this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Doing a multi billion dollar realestate fraud, in a semi-communist "Socialist Oriented Market Economy"....
...yeah the penalty is gonna be on the steep side. Landlords, rent seekers, and fraudsters aren't looked upon nicely anywhere, but particularly so in a country with that relationship to communism.
Landlords aren't generally considered communal minded. Fraud isn't good for the community, it's not done for the collective good.
The immune system of the masses has weeded out the what was going on here, and will deal with it via putting the perpetrator to death. Making sure this outrageous and damaging conduct will not continue or be encouraged.
It's a tough call, and they're making it.
One landlord may be more or less "ethical and community minded" than another, but being a landlord is 100% about profiting from somebody else's precariousness. The best you can say is, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." I appreciate a landlord who fixes the broken pipes and doesn't totally gouge me... but that always feels like Stockholm Syndrome.
I don't see what difference that would make. They still get to set the price, and you can either take it or leave it.
I suspect that this number is extremely low.
Easily with far (far far far) fewer landlords.
It's genuinely ridiculous to paint "rental homes" as some boutique service offered as a choice to home-owners who have money for a house but just don't want the "commitment" (?!?!?!?!?) of not throwing a huge portion of your money away every month. Absurd.
I don't hate small landlords. We all have to betray humanity to avoid being homeless. We work at unscrupulous companies, because what other kind of companies are usually hiring? But we don't have to contort ourselves to the point of breaking every single bone in our bodies to morally justify profiting from the unfair precariousness of people terrified of homelessness.
Yeah, the short of it is if you are a landlord and you're not undermining your own industry by encouraging tenants to become owners of their own personal property, then you're not community minded in the socialist (own the means of production) sense. There are exceptions, like one case where a rapper bought a poor neighborhood but did so to keep rent hikes and evictions from happening, arguably giving those families more stability so they have a chance to build family wealth.
The one issue I would raise with your analysis is that if things were very different (like all people who wanted a home had one) a second home rented out not to the desperate but people in a transitional state could be a benefit to the community. Think college students who are attending school somewhere they do not plan to live long term, and who prefer not to live in a dormitory. Or people who are staying for a few months in another city for their work or visiting family, where a hotel would be prohibitively expensive.
Interestingly enough, something like 86% of Vietnamese people own their own homes...
In part it's because 70% of the population are farmers, and if you live in a rural area and pass a test on raising crops the government will just assign you a plot to farm.
I imagine home ownership is also very high in Japan, where they've had a negative interest rate and deflation for 25 years. Their housing bubble burst with their aged population explosion and the total population being in decline.
Yes, if things were different then things would be different.
I'm not sure how a house is different from an apartment in this regard. It doesn't need fed or anything, you can just go on vacation if you want.
It's a simple question. Are you taking away a home that could be bought and lived in by another family, for your own financial benefit?
If yes, then i have a French friend I'd like you to meet
You are looking at ethics and morality from an individualistic perspective, not a systemic perspective. People opposed to landlords are more concerned with the latter. This is an insignificant edge case needed to construct a situation where the individual and social ethics diverge and has little relevance to policy decisions.
I wouldn't say either is entirely ethical, but the second example is way more ethical than the first. If you buy a house to rent, it doesn't really matter where the house is, you're still preventing a family from having a stable home and taking it off the market for your own greed. With the second, at least you're building housing.
Probably, because it would probably cause them to become entitled, or have an overly endowed sense of entitlement or control over the area (by valorisation of the owning more of it). They'd probably bring it up whenever they could, especially at council meetings as of its an act of charity when it's still rent seeking.
That sense of entitlement is generally termed "being a Karen" these days, and is a Common phenomena among financially sucessful liberals
What? Rubbing the renters face in the fact that they've got them paying off a mortgage that the renter could probably afford themselves if they only had the CAPITAL outlay for a down payment on the place they're now forced to rent?
No, the ethical move would be to place the house in the renters name proportionally as they pay it off - because they're the ones actually paying the mortgage. Making the false claim of "oh look how much of YOUR MONEY this is costing me" isn't some how more ethical.
This is the nature of capitalism, it privileges people with CAPITAL. Rubbing the renters nose in that fact doesn't suddenly make it ethical. Most renters already know they're paying off someone else's mortgage - or in some cases second or third mortgage - that's part of the whole problem. That's what "rent seeking" is, the creation of a false middle man who collects rent without doing the work of the actual person charged with paying.
You can't make it ethical simply by telling the victim that that's what you're doing. No.
A mugging doesn't become more ethical if the mugger explains what they're doing and how much of the person's cash they're gonna spend on what.
That's not a thing. You've made something up, and it sounds like you're feeling a suitable guilt for your rent seeking behaviour.
People WANT the commitment, security, and stability of owning their own homes, they just can't find a bank to offer the Capital outlay, or can't find an available property within their means because HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY. That the wealthy wittingly or unwittingly use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages. So you need to get real on this issue.
By banks determining who can have a mortgage by who has a healthy record of paying rent on time. If someone is consistently the source of the cost of the mortgage THEY should be trust worthy enough for their own similar mortgage. That's just common sense.
But instead HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY that the wealthy (wittingly or unwittingly) use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages... It's rent seeking behaviour.
Yeah, seems like something that just privileges the moneyed Capitalist class.
Yes, it doesn't happen so much in America because America is a Capitalist oriented feudalist system designed with poverty as a feature of the system. Gotta have someone for the upper class people to exploit.
I'd love to tell you different because it's clear you have a conscience even though you're living your part in the system... But I can't.
Thanks for trying to make an "Ethical Capitalism" but there can seldom be such a thing (it's a bit of a contradiction in terms). Australia is trying to get a thing called HAFF (the housing future fund) up and running, where building unions pay for starting the construction of new housing but the housing is still sold on the open market of Capitalism as a commodity to whoever has the largest Capital outlay... So yeah.
The UK has more co-op housing, where subsidized housing is owned and ran by the tenants.. but it's still not quite ethical and pretty hard to get into because it's not a large program.
Congrats on being a home owner (I assume). Maybe you got lucky and under other circumstances you'd be on the other (less pleasant) side of the equation.
No, I'm not really fine with banks profiting of mortgages, but I am more fine with it than I am private individuals. This is for a couple of reasons:
Banks are easier to regulate.
Banks are more directly related to the life of a currency, they're responsible for the buying of government bonds which enables the money supply to be increased.
A disparity between the wealth of banks and the wealth of private individuals is already an stable established norm.
It's not common for banks to be owned by private individuals.
Banks can be owned by unions.
Land is a finite resource, and I'm not sure anyone has cracked how best to manage it. I like some of what Vietnam does, where if you live in a rural area and can prove that you know how to raise crops (via a standard test) the government will allocate you a plot of farmland to farm. This has resulted in 70% of their population being farmers, and 86% of the population owning their own homes. So ultimately I think the state and probably a state bank, or state land bank, should probably be responsible for managing mortgages.
The word mortgage actually breaks down to death's pledge by the way. It's the kind of thing designed to take someone a lifetime to pay off.
It's all pretty dark, and really I think housing should be a human right. I think if people were responsible for their own homes we'd see better upkeep, and that to some degree housing, shelter, and land should be seen as a nexus point between the citizen and the nation which is made up of the geographical area parceled out and built on to live in.
The less public housing is made, and the more like a private speculator's market it becomes, the greater wealth disparity we'll see. Housing is tied up with homelessness which is a key indicator of how in decline citizen's feel their society to be. Leaving that up to the free market is insane, and represents just how "sold out" our lives can be.
It's part of maintaining the physical, financial and mental health of the population. We shouldn't leave it up to profiteers.
I can understand having a death's pledge to the state. I can't understand paying off someone else's death pledge with your life, so that they can buy more and more houses and do more of the same. What are these, soul collector's?
Societies with a narrower wealth disparity (a smaller gap between the richest and poorest) tend to be better off, more unified, more humanitarian, more democratically capable, and less tolerant of injustices. Making sure the rental system doesn't become a speculative investment market is an important aspect of a society's success, empathy, and of the quality of life and peace of mind of citizens.
Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.
It’s all good, and thank you for your response. You really gave me a lot to chew on, I’ve never really considered a lot of what you brought up about bank owned mortgages, specially the bit about regulation and pre established wealth disparity.