this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Indoctrination is a weird word to use here. It’s limited supply meeting increasing demand. When people see which way the wind is blowing, they see an opportunity.
I am a fan of classic video games from my childhood (NES, SNES, etc). A lot of people are fans of the games from this era. So some people saw this as an opportunity and began buying up a lot of the limited supply of these old games. Now many of these games go for thousands of dollars.
Do I like that my favourite childhood games are now unaffordable? No. Was I indoctrinated to see these games as an investment? Also no. I wish they weren’t so expensive but that’s the reality of it. At least ROMs are freely available, however, whereas with housing there is no way to bypass that issue.
Imo indoctrination is the appropriate word to use. I'm old enough to remember when food, water and shelter were considered a critical necessity for people to live. Back in the 60s and 70s it was rare to see unhoused people in the cities I grew up in, as we still had a large population of residents who grew up in the Dirty 30s and knew what it was like.
Empathy has been overridden by greed, brought on by capitalism's indoctrination that money is more important that human being's welfare.
Capitalism didn’t invent greed. Humans have been killing each other and stealing each other’s resources for tens of thousands of years. Greed isn’t even exclusive to humans. If you’ve ever seen what foxes or weasels can do to a henhouse, or what giant Asian hornets can do to a beehive, then you’ll see what I mean.
Capitalism is just the idea that competition leads to better outcomes for everyone and that the best competitors are people who put their own resources on the line (rather than someone else’s). What we’re seeing today is consolidation and centralization of wealth and power, the exact opposite of competition. Anyone celebrating this is not a capitalist, they’re a (wannabe) oligarch.
As for empathy, I think the only way to build that is to work directly with people and try to make a difference in their lives. Economic planning and policy making does not achieve empathy, you have to already have empathy going into it.
That's not what capitalism is. Competition is one component that's observed in capitalist systems and it isn't strictly required, nor necessarily the natural course of capitalism. There are well established examples in capitalist economies where competition cannot exist naturally. Then you have the history of capitalist economies rife with consolidation, only sometimes impeded by intervention. I'd invite you to consider what happens to the losers in a best case scenario competitive market. What happens with their machinery, workers, brands, market share, etc. once they're our of business. I'll say it since I want to draw a conclusion - they typically get absorbed by the successful competitors. Repeat this cycle enough and you get the consolidation we see all around us. What we live in isn't not capitalism. It's just a ..late.. stage of it. The perfect competition model doesn't prove that it's a natural or a likely model of economies, there's no good evidence that competitive equilibria are likely or stable. If reality is any guide, it's the opposite.
No, of course not. Competition needs to be preserved through strong antitrust laws. The US used to have a very active FTC which sued to prevent mergers and attempted to break up monopolies in order to preserve competition. Then it went through a long period of inactivity due to monopoly-friendly governments.
Now, the Biden administration and their appointee, Lina Khan, have resumed this important work. Of course, this could all be jeopardized if Trump wins the election, but so could a lot of other important things.
As for Canada, we favour oligopolies under a misguided theory that large Canadian businesses will protect Canadians from foreign competitors to the south. We’re paying the price for having no trustbuster with teeth, like Lina Khan.
Oh yeah, the whole "greed is good, people are absolutely selfish" is another level of indoctrination. There's so many counterexamples but you need it for the theories based on these axioms to sound plausible.
The home you live in is not an investment if you aren't willing to downgrade. If you live forever in your home, you can't spend the money you'd get if you sold it because you won't sell it till you die. If you decide to sell it, and decide you won't downgrade, that you want an equivalent home, that home will cost approximately the same as what you sold yours for as it would have appreciated in value just like yours. In fact you'd lose the transaction fees. If you wanted to make money you have to buy a cheaper home. That typically means some form of downgrade. Size, type, location, etc. Yet many people don't understand this and believe that the home they own is an investment and that it going up in price is good for them. All the while their taxes go up with its price along with everything else they buy because everyone else also has to pay higher housing costs. It's irrational to believe this because it's simply not true. Therefore I say people believe this due to indoctrination. The process of learnint to believe something without critical examination of its validity. I'm just using the term because I think it fits the bill.
The home you live in is only an investment if you're willing to downgrade and you can only collect the upside on the difference in price between what you sell and what you move into. Secondary units are an investment proper. The scenario with classic games is like a secondary property because you don't need to buy an equivalent in price cartridge when you sell one you have.
That’s not true at all. If you own your home outright (paid off your mortgage) or even if you’ve only paid off part of it, you can use it as leverage to borrow money you otherwise would not have access to. A common loan of this type is called a home equity line of credit.
Another thing you can do is what is called a reverse mortgage. This is where you effectively sell your house back to the bank but continue to live there rent-free. In exchange, the bank gives you a monthly payment based on the value of the home. You can often see TV ads for this sort of financial instrument. They’re very popular with retired folks who would like some extra money to travel or take up new hobbies.
Is the HELOC free? Are the reverse mortgages free? Aren't they just swapping downgrading your living conditions with making less money than you could have? I think you're just presenting another alternative to capitalize some of your primary home, not really disproving the general point.
You said you had to buy a cheaper home to make money from the equity in your home. That is not true, and the examples I have showed how.
As for “free”, what is free is the increase in value of your home over time. That’s the investment part. There are people who bought homes in San Francisco back in the 1970’s who are now multi-millionaires simply due to the many-fold increase in the value of their home. With a HELOC or a reverse mortgage they can gain access to some or all of that money without needing to move to a cheaper house.
That’s not true at all. A house owned in an appreciating neighborhood or that is thoughtfully invested in (appropriate upgrades) can increase in value over time. Moving to a different neighborhood or selling and buying under different market conditions can allow regular people to realize real gains.
If the market conditions are different, your house is very likely going to be subject to them as well. Different neighbourhood falls under downgrade.
That’s a ridiculous oversimplification but it seems to make you happy.