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America’s Frozen Housing Market Is Warping the Economy
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Everybody’s like : we need to build more apartment complexes and duplexes. No, we need to outlaw landlords.
It falls under a greater problem of our time. Everyone thinks they can be clever by becoming a passive income earner. So we get things like middle men which has been increasing the cost of things because every hand needs to grab a cut along the way. We have people becoming landlords slowly amassing rental properties which created a bigger and even life long tenant class. We get economies that revolve around stock markets pivoting industry from productivity to shareholder profit.
I don't know if this is a trigger phrase like it is on reddit but it's true that nobody wants to work anymore. Societies require people to work to keep things going. Can't have everyone sitting on their ass waiting for others work for them.
Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to be the sucker that didn't get a leg up on everyone else. So everyone plays along with this massive collective cognitive dissonance.
Name a time when people wanted to work. Did slave owners want to work?
and those lazy stone age humans didn’t want to work hunting and gathering all the time so they invented agriculture.
Most people have always been OK with working reasonable jobs for good pay, though. Work is not the problem. Unchecked greed is.
Evidently given the state of affairs whatever share of "most people" has been tipping away from a balance.
Call it unchecked greed. Call it nobody wants to work anymore. It's two sides of the same coin. The framing is just hurting someone or others feelings. The underlying problem is the same. Too many greedy people don't want to work.
I think we should be careful. It's certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that's terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.
I don't recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.
The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we're actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.