this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I love the revolutionary optimism. That has been a question that has been posed in philosophical politics ever since Marx and Engels were alive.
Before even then
Price controls were something people were trying even as far back as the crisis of the third century when Diocletian set the standard prices for several common items bought by the Roman peasantry like bread.
Contrasting against the grain dole, which worked better because it was the state stepping in to directly remove a large cost from the lives of eligible households, allowing them to put that money towards improving their fiscal standing. For ancient Romans it was Bread, but for modern Americans a solid equivalent would be medicine or education, shit you could argue that the post war boom was in part because of the govt. doing this partially with housing, subsidizing the costs of WWII vets to build new homes or buy existing ones, of course because America black vets got shafted and redlined but the general idea is still there.
And in a country with practically infinite money, why don't we ensure housing? We have infinite money, we could house literally everyone, but we don't. Why not?
Infinite money is not the same as infinite resources. We can't just create houses out of thin air just because we have money. We still need tangible things like lumber and concrete to actually build the house.
With that said, we could certainly provide housing for everyone in the U.S. It's not an issue of resource scarcity.
Not even housing scarcity, there's already more available units than there are unhoused people, the problem is property owners who are eating properties up they have no intentions of living in themselves to collect rent on them.
We have the houses already. We don't actually need to create them, though we sure could if need be.
It's a way to force the masses to be productive for their capitalist overlords. Overt slavery isn't acceptable any more, but saying “you're going to live under a bridge unless you comply” still is.
I'd genuinely love to learn more, do you have any readings for pre-marxist ideas about equality in economics?
https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=k4sT-b3VnwAdjiTI
Not a reading, but it'll certainly getcha blood boiling!
He's actually a good resource on ancient Roman history generally too, he's the guy who brought my attention to how successful the grain dole system was and why it was that successful.
He also includes social developments like the Aedileship of Agrippa, which was one of the greatest periods of infrastructure development and renewal in Roman history.
Not sarcastic at all, I just wonder about the need for "growth". I know absolutely nothing about the theory, I just wanna know why it seems to be necessary. Why don't we fix prices, or at least have them justified regionally, based on the need of the region?
There is no need for growth. Sustainability used to be a thing. But the wealthy do what the wealthy do with all their leasure. Turning systems inside out and on their head. Gaming it till the growth pushes everyone else out. And it's not likely to change till capitalists are regulated from existence.
Currency and markets can exist without capitalism. Sustainably can't exist with capitalism.
If we fixed prices for one thing, we'd have to do it for everything. In a world where resources aren't exactly infinite, that creates a huge problem; especially when you have to pay people who're producing this fixed-value commodity (because you need people for that) and you have to increase their wages to buy stuff that isn't fixed-value, like housing (since land is a limited, though abundant, resource).
There's infinite land in the universe, let's go get it (/s, but only kinda)
Man, if only...too bad NASA doesn't get the funding they need.