this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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The utility land owners provide is absorbing the risk of property value fluctuations and facilitate quicker transfer than buying and selling. But they charge exorbitantly for it.
a government can do the same
A government could do any utility providing activity.
They sure could.
So the government would be the landlord
In the democracy the government can be influenced, working for people, and providing utilities and not trying to profit on every interaction.
US democracy is very much broken so you can't see how it would work, but that's the idea.
I wasn't even thinking of the US. Why is that the default for so many people?
There's load of different systems and governments. I'm just saying making the government the landlord wouldn't necessarily be any better.
US is default on the internet, that's just how it is. I'm not from US either but still living in this paradigm.
Yeah, obviously it wouldn’t necessarily be any better but it's hard to be worse
There's loads of very dysfunctional and corrupt governments. I can see how a very corrupt and faraway government entity being your landlord might be worse than renting from someone who lives in the building or something.
Yeah, and dying in prison because you disrespected the glorious leader is worse than living under the bridge because you can't afford a rent working three jobs.
But if we were to think of a system that will be an improvement, switching from barely regulated ancap dream to something managed not by profit but by desire to give people necessities is better for society. And it will have to involve a government.
Here renting is very much controlled on both sides.
I'd imagine some anarchists disagree haha
In the future anarchists envision the concept of rent doesn't exist. Unless they're ancaps, but those can put their disagreement back to the dark place they crawled out of
That pretty low utility when property value has gone vastly up for decades. Id also question what "quick transfer" is, and whether it provides any use at all. Houses buy/sell in days now, as all the transactions have been streamlined between even novice sellers/buyers.
Changing exorbitant profit to poorer people on top of raking in exorbitant profit for taking near zero risk isn't a laudable role in society.
As climate change spins out of control, all land that is still functionally livable will skyrocket in value.
Which is also why, shocker, the mega rich are buying up massive amounts of land in areas least likely to experience the worst of climate change, like Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which has seen lots of influx of the rich buying property for "future-proofing" their life-plans.
Yeah, it's not much utility, but they can charge huge amounts for it because of how much demand there is for little supply. And the supply is kept low by horrible zoning and stigma against poor people and high density housing.