421–430 of 462 posts
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People are lining up around the block to adopt poor non-white babies? Mothers have no natural human emotions of attachment to their offspring?
Single-mothers gave up their humanity when sleeping with "bad men" apparently.
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If the top end is short of "billionaire", I think you get a world without Tesla, Space-X, Blue Origin, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and several other things that I believe are valuable and worthwhile. You may argue that the cost is too high and that we'd be better off without those things.
I wasn't arguing for lowering the top end, I think it's fine as is. A broader bottom end may mean that it gets a bit harder to make it to that point, but in practice that's not where most of the resources for providing more/better housing would come from anyway. Ambitious people will find a way to make it to the top, while putting their wealth into self-directed charities and moonshot companies instead of government-…
Sorry. I was reading my own bias/worldview into it and taking as a given that there will always be people with negative net worth (debts in excessive of assets). You were clear enough in speaking to that as unnecessary, but I read right through that without really internalizing your point of view. (I still believe in any system where credit exists that there will always be some net debtors, but that doesn't give me the right to argue against a point of view you weren't espousing.)
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>In the sense that he or she is charging 70% of their monthly income for rent. No. He or she is charging an absolute amount, not a percentage of their payslip. >And it's coercion alright if the alternative is being left homeless. Coercion /koʊˈɜːrʃən/ is the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of intimidation or threats or some other form of pressure. There is no coercion here. Po…
>> He or she is charging an absolute amount, not a percentage of their payslip. Here's another analogy. I make this beautiful and unique item that you want to buy. I charge - literally - an arm and a leg over it. Like, the actual body parts. You protest: "You're asking for a part of my body??". I reply "I'm asking for an arm and a leg, not a part of your body". Hey, maybe you can pay me with someone else's arm-and-a-…
The simple fact is that, over many thousands of years, humans have evolved a system of voluntary exchange. And we have found that that system produces the greatest benefit for the largest number of people as compared to all other systems we have tried at scale. This means that those with property rent their property to others so that they may live there.
If you don't allow the owners of property to rent their property, then there will be no homes for anyone. If you do not allow people to own property, then property will likely not be put to its most productive use (see: communist russia, china, north korea, etc.).
If you'd like to propose a better system, i'm all ears. But until then, you need to accept the hard reality that there is no better solution for these people, and that an offer like "pay 70% of your income in rent" is something that they have the right to accept.
To suggest that these people are being exploited when they are entering into such an agreement is to suggest that they are incapable of agency, and to deny them the most basic of human rights.
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So what you are, in effect, saying, is that these poor people would be better off if the owner of the trailer park would kick them all out? Then they would not be "exploited". I am inclined to believe you are a troll, because the distinction between an aggression of violence and a voluntary free exchange on the market is quite easy to make, which in your argument you fail to do.
If every time you took an ambulance you were forced to sign over 80% of your wealth or be left to die in the streets in a 'voluntary exchange', that would be exploitation. The difference between that and slumlords is simply a matter of degree. Desperation is the route to profit in both cases. Truly voluntary exchanges without gaping chasms of systemic inequality do not provide opportunities for sustained profit.
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Similarly, employees should accept the bare minimum salary they need to live on(perhaps with a modest vacation). Anything above this is unethical, since they are now profiting off of their employer. In both cases, you are essentially condemning the person to stay in that position forever with no chance of advancement. It reminds me of the parable of the talents[1]; I tend to agree with its conclusion that the guy who…
Why is advancement desirable? Giving people more responsibility when they prove they can handle it is one thing. It's entirely another to equate advancement with monetary compensation. In general, I believe people should be incentivized with responsibility, which is in everyone's interest. Cash compensation only benefits one person; doubly so when considering the rate of tax avoidance in the upper echelons of income.
The United States isn't the right country for such a system, though. You might look at Japan: their corporations motivate people with social status more than money. The CEOs there don't directly make a large salary, and neither do the employees. Really, nobody makes a lot of money in Japan.
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Having access to incredibly high interest temporary credit means having the same problem next month and this new problem of having to pay off the high interest credit bill. You're generally not going to be evicted for a temporary hiccup. Late bill penalties are almost certainly going to be less than the payday loan fees. I have mixed feelings about the making bail bit.
My bounced check fee is $30 from my landlord, $30 from my bank. My late rent fee is $30. My late utility fee is $5, but if I paid by a bounced check, that would be $35. In other cities, it could be much higher. The fee for not paying a fine on time can be a weekend stint in jail, whereby you will get charged for room and board. The fee for not being able to pay for car repairs is losing your job. The fee for not payi…
looks at this in complete puzzlement
I'm constantly amazed at just how broken the US system is in almost every possible way.
And just for the record, there is no such thing as payday loans in Europe. At the very least not in Germany. The first time I heard of these was when John Oliver did a segment on them.
Instead of giving money to poor people, who then have to spend it all on rent, why not provide affordable housing? In Linz we have something called "housing cooperatives" (the German word is "Wohngenossenschaften"). These cooperatives build apartments, and to rent them you become a member of the cooperative. The goal of these cooperatives is not to make a profit, but to provide affordable housing. And it's amazing ho…
"The only problem is that there are very long waiting lists (more than 5 years in some cases)." So some proportion of poorer people are getting cheap housing, and others are priced out. This sounds like the same outcome that results from rent controls in San Francisco and New York. "It's amazing how cheap good housing can be when it's not necessary to make a profit for the owner." What would need to change in order f…
The biggest problem is that the regional government is conservative/nationalist and strongly influenced by a large bank that does a lot of property development. So there are a lot of political obstacles to new developments by cooperatives. I feel that the cooperatives are a remnant of the times when the social-democrats had more influence.
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Well, okay. If you live in a place with a "failure of government", do you wait for the government to get fixed? Until then let them eat cake?
> Until then let them eat cake? Of course not. But neither is it all or nothing; slum or safety net. My point is the root cause needs to be explicitly identified before it can be rectified. The root cause in this case is America's fetishism for small government and smaller taxes.
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Artificially decreasing housing prices always creates shortages - that's already well understood. The more people who can take advantage of artificially lowered prices, the more pressure there is in other parts of the housing market to absorb excess demand. The cost of decreasing those housing prices are paid for somewhere else in the system.
Hm, how is a cooperative / mutual-aid-like financial/organizational structure imposing artificially lower prices? The profit is absorbed by the members in-kind in the form of lower shelter costs in exchange for the responsibilities of shared ownership, and as the shareholding owners it is their right to take out profits in the form they mutually agree upon. Just because the profit is not capital and not in the norm o…
This is not to say that the housing cooperative does not generate a modest profit, which is then used to build new affordable housing, or to modernize existing properties for modern energy efficiency laws.
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So I'll admit that personally I'm intrigued by land-value tax, but it's not an answer to the other guy's question. He was precluding all public and private land ownership. There can't be taxes on land of any kind if no one owns anything and no ownership is enforced.
Why can't there be taxes on land and no ownership? You can't tax land use? Are all the shelters floating above the land? No records? What's the problem that makes taxing land with no ownership untenable?