As someone who owns 3 houses, I believe no one should be allowed to own any houses. Housing should be lifetime leased only from a central scheme that has pricing adjusted by income. This facilitates mobility without the need of a rental or buying market.
In the current market based housing system if I sell my houses, they will be bought by worse individual landlords or corporations who will immediately hike the rents to market rates, and drag their heels on maintenance.
My only option out is to gift them to my tenants (who couldn’t afford to buy), but then they just become their assets instead. I’m sure there’s a high possibility they couldn’t afford the tax implications of such a gift. They will invariably need to move at some stage, sell the properties, or rent them out to someone else at market rates, and the dwellings become live ‘housing stock’ again. It doesn’t matter if you live in your house or rent it out; in the current system you are still commodifying what should be a human right.
The problem ISN’T individual landlords being a bunch of asshats, that’s a separate and real problem, but not THE problem. It’s the fundamental idea that landlords and renters should exist, and a system that perpetuates that. We need to eat the rich on a systematic level, otherwise the only people who will be eating the rich are even richer people, who can afford to eat those less rich than them, like the massive transfer of wealth up that happened during the COVID crash.
Becoming a capitalist only strengthened my belief that it is a broken system that needs to die. It is rediculous that I can sit on my arse and collect enough money to live. I ‘earned’ my assets (as an orphan on a government pension), but many (most?) capitalists don’t even need to do that step, with generational wealth and the opportunities that financial stability bring allowing them to invest and build a portfolio with little effort. If I can get where I am with no financial or family assets behind me, imagine what others can achieve… Wealth makes wealth is a rediculous system that can only breed inequality.
If I stop being a capitalist, someone else just ends up with those assets. I lose that power, and someone who wants to use that power to its full ‘potential’ takes them. I lose the time it gives me to devote to spreading anti-capitalist propaganda (what little I do, but it’s something), and my ability to try and get political power to help make systematic change. Where I own property, it’s already heading towards a Berlin like situation, where corporations own most of the housing. If a release those assets, it just increases the chance of those assets going in to corporate hands.
Anyway, if I’m totally wrong on all this please point out my mistakes, that’s just where my current thinking is at.
As someone who owns 3 houses, I believe no one should be allowed to own any houses. Housing should be lifetime leased only from a central scheme that has pricing adjusted by income. This facilitates mobility without the need of a rental or buying market.
In the current market based housing system if I sell my houses, they will be bought by worse individual landlords or corporations who will immediately hike the rents to market rates, and drag their heels on maintenance.
My only option out is to gift them to my tenants (who couldn’t afford to buy), but then they just become their assets instead. I’m sure there’s a high possibility they couldn’t afford the tax implications of such a gift. They will invariably need to move at some stage, sell the properties, or rent them out to someone else at market rates, and the dwellings become live ‘housing stock’ again. It doesn’t matter if you live in your house or rent it out; in the current system you are still commodifying what should be a human right.
The problem ISN’T individual landlords being a bunch of asshats, that’s a separate and real problem, but not THE problem. It’s the fundamental idea that landlords and renters should exist, and a system that perpetuates that. We need to eat the rich on a systematic level, otherwise the only people who will be eating the rich are even richer people, who can afford to eat those less rich than them, like the massive transfer of wealth up that happened during the COVID crash.
Becoming a capitalist only strengthened my belief that it is a broken system that needs to die. It is rediculous that I can sit on my arse and collect enough money to live. I ‘earned’ my assets (as an orphan on a government pension), but many (most?) capitalists don’t even need to do that step, with generational wealth and the opportunities that financial stability bring allowing them to invest and build a portfolio with little effort. If I can get where I am with no financial or family assets behind me, imagine what others can achieve… Wealth makes wealth is a rediculous system that can only breed inequality.
If I stop being a capitalist, someone else just ends up with those assets. I lose that power, and someone who wants to use that power to its full ‘potential’ takes them. I lose the time it gives me to devote to spreading anti-capitalist propaganda (what little I do, but it’s something), and my ability to try and get political power to help make systematic change. Where I own property, it’s already heading towards a Berlin like situation, where corporations own most of the housing. If a release those assets, it just increases the chance of those assets going in to corporate hands.
Anyway, if I’m totally wrong on all this please point out my mistakes, that’s just where my current thinking is at.