this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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So make a self sustaining commune that lives up to your principles. I think you will find that to be more work than your average 9-5 however.
It's illegal to homestead in the United States without first buying the land from whoever owns it already, even if the land is entirely unused. This means you need a massive injection of capital, the kind of capital that would mean you're in the top 10% of Americans (at least) in terms of wealth, exactly the kinds of people who aren't looking to escape society. This isn't even mentioning the kinds of building permits and other stamps of approval from the government you'd need to do this, also requiring capital and often licensing by a trained professional.
Of course you can just find unused land and roll the dice on getting caught. A lot of communes have done this successfully, but not everyone is comfortable doing something that is technically illegal.
A lot of people in the top 10% are still working class, and would benefit from a dismantling of capitalism, but they're not so poor that leaving society is favorable, just reforming society.
For the people who would benefit from leaving society, they're coerced to stay via laws written by and for the powerful (enforcing private property rights for example, denying access to unused lands).
You don't need a lot of personal capital if you fundraise prior to starting your commune, and have everyone pitch in the equity from sold homes/cashed out 401(k)s etc
Also you don't have a right to someone's property simply because they aren't using it at the moment
A lot of Americans have negative net worth, so everyone cashing out would likely mean you're still in debt, which is one of the ways our society keeps people trapped.
There's a difference between legal rights and moral rights. Legally you're correct, but 150 years ago people legally had the right to buy slaves, but they didn't have the moral right to.
Similarly, people have the legal right to buy hundreds of acres of land and hold onto it until it increases in value, and then sell it later. This is immoral though, it's scalping. We all understand scalping is bad when it's through the lens of GPUs or consoles because we weren't raised hearing about how "smart investors" invested in GPUs, we just heard about "investing" in housing or land.
If you have a solid argument why scalping houses or land should be permissible and even praised, while scalping GPUs/consoles should be impressible or at least scolded, I'd love to hear why.
I'd assert that scalping necessities is actually worse than scalping luxury goods.
I think it's unhelpful to frame structural economic problems as moral wrongs done by individuals, because these are all situations where more people accepting a moral consensus doesn't actually resolve the problem. If there are 50 active GPU scalpers in the market, and a shaming campaign succeeds in reducing that number to 10, ultimately those 10 people are still going to be able to exploit the differential in retail price and actual market price to the same extent. Maybe it would take them a little while to scale up their operations, but they would do it. No amount of moralizing against scalpers can overcome supply and demand in this situation or actually make cheap graphics cards available to everyone.
Squatting isn't immoral IMO, but enshrining legal protections for squatters would probably just result in a lot of effort being wasted on preventing trespassing lest property rights be forfeit. Instead it would be better to have high taxes on unused land and various forms of redistribution to keep everyone in a situation where they have genuine choice in their lives. The point shouldn't be deciding who the wrongdoers are and punishing them.
Whether or not it's helpful is orthogonal to whether it's true, which is more what I'm concerned with. Maybe there's a point to be had about effectively trying to convince people, but I don't have an obligation to be the most effective conversationalist or converter.
However I'd happily support systemic approaches to reducing the effectiveness of housing scalpers. Calling them immoral is not mutually exclusive with supporting legislation against them. I'd even say those things are usually aligned.
This is why I don't think it is aligned. There is a lot of possible legislation that would effectively punish "scalpers" or reduce their effectiveness in pursuing their goals, but would not actually help resolve the actual underlying problem or even make things worse. For instance trying to ban the practice directly, or trying to fix prices, those generally will backfire. If the focus is legislating "against" them, that's looking it as a justice problem instead of an incentives problem, but even if it is immoral punishing immoral acts is much less important than solving the problems in peoples lives, and these goals can easily be at odds.
It's not scalping to hold onto something for years. That's the opposite of scalping, which is taking advantage of surges in demand for quick profit.
Owning land is not a necessity.
No, that's gouging. Scalping, at least as I've always understood it, is buying up a limited resource and then selling it at an inflated price.
I'm not taking a position on the morality of buying unused land, just trying to get the terms right.
GPU scalping isn't technically scalping either by some definitions, but the layman usage of the word is "buying up a product and selling it back at an inflated price". Someone is still a GPU scalper even if it takes them 2 years to resell some stock.
By this definition, housing scalpers are scalpers too. I'm not in the business of prescribing how people should speak, so if you have some academic issue with the word "scalping" I can choose a different one. We'll call it "yeegstrafing", but my contention is still the same despite what you call it.
People correctly have an issue with GPU yeegstrafers, because they're not providing any value, they're just hoarding excess goods and reselling to make a profit. Housing/land yeegstrafers are doing the same thing with necessities.
You may claim that housing or land more generally (you need land for housing/shelter) is not a necessity, but larger society disagrees. People generally regard shelter+food+water as the basic necessities. If someone successfully hoarded all the land, nobody would have access to shelter.
The correct term for buying a thing at a lower value than you sell it for after a period of time is "investing"
What you need isn't stealing from people, it's changing zoning laws.
You can call it scalping, yeegstrafing, investing, whatever. I recognize that depending on what you call it, people will have different emotional responses to it. If you call it scalping, it'll be negative. Investing it'll be positive. Yeegstrafing, probably just confusion.
But playing with words isn't the game I'm trying to play, I have a contention with the action, not the word choice. People shouldn't be allowed to invest in certain things, you can agree. Like you shouldn't be able to buy up humans at a low value and sell them at a higher value later. Even if you called it investing, it'd still be impermissible.
Similarly, restricting access to land/shelter, driving up prices by reducing supply, and then later selling your hoarded supply at an excess due to said price driving is problematic. It's restricting cheap access to housing so some people can "make" money.
Using "scalping" as the word to describe this highlights its parasitic nature, they're siphoning value out of the economy and restricting access to shelter/land while doing it.
Using "investing" instead ignores the negative societal ramifications, and only focuses on the positive personal outcomes (generating money for yourself).
You keep assuming that things you say are true but without any reasoning whatsoever behind those things. It is not "problematic" to own land.
If anything, what's problematic is legislating that people can't build on land they own
The reasoning (as I've clearly outlined several times) is that restricting access to land/shelter in the name of extracting money from the working class is a bad societal outcome. I would imagine you agree with that, but if you don't we're having the wrong conversation.
Your proposal is that the idea of rent, itself, is a negative?
Yeah that's an insane take.
This is fun for a couple of reasons:
Your reasoning? "Your insane".
Stop being a hypocrite. It'd be great if you could both explain your position, while also not strawmanning mine.
If you don't want to, that's fine too, but then you should stop dragging on a useless conversation and do something you want to do.
I have to guess what you mean because you are not actually saying anything. If you're not interested in the conversation, don't have it.
I don't know what "extract wealth from the working class means" in this context, because working class people aren't exactly real estate investors, so I guessed rent.
This is what happens when you communicate with Twitter platitudes instead of actual thoughts.
Is calling me insane an "actual thought"? You expect more from me than from yourself.
Just because you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm not saying anything. Not to say it's not my fault, language is a two way street. But similarly, it's not only my fault, you shouldn't just assume that your misunderstanding necessarily means I don't have a position. Maybe you think you're infallible and incapable of misunderstanding, but I assure you you're not, and I hope you understand that.
When you scalp land, you're reducing the supply of land. I assume you have an at least rudimentary understanding of supply/demand, so you know that reducing supply increases cost with no changes in demand (fun sidenote, demand for housing is actually increasing as population increases, so this effect is even more pronounced).
This increased cost in housing/land will be felt by the working class. So as an externality of your profitting off increases in land value (caused in part by this scalping), the working class will have to spend more on housing.
So owners get more money and workers get less money.
What we see in societies that don't have this gross feedback loop is housing costs that remain healthily at 5-10% of median income. Our society is instead at 30-80%, and it's growing relative to wages (not just inflation).
Imagine if we invented magic buildings that could hold more than one family. Imagine how many people could fit in a relatively small area.
Why, you could fit like 1.6 million people into 33 square miles, like in Manhattan.
If you let people build, it turns out they do. Zoning codes are the problem. And in Cali you know who votes for exclusionary zoning? Progressive liberals. Because terrible people live everywhere and believe every ideology.
Answers are practical, ideologies aren't. Let people build. Let "neighborhood character" evolve as a neighborhood does. Gentrify poor neighborhoods and subsidize the rent of the otherwise-displaced til their wages match local COL.
These are solvable problems. Blaming capitalism is absurd when capitalism was kneecapped over a generation ago.
I'm not a liberal, for whatever that's worth.
Sure, lets build more affordable housing, that's fine.
You ignored my entire point though and went on your own ideological ramble there (one paragraph saying we don't need ideology and the next defending capitalism. Do you read what you write? Lmfao).
Are you saying you don't believe supply/demand is a real thing? Or you just choose to ignore the impact that over 10 million housing scalpers would have on the U.S housing market?
If it's neither of those, then I guess we're in agreement, outlaw housing scalpers and build affordable housing. We could get median housing costs down to a fraction of what they are now, just like other societies have that outlawed scalpers.
Capitalism isn't an ideaology, it's an economic system.
Supply and demand is a real thing and demand vastly outstrips supply due to lack of ability to build.
But you don't have to take my word for it:
https://danville.ca.gov/CivicSend/ViewMessage/message/153105
I responded when lemmy.world was having issues, so my lemmy client couldn't find your comment and so it just responded at the top level: https://lemmy.world/comment/1975730
Lemmy is a dope forum but I think we're smothering their servers a bit lol
Agreed lol, though iirc they're getting periodically DDOSed, so it's not just normal usage spikes.