Fucking do it you cowards.
Or the courts that would throw the law out as soon as it gets challenged the first time
They should never have been allowed to buy them to begin with.
The second best time is now.
Or charged with a crime. All the protections of a person with none of the liability. Seriously it’s beyond stupid. If someone said that to you you would laugh awkwardly and get out of the convo asap and depending who it was talk to their family about possible treatment from psychiatric providers. Yet here we are, having to all pretend like the psycho is right because they bribed a politician into making it the law.
Yeah, but you can squeeze 285,000 corporations in one office building!
I mean it’s a free market, it’s not reasonable nor desirable to proactively prohibit all possible bad scenarios
edit: to anyone downvoting, read carefully
I read your comment carefully and still downvoted because its an incredibly dumb thing to say.
why is it a dumb thing to say? in a free market, it is wise to take all that you can for your shareholders. Maybe a free market isn’t what you desire?
That’s a really good point. I should be able to buy some people since it’s a free market and it’s just impossible to curb exploitation.
I don’t wanna get exploited! You better be willing to buy me for a fair price…
Now are downvoting because: What they said isn’t true… Disagree with what was said… Missed that they are pointing out a free market does not give a fuck about you; unless you are profits…
I was just saying that as I was about to send my 6-year old out to the corner store to go buy some cigarettes for me, since our free market hasn’t imposed any restrictions on that transaction.
Or if you look at the housing market specifically, in my area at least, I can’t buy a second home in the same area as an individual. I can buy investment properties that I’d need to rent out, but I’m forbidden from owning a second residence for myself.
State, Local, and Federal lawmakers are constantly proactively prohibiting bad scenarios. And in this case, it wouldn’t even be proactive, it’s literally something that’s going on right now that needs corrected.
Homes are for people.
If allowing ordinary people to be priced out of owning homes is your idea of a free market, then fuck the free market.
Gods yes. We can’t predict every sort of bad behavior in the market, only react. Bunch of arm-chair quarterbacks in here, “We should have seen this coming!” Watch 10 people tell me exactly how we could have.
And on this issue, it’s high time to react. Doubt it will happen. :(
It’s not a free market… that’s not an actual thing that can ever exist. It’s a state where the markets are in a perfect, frictionless state, where barriers of entry are non-existent and everyone has equal access to trade on the market… Ignoring petty things like needing to actually source things
It is, in fact, both reasonable and desirable for the government to proactively watch and interfere in the markets before they enter a failure scenario, that’s their job in the market.
It’s often willfully misunderstood, but what you’re describing is a half step from lasse faire capitalism. Which is the idea that a “free market” is a stable state, and we just need to let it settle long enough without interference. But that’s literally psuedoscience…
And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.
the country would function so much better if we just sent out ballots to everyone to vote on every bill if they want to
That’s how Brexit happened in the UK.
I agree about not trusting the politicians, but not sure I trust the general public much more unfortunately.
The founding fathers didn’t either that’s why they put a buffer in in case there was a nuance not under stood by the general public. The only problem is I don’t think they envisioned a party hell bent on the country’s destruction.
I non-sarcastically love your optimism. But part of me really believes that 50% of the country votes however their church tells them to. So I’m not sure it’d be better.
Stupid take. Nobody thinks rote popularity contest is a good idea. There’s too much to know. Too much to regulate. Have to employ experts.
If it were left to popular vote, do you think we would have the Exclusionary Rule? A ban on cruel and unusual punishment? A right to remain silent? Any criminal rights?
Any minority rights at all?
So just vote for the issues that matter to you.
Either way, you get more control than having someone else make the decisions for you.
Direct voting is the future.
We have frequent ballot measures in California and as a voter I do a lot of work to understand those ballot measures that many do not have the time or the ability to do. California ballots may have 5-10 questions on them, and these things already take a long time to properly research and understand…Can you imagine the complexity when you’re talking about national issues and especially thinking of running the entire government that way?
It’s a full-time job. There’s no way it’s scalable to run a country this large with this many competing interests using direct voting. You’d spend your whole life voting on or researching on voting on things.
Ultimately, you’d wind up with industry writing all of the law proposals and a misrepresented version of those coming across some kind of voting device. We’d still continue our slow slide into some sort of industrial feudalism, just without the politicians to blame for it.
I think proportional representation and ranked choice voting are both better ideas.
This will pass at the same time as the healthcare, world peace, and word hunger bills.
From the article:
With a divided Congress, the bills are unlikely to pass into law this session. But Mr. Smith said legislators needed to start a conversation.
Solid odds this will be a campaign issue, which is a great thing.
It will be a campaign issue and then nothing will be done about it. Fingers will be pointed.
This 1000%. A bunch of bullshit from all sides, all these “ought to’s” and a bunch of malarkey will get tossed around. The election will get won by Biden or Trump, and all this will just turn into the same thing it always does…empty promises and a shit ton of money getting made at the top while we’re all fucked.
Real change won’t happen by voting for it, it’s when billionaires find their heads in baskets staring up at the axe/guillotine/whatever that just cut their fucking heads off. Eat the rich.
Everyone will talk about it, nobody will do anything to improve the situation.
Once you reach the ranks of the Senate, you have more financial interest in the future of your REIT-heavy investment portfolio than the price any of your constituents are paying for housing. Hell, more than a few Senators come straight from the halls of Wall Street themselves. That’s how they have the kind of surplus cash to run for office to begin with.
Gun regs have better odds, as high real estate prices don’t put Congresscritters in the hospital.
In fact, we’ve already passed more regulations recently in the form of Safer Communities Act, as well as reimplementing the Obama Era mental health screening that was removed under the Trump Admin. Sure, it’s not a renewal of the Assault Rifle Ban, but it’s something.
Liberals: “We’re teetering on the brink of tyranny, democracy may cease to exist after 2024.”
Also liberals: “Please remove our 2A rights while fascists in red states expand their own.”
“remove our 2A rights” is a weird way to phrase “regulating gun availability to make it harder for people who intend to use them to kill people to get them.” you know the text of the second amendment includes the phrase “well-regulated,” almost as if they did not intend for gun availability to be the lawless wasteland that it currently effectively is.
Your rifle isn’t going to protect you. Did guns stop the war on drugs? Did guns stop the Patriot act? Did guns stop the Japanese interment camps? Did guns stop Jim Crow? Did guns save the Natives? Did guns stop the anti-black city riots? Did guns end the robber barrons or the city bosses? Did it stop the attacks on Asians in San Francisco and New York last century or even two years ago?
Your gun means jack and shit. The biggest proof of that is you are not in front of a planned parenthood in Texas ready to battle with it.
Do your part and vote 3rd party. If we want change we have to vote for it.
Our current electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd parties. We need to switch to approval/STAR voting to make 3rd parties viable.
Yeah, people keep saying things like this, and then just completely ignore that their view is led us down a 40-year path where our liberty and economic power has dwindled progressively with each passing election.
So no.
Your viable parties are shit. I’ll vote better.
Our current electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd parties.
That’s true until it isn’t. Year-over-year, the nation can only support two parties nationally and one dominant party state-by-state. But which party (and which coalition of leaders) hold power can change in wave years, particularly when strong third party campaigns force rival parties to cater to the independent vote to get over the 50% hump.
There’s a podcast called Hell of Presidents that does a great job of documenting the rise and fall of state party organs and their impact on the national scene. The rapid collapse of the Federalists, the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats, the collapse of the Whigs and emergence of the Republicans, the rise and fall of democratic socialists, and the emergence of liberal progressives, movement conservatives, libertarians, and neoliberal democrats all begin with third party bids in small states.
While we don’t have more than two distinct parties in the US, we absolutely do have factions within the main two parties that have regionalized and polarized constituencies that are fighting for control of the national party apparatuses. Even setting aside guys like Trump and Sanders, just check out Nebraska’s Indie dark horse contender Dan Osborn, whose union organizing is putting him ahead of both party candidates.
There’s quite a few southern states that use runoff voting. Their state legislatures are just as filled with the big two parties as everywhere else. Additionally, the US is not alone in favoring FPTP voting, but many of those other countries still have third parties that are viable in individual regions (Canada and UK, for example). The US is unique in how the big two parties are dominant everywhere at every level.
People focus a lot on FPTP, but it’s not the only factor at work.
Please, tell me you’re a child who knows nothing about the US electoral system without telling me. People like you got us Trump
Too much of a baby to read and understand the spoiler effect that comes with FPTP? Too impatient and short-sighted to push for election reform (RCV or approval voting) and just want some low effort immediate option that requires nothing more than casting a vote? Child. Democracies require effort to survive.
You’re looking at 3rd party votes in the wrong light.
They’re an effective means of voicing discontent with the candidates from the two largest party. Unlike the third of Americans who don’t vote 3rd party votes demonstrate a willingness to go out and vote along with their discontent in the platform of the two largest parties.
We aren’t going to get RCV by just waiting for it to happen. It’ll take actual work.
And calling people who have different opinions from you on the Internet ‘child’ isn’t going to get them to agree with you.
Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY’RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.
Remember that Blackstone and the other institutions are only financing it. These companies have names; like American Homes/AMH, invitation, opendoor and so on. There are a lot of them and they are all given billions to go buy as many houses as they can get their hands on… essentially bottomless pockets. And those are just the large ones. There’s plenty of people churning 100s of homes and letting property management companies do all the work, financing new deals with existing rentals as leverage.
I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?
Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that’s been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There’s no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you’ll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.
So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you’re going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.
Yes it would be better. Monopolies are bad. Near monopolies are bad. The more market power a company gains the more they can charge for no reason at all except “fuck you pay me”.
Monopolies are bad.
Cartels are equally bad. Unless you change the economic incentives in home building and real estate speculation, you are - at best - changing the discrete number of people who get to participate in the profiteering. I don’t particularly care if one national guy or fifty state guys get to ratchet up my housing prices. Big Number Goes Up all the same.
The solution is to make hoarding rental properties an unattractive investment. Put an escalating tax on owning multiple residences. If the 5th property is at 40% tax every year it’s no longer a money maker in a competitive market. Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest. Now you have buyers back in the market and landlords looking to sell.
Well said, people think that making certain companies go poof will suddenly resolve issues for a long time, without thinking about resource availability, the circumstances which led to the sutuation and the customers who enable them.
