You don’t need a lot of personal capital if you fundraise prior to starting your commune, and have everyone pitch in the equity from sold homes/cashed out 401(k)s etc
Also you don’t have a right to someone’s property simply because they aren’t using it at the moment
A lot of Americans have negative net worth, so everyone cashing out would likely mean you’re still in debt, which is one of the ways our society keeps people trapped.
There’s a difference between legal rights and moral rights. Legally you’re correct, but 150 years ago people legally had the right to buy slaves, but they didn’t have the moral right to.
Similarly, people have the legal right to buy hundreds of acres of land and hold onto it until it increases in value, and then sell it later. This is immoral though, it’s scalping. We all understand scalping is bad when it’s through the lens of GPUs or consoles because we weren’t raised hearing about how “smart investors” invested in GPUs, we just heard about “investing” in housing or land.
If you have a solid argument why scalping houses or land should be permissible and even praised, while scalping GPUs/consoles should be impressible or at least scolded, I’d love to hear why.
I’d assert that scalping necessities is actually worse than scalping luxury goods.
It’s not scalping to hold onto something for years. That’s the opposite of scalping, which is taking advantage of surges in demand for quick profit.
Owning land is not a necessity.
GPU scalping isn’t technically scalping either by some definitions, but the layman usage of the word is “buying up a product and selling it back at an inflated price”. Someone is still a GPU scalper even if it takes them 2 years to resell some stock.
By this definition, housing scalpers are scalpers too. I’m not in the business of prescribing how people should speak, so if you have some academic issue with the word “scalping” I can choose a different one. We’ll call it “yeegstrafing”, but my contention is still the same despite what you call it.
People correctly have an issue with GPU yeegstrafers, because they’re not providing any value, they’re just hoarding excess goods and reselling to make a profit. Housing/land yeegstrafers are doing the same thing with necessities.
You may claim that housing or land more generally (you need land for housing/shelter) is not a necessity, but larger society disagrees. People generally regard shelter+food+water as the basic necessities. If someone successfully hoarded all the land, nobody would have access to shelter.
I think it’s unhelpful to frame structural economic problems as moral wrongs done by individuals, because these are all situations where more people accepting a moral consensus doesn’t actually resolve the problem. If there are 50 active GPU scalpers in the market, and a shaming campaign succeeds in reducing that number to 10, ultimately those 10 people are still going to be able to exploit the differential in retail price and actual market price to the same extent. Maybe it would take them a little while to scale up their operations, but they would do it. No amount of moralizing against scalpers can overcome supply and demand in this situation or actually make cheap graphics cards available to everyone.
Squatting isn’t immoral IMO, but enshrining legal protections for squatters would probably just result in a lot of effort being wasted on preventing trespassing lest property rights be forfeit. Instead it would be better to have high taxes on unused land and various forms of redistribution to keep everyone in a situation where they have genuine choice in their lives. The point shouldn’t be deciding who the wrongdoers are and punishing them.
Whether or not it’s helpful is orthogonal to whether it’s true, which is more what I’m concerned with. Maybe there’s a point to be had about effectively trying to convince people, but I don’t have an obligation to be the most effective conversationalist or converter.
However I’d happily support systemic approaches to reducing the effectiveness of housing scalpers. Calling them immoral is not mutually exclusive with supporting legislation against them. I’d even say those things are usually aligned.
The moral rights are more complicated when the property is in something that includes natural resources such as land. Land isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor, so everyone has an equal claim to it. There are a variety of ways this equal claim could be recognized, but one that has been proposed is requiring active occupancy and use to retain ownership of land. Another is a 100% land value tax whose revenue is distributed as a social dividend to citizens, which would give people some capital
I always have an ear open for Georgism.
Getting others as interested as I am is the challenge
To get other’s interest,
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always mention the LVT and other natural resource payments should be entirely used to sustain a guaranteed minimum income. This is justified on the basis of everyone’s equal claim to natural resources.
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Include it as part of a larger systemic critique that mentions how the current system denies employees the positive and negative fruits of their labor, which the employer solely legally appropriates.
