Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a landlord owns 500 homes and tenants pay off the mortgage, maintain the place, and generate the income stream, who is really taking from whom? "Seizing" kind of sounds like theft. If McDonald's employees at one shop in Pasadena Texas suddenly stopped sending money up the chain, isn't that theft of that particular McDonald's shop? I say no, because the theft has already occurred, but legally: faceless profiteers a…
Too long, did read but replying to a granular supporting point at the beginning not to the whole idea. Which isn’t to say I dismiss the whole idea, this is just how my brain processes arguments. If an argument relies on a certain support, I like to check in on the supports and not just accept or refute the argument. > If a landlord owns 500 homes and tenants pay off the mortgage So I agree that this situation feels l…
So along these lines the idea is, we can keep doing private property (this is different than personal property - toothbrushes), so long as we solve the "unfair" imbalance that leads to coercive landlord relationships?
Sure, I'd rather live in that world than this one.
But, for once I get to wear the anarcho-communist hat, so I'm gonna give my full commie answer: no, private property isn't fair, natural, normal, or sane. It is the root cause of the wealth concentration, the boy's club, and the feeling of unfairness.
Capitalism's inevitable end stage is wealth concentration, because fundamental to capitalism is the idea that money == power, after all, the amount of capital you have determines the amount of resources you get to decide how to distribute. So eventually, you get enough to where you can make decisions about whether to put a plant in Pasadena or Deere, Texas, and whichever town gives you the more permissive legal situation is the town you choose. Lobbying, lawfare. The instruments of the State, no matter how well designed by moral liberals attempting to prevent club membership being determined by money, are chipped away by you and your friends. This is compounded by the fact that most people are happy with what they have and just want to get on with their lives, but the corporations are capitalistically unable to do that: they HAVE to constantly grow, or they're not delivering good shareholder value. Only so many directions to grow. So they overwhelm the energy of humans who just want to chill, get a mountain of small decisions passed that make their lives unfair.
The unfairness is around the exclusion. 500 property landlord isn't just due to money concentration - it could be inheritance (yes that's wealth concentration but only because we consider land to be wealth), cronyism, or domination (go look up how most of the land in Taiwan was acquired, or in the UK, and how that land never really left the families it was given to by actual military conquerors).
It's not fair that one person/entity can arbitrarily exclude access to what traditionally is the commons - we're talking about housing right now but I mean all commons, land, network infrastructure, water. It's not fair that they can charge rent to access those commons for all of forever, despite the fact that the only reason those commons have any value at all is the existence of the community that needs it. The relationship is inherently interconnected but for some reason the money moves one way and only one party gets to say how the resources are distributed, and it's not the party with the actual needs! Which in the real world leads to detached corporations and individuals making bad decisions about resource distribution because of their distance from the need or because they're trying to maximize profit, which leads to capitalist insanity like leaving fields fallow despite workers wanting to work and people needing food, but crop prices aren't high enough to justify planting, growing, and then selling the food in a market, so fuck yall, we chained up the commons due to changing marker conditions.
It's not fair that people have to justify their labor's value to capitalist markets instead of the needs of their community. It's not fair that access means of that labor can be shut off based on the whims of markets or, don't forget, a petty human (remember that dumb beach access gate thing in California a couple years back?). Wealth concentration is an inevitable symptom of this system and therefore not the core problem.
Even under less wealth concentrated private property, a landlord can still evict a tenant that doesn't want to be evicted. That's unfair.