Sure there are people wasting more water and we need to spend more energy reducing their waste, but just because someone is worse than you doesn’t mean you’re “good”.
So you expect me to buy another house when my kid is old enough that I don’t need help from my in-laws and spend much more money after the housing price goes up.
My landlord is in a similar position as mine, soon after he bought the house I’m staying in he got assigned to work abroad for five years and decided to rent the house for cheap. I did the same expecting the tenants would act like me.
Man people hate owning property here. Selling your house because you needed to change living conditions for a while is wild. Besides the absolute volatility of housing markets and prices, just the cost of buying/selling a home is a ton. Renting is an easy way of what you did.
No way do these people think selling your home was the right idea in your position. And it’s not entitlement to want people to take care of property.
This, if someone borrowed your shit at least you want the borrower to take care of it.
Landlords gonna landlord. You’re literally the guy in the meme “owning other people’s homes and complaining about it”
Basically you wrote a story where you’re the good guy who out of the goodness of his heart rented his only house at HALF MARKET VALUE just because you love the poor and want to help them. Then an EVIL NON LAND OWNING tenant moves in and destroys it for no reason. And you didn’t even make any money. What a disaster. Thankfully for your landlord you’re a good land owning tenant. If only all tenants were like you.
What a joke.
Entitlement is a hell of a drug. I deserve to live wherever it’s easiest for my family, obviously. You don’t though.
Dude, I’m literally renting the house for a couple of years before I move back in after my kid is older. What the fuck do you expect me to do? Do you know how much I rented the house at? Only for 2 months cost of the mortgage for a year.
Let me sum it up for you simply, if you bought a house for some price and then you need to move for a short time like 3-4 years, why the fuck should you sell the house?
Sounds like poor planning to me
Imagine complaining about having to buy a house in a bad market while also complaining about being a landlord
So let me get you straight. If I needed to live somewhere else for a short time like 3 years. I’ll need to sell my house and then buy the same house again after 3 years for 50% more price?
No? Why would you need to buy the same house again?
Also you’re getting mad at the exact evil that makes renting the only option for some - the shitty housing market. It just so happens that landlords exacerbate the shitty market by being economic parasites. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned you are as a landlord, the concept of renting is parasitic.
A man owning a home and renting it out isn’t the problem and you know it.
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It’s not the problem but it’s part of the problem. Obviously the problem is giant corporations buying up tons and tons of homes, basically hoarding property, and renting them for near-mortgage prices. But that doesn’t change the fact that the concept of renting out property, renting out a home, is parasitic.
Imo taking houses out of the market to rent them out shouldn’t be allowed.
Lol, no nuance here. Landlords are the devil. I try to inject some moderation once in a while. We have a rental, it’s in fantastic shape. We’ve never raised the rent. We’ve spent so much on improvements and repairs we’ll not see a profit on it for the next 3 years. Tax write off? Sure… but nonetheless landlords are the devil. Doesn’t matter if we worked out asses off to afford it.
E: what follows is people willing to subscribe to luxuries like entertainment, but complain about fair prices for necessities. Why bother being decent when you get shit on anyway.
I would argue that owning additional property in an environment where there is a housing shortage is implicitly unethical even if you’re trying to run it ethically. Only argument I can think of against that is that you’re keeping it from shittier landlords and corporations. But still, denying others the opportunity to grow their wealth through property ownership causes poverty on a mass scale. Not any one person’s fault, but still.
We charge well under mortgage rates for rent. It’s affordable. I hate to throw this out there, but our intent is never to “extract” the max profit from someone. If someone wants to rent at the upper extent of their ability to pay it’s not what we’re forcing on someone.
The only reason you own a second house is for profit. A profit you are doing directly from an other individual. You can twist that how you want, it’s the reality. You are doing it respectfully and are providing a service. But an artificial one.
What if it’s run at cost? (And the property value were to stay level)
You’re still extracting wealth from the tenant, and the tenant is only losing money. You’re still preventing the tenant from building their wealth through property ownership.
The ethical thing to do in this situation would be to sell the house to the tenant at a price proportional to the rent, minus what they’ve already paid in rent to this point.
Sorry I genuinly don’t follow. If I were to rent out at cost, that means if the tenant were the owner, they’d have to pay the same cost as well. So they’re losing the same amount of money either way.
And how would they be building wealth through property, if the property value doesn’t rise? They would buy the flat for say 50k$, and then own 50k$ worth of property
I think you’re assuming that I would be paying off a loan with their rent? By renting at cost I meant their rent covers maintanance/upkeep
But if they own the property, they can potentially get that money back as the value of the property increases. Property is an appreciating asset, at least in the current US housing market, which is the frame of reference I’m coming from.
The property value almost certainly will rise, as long as the property owner maintains it properly.
I was assuming that, yes, but it’s sort of besides the point. The fact remains, any money a renter puts in, they can’t ever get back. The property owner however, being the one in control of the appreciating asset, can grow the money that they collect from the renter by investing it back into their property, increasing the rate at which it appreciates.
Edit: in the imaginary scenario where property value never changes, the tenant is still paying all the costs of homeownership, without the benefit of homeownership, ie, owning an asset which has value and can be sold. In this scenario the landlord is simply a middleman who is hoarding an asset.
If its run at cost, why aren’t you selling it to the tenants?
It can be fairly priced, but that doesn’t really change anything I said before. It’s not how the property is run that’s the problem, it’s that it’s owned by someone who isn’t living there during a time where that, on its own, creates problems.
Yeah, youre doing it out of the goodness of your heart and not to have a renter pay for you to own an appreciating asset. /s
Why do you think any business does what it does? That’s an absurd assertion that anyone would do that for nothing. We take good care of our tenants because we like having good people there, and that’s worth a lot. We play the long game. Your /s is useless after that post.
Yeah, profit is legitimately a problem, this guy Adam Smith wrote about it in a book and then Marx wrote a whole series of tomes doing a more comprehensive analysis about how it is unsustainable and to the detriment of humanity.
We’re not interested in infinite growth and owe no loyalty to shareholders. Our rates are static.
Yeah, youre a member of the rentier class, not the capitalist class.
The critique is actually different for rentierism vs capitalism, even most capitalist economicists hate rentierism. You’re collectively a parasitic class even to the capitalists because you increase their operating costs indirectly for no benefit. Earnestly no offense, as class analysis is about understanding structures, not moralizing.
You still benefit from extractivist class dynamics. Unless you’re going to be in the red even after selling the properties you own, even if you’re charging so low that you lose money in the short term. But I’m guessing that on aggregate over time you’re gaining money in the short term.
Well, that’s an opinion.
It is more than my opinion, it is literally the academic concensus on the subject, including pro-capitalist economic theorists in the consensus. You’d literally have to go back to the divine right of kings being an intellectual position taken seriously to find a consensus in support of rentierism.
Now, of course, feel free to be an anti-intellectual about it. Your opinion as someone who hasn’t read a lot of political economic theory is just as valid as the mainstream academic concensus among economicists and political economicists.
Typically most businesses aren’t profiting from the threat of withholding basic human needs.
Really?
Groceries?
Electricity?
Fuel?
I think you need to adjust your thinking.
Food stamps. It definitely would be nice to have a government owned food bank. This is a bit of a weird one because the line between luxury food and necessity food is blurry and complex. It certainly is a system that is also in need of reform
About half owned by the government why I live, the other half is highly regulated, companies dont really get a choice of what to charge. It’s also illegal where i am to cut off electricity during winter months where it really is 100% a need. If they don’t really get to choose who there customers are or how much they charge, aren’t the real customer the government? I think this would be a pretty good model for land ownership.
Not really a basic need, I haven’t used any in a couple years. The car cartels are certainly a huge threat to people’s basic freedoms.
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IIRC natural gas where I am is controlled by the same government org electricity is, so similar restriction apply.
I get charged a solid 30bucks a month to have it as a backup to my heatpump which is very annoying.
Yes really.
I absolutely agree with you about grocery, energy, and fuel companies being evil. But most companies aren’t grocery, energy, or fuel companies.
That said, I still hate capitalism. But for the purposes of this discussion, landlords are listed among the worst because they’re part of the select few who withhold basic human necessities over profit.
Fuel is NOT a basic human need, especially in countries where gas stoves are extremely uncommon or banned from being used in new houses (which includes most of Europe). In fact, in most of the US electric stoves are also by far the most common type (with the exception of California, NY, Illinois, and New Jersey).
Fossil fuels as a “need” is manufactured, it’s completely artificial, it shouldn’t even be legal to install stoves or heating that require gas. The US and Canada also shouldn’t have shitty car-dependent infrastructure. The only reason we have these problems is because of propoganda from fossil fuel corporations promoting garbage like “gas stoves cook better”… whatever that’s supposed to mean… or lobbying to keep cars as the only viable form of transport for the past hundred years.
I agree with the rest of your points though.
Well actually…
(I get your point though, it is very direct with landlordism)
Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is still evil. On the employment end they’re still extorting people because below a certain level, in the current society, money becomes a basic human necessity.
But for the purposes of this discussion, from a consumer perspective, most businesses in the world don’t trade in human necessities. Landlords, grocery stores, hospitals, energy companies, and a few more are the select few who do.
You’re literally my parents. They were long term landlords, bought properties for nothing in the 90’s rented them for 20-30 years and then sold them. Most properties were long term rentals, people lived there for 5+ years, one lady had 6 kids in 10 years in one of their houses. Rents in their area are ~$1200-2000, my parents were still renting at $700 because the place was paid off and the people living there had been there for nearly a decade.
Side hustle landlords ain’t the enemy, it’s the corporate landlords that are the true problem. Unfortunately the people being oppressively fucked don’t see a difference and it’s hard to blame them.
Hope your side hustle works out for you and I hope you stay one of the good ones.
EDIT: My parents both have full time jobs, having rentals wasn’t a job for them. They rented to pay the mortgage and pay for upkeep. The long term plan for them was to sell the houses and retire, not live off rent for perpetuity. They rented the properties at a rate that allowed them to pay the mortgage off quickly and pay for landlord repairs (roof, HVAC, water heater, septic tank, etc).
No they’re still part of the problem just not the biggest problem.