They all involve taking some kind of unearned economic surplus that exists based on the fact that houses are a thing you can own in our capitalist system 3) isn't any less capitalist than 1), it just crowdsources the capitalism so you can't see it and have no control over it
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I dunno, I don't have an answer I freely admit I have no plans to give away all my money, and I'll even say that while I might indulge in saying "I'm just a bad person like that" I don't think it actually does make me a worse person than average, I mean you haven't done it
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It just seems to me like black and white textbook Marxist definitions of who's good and who's bad are kind of pat and lead to obvious perversity Like leftist NIMBYs who think the people taking option 2 are heroes have actually really fucked up American cities
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Like San Francisco has a record homelessness crisis because no one is actually doing 1, a lot of people who think of themselves as hardcore leftists are fervently defending 2, and the majority of people who don't want to be made to feel bad just wash their hands and do 3
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And everyone's saying the mythic option 4 (be a rich person who voluntarily sets up a low-income housing co-op, or be an angry mob of poor people who seize the property by force to create one) is the only acceptable answer Well, yeah, but it ain't happening
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I mean I've never had tenants and I've also never run a business with employees And I get the argument "There shouldn't be private business owners with employees, it should be worker-owned co-ops or nothing", just like "Landlords shouldn't exist, only housing co-ops"
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And yet in the world as it is, starting one of those is a huge pain in the ass and nobody does it Not even your socialist favs (Jacobin Magazine is a privately owned business, not a co-op, so is Zero Books, so are most of them)
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I know it makes me an incrementalist neoliberal shill but hey if all landlords and owners are scum and it doesn't matter how low the rent you charge is or how high the wages you pay are then... The incentive you've created isn't really so much for co-ops as for owners to hide
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Like my read of it isn't that it means most people with money will go "Okay, I will give up all my power and put the money into a co-op" or "Okay, I will just straight up give all the money away" It'd be "I'll just put my money in the bank or in a mutual fund like everyone else"
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"It's not ideal but it's easy and comfortable and no one will even see it as a specific action on my part to single me out or yell at me for it I can just forget about it"
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Am I actually saying "Be nice to landlords so they'll have an incentive to be nice" Well, maybe I kind of am At the very least I'm saying there's a reason to make the distinction between better and worse landlords or bosses
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The counterargument is that by giving cookies to individual nice landlords you're enabling an overall exploitative system And I guess what I'm saying is... the system is fine with individuals becoming uncomfortable wielding that power, it's already evolved around that discomfort
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Like our society is already shot through with mechanisms of abstraction, if you want to make money from the fact that people pay rent without ever knowing the people or making any decisions it's really easy, and the shame-based discourse just guarantees that system will grow
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It's like the argument over small business I'm very well aware lots and lots of small businesses suck and are run by awful tinpot tyrants I still think it's worse for the country to have one giant faceless corporation be everyone's employer
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End of conversation
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