Clearly they must be giving out free land in good places to live (near were all the jobs are), free materials and free time over there.
It’s either that or that house you mention is supposed to be made out of opinions and built in fantasy la-la-land, as it’s only how the materials and places to put it in would be endless and free.
Oh so wait, so building a house isn’t free then since nobody is giving the land and materials away. So why do you expect a landlord to let you live for free if he had to pay to buy the land and build it?
Nice to see you’re getting close to the core of the problem.
Yeah, Land is owned rather than belonging to everybody as it used to be back before monarchs and as land ownership works in this system - any one individual with massive wealth can own way more Land than they need - it can be easilly hoarded by those with more money in a way that’s impossible for those with less money to overcome (short of a Revolution) and thus create cartels or even monopolies in Land in desirable places to live, a market positions from where they can extract as big a rent as they want since everybody else has no alternative.
It’s from the massive imballance thus created by Law in the main, essential and irreplaceable, “raw material” for housing that the massive house prices we see come from, and landlords usually use their priviledged position in that highly imbalanced market to extract excessive rents.
The whole situation is actually the very opposite of the “Free Market” you state it is - Land (and thus housing) ain’t like teddy bears and soap were a competitor can just enter the market and make more of it when somebody tries to corner the market, quite the opposite: it’s dependent on a naturally limited resource on top of which a trully ancient kind of legislation makes hoarding extremelly easy for those lucky enough to have lots of wealth, artificially transforming the limits of that resource into an extreme kind of scarcity.
In this Not-At-All-Free Market, most landlords will extract excessive rents far beyond the value they add. If rents were not mainly based on exploiting a dominant position in a market dominated by hoarding and artifical scarcity and only paid for the actual service being provided by landlords, they would be tiny in comparison with the current situation and very few people would be critical of landlords.
Private interests are the ultimate autocracies.
Let private interests amass huge amounts of resources and you have hugely powerful autocracies.
Let these autocracies hire so-called economists to convince everyone that they will settle into some kind of optimal state if we just let them be and you have the current situation in the USA.
My landlord inherited 17 houses and hasn’t worked a day in his life. I inherited male pattern baldness.
Your point being what exactly? My landlord has spent his entire life working at a coal mine to buy a building that needed to be torn down. He then tore it down and built a modern one in its place. Since then, he is here all the time doing maintenance, packing the trash so it gets accepted, despite being over 70. But fuck him regardless according to you guys, since every landlord inherrited millions of houses, and if only you were so lucky, you would have given those houses to the poor.
The land is really the limiting factor here, the rest is very easy by comparison.
There are tons of natural limitations in all kinds of things and all sorts of Markets - which is why Free Market Theory is mainly bollocks: the conditions for it to work as advertised exist only in a handful of Markets.
In Housing, clearly Land is the main limiting factor in places like cities and surrounding suburbia, though if that was removed we would eventually run against other limiting factors, probably on some kinds of building materials or manpower (hence my mentioning of both), though all that could be overcome with time whilst Land limitations, although made worse by Landownership laws, are ultimatelly down to there not being possible to make any more of it (though different work patterns could make it be much more efficiently used if they weakenned the need for people to live in and around cities).
Also keep in mind that land usage efficiency can be increased by building more multi-story housing, though in the current situation with land ownership that possibility just gets translated into higher land prices, so in places like the US you end up with sprawl rather than medium density housing: the whole economics of Land and thus housing pricing make a bigger and nicer living place far from a city center be the same price or cheaper than a crummy appartment nearer the center, even though were land was used with higher efficiency and dwelling size is smaller the price per dwelling should actually be cheaper.
Even in space I expect there will be some areas that are most desireable than others because of proximity to resources and markets. Increasing density is something I am very much in favor of but as you correctly pointed out this mostly leads to higher land prices which represent value captured by the ownership class as explained by the Iron Law of Rent.
I mean I get both sides here. We live in a free market economy, where the scarcity of something affects the cost of it. People want land close to the city and there’s an extremely limited amount of it. If there are n*100 people and only n parcels of land in a small area, how do you provide it to people? Do you sell it? Is it a lottery system? Is the land sold at a base value that never changes? Like, how do you envision this going?
Right now, people have to freedom to buy as much land as they want and set the pricing for that land. What we need is a property owner tax that scales up depending on the amount of property that you own. Though this will just make more land available. No one in their right mind will sell it for less than it’s worth though.
