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House prices are set by credit availability. Rents are set by wages. I'm not agreeing with anything you are saying here and I don't want to waste more time on i

House prices are set by credit availability. Rents are set by wages. I'm not agreeing with anything you are saying here and I don't want to waste more time on it. You seem to think it's simply market pressures which I think is naive. Taken to the extreme exploiting land monopoly isn't "providing shelter" any more than serfdom landlords provided shelter. They extracted labour at state gun point if necessary. We have a very extreme situation now dating back to pre 2008 when the banks went utterly wild.

sokoloff 11y ago
House prices are indeed influenced by credit availability (and prevailing local wages, housing supply, housing demand, property taxes, purchase alternatives [like renting], school quality, and many other factors). Rent is likewise a balance of many factors, including wages but also interest rates, house prices, rental supply, rental demand, property taxes, and other factors. I'm not sure what you propose as a workable alternative. Banning renting of housing? Government dictated housing prices? Banning real property ownership? Something else? Buying a house and renting it out is not a land monopoly in any meaningful sense of that phrase; otherwise, I'd have a "monopoly" on the shirt I'm wearing right now.
- branchless 11y ago
  This last sentence speaks volumes. We can make more shirts. Right now with land we have artificial scarcity (and real in places like Manhattan).
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    I prefer to have control over who lives in my residence (that's the same now as an "owner" (mortgagee) as when I was a tenant/renter). I assume most other people also desire that. In order to accomplish that, we have a notion of property rights (the right to exclusive control of [including the right to exclude others from] the housing unit) and we allow those rights to be permanently or temporarily traded to others in exchange for money or other consideration. Unless you don't care who lives in your housing unit from day to day, there's got to be some kind of property right in real property and a derivative right-to-exclude. If you want to call the right I have to my own house a monopoly on that particular property, you're technically right (the best kind of right). By that same argument, the corner gas station has a monopoly on selling the specific gasoline contained in its underground tank. Land is indeed finite. That's one of the properties that makes it valuable.

sokoloff 11y ago

House prices are indeed influenced by credit availability (and prevailing local wages, housing supply, housing demand, property taxes, purchase alternatives [like renting], school quality, and many other factors). Rent is likewise a balance of many factors, including wages but also interest rates, house prices, rental supply, rental demand, property taxes, and other factors. I'm not sure what you propose as a workable alternative. Banning renting of housing? Government dictated housing prices? Banning real property ownership? Something else? Buying a house and renting it out is not a land monopoly in any meaningful sense of that phrase; otherwise, I'd have a "monopoly" on the shirt I'm wearing right now.

branchless 11y ago
This last sentence speaks volumes. We can make more shirts. Right now with land we have artificial scarcity (and real in places like Manhattan).
- sokoloff 11y ago
  I prefer to have control over who lives in my residence (that's the same now as an "owner" (mortgagee) as when I was a tenant/renter). I assume most other people also desire that. In order to accomplish that, we have a notion of property rights (the right to exclusive control of [including the right to exclude others from] the housing unit) and we allow those rights to be permanently or temporarily traded to others in exchange for money or other consideration. Unless you don't care who lives in your housing unit from day to day, there's got to be some kind of property right in real property and a derivative right-to-exclude. If you want to call the right I have to my own house a monopoly on that particular property, you're technically right (the best kind of right). By that same argument, the corner gas station has a monopoly on selling the specific gasoline contained in its underground tank. Land is indeed finite. That's one of the properties that makes it valuable.