7 ms·

It almost as if housing is a human right and not an investment opportunity for the wealthy to exploit.

by ryaneager 3y ago

rednerrus 3y ago
How is it a human right? How does that work?
- throwaway655368 3y ago
  Every human has a right to enslave three other humans and force them to build a house. When a house is finished they have to be released though to prevent infringing of their own human rights.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    I refuse to believe that you actually believe that's how "rights" work when it comes to rights that require the labor of others to provide. Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Children have the right to a K-12 education. Do you consider the entire public school system to purely be slaves? If I go to an emergency room, I have the right to life-saving treatments even if I can't pay. Are the doctors slaves? No, of course not. They all get paid. They're all free to quit their jobs at any time.
    - johngladtj 3y ago
      The prison-school complex is not the example you think it is Buddy
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Let's steelman GP's argument, which obviously was hyperbolic. But it's true that positive rights (or entitlements) are always paid for by the labor of others. K-12 public schools are generally majority paid for by local property taxes, and we all know what happens if you stop paying property taxes. The average American worker already pays close to quarter of their earnings in labor-related taxes[0], which doesn't include property tax, sales tax, or any other kind of tax that people pay. I think we can safely estimate that at least a third of everyone's labor is already spoken for by various layers of government; this lines up with the pre-Covid US government expenditure as a percent of GDP, which was around ~35%[1]. Of course, all of that spending was decided by a democratically-elected government and people more or less buy in to the idea that it is for the common good of the country. But as that spending increases monotonically over time, and as people share fewer things in common with each other (I mean, try putting a 22-year-old college graduate working at a nonprofit in Brooklyn and a 22-year-old journeyman electrician in Iowa City in the same room), it gets harder and harder to believe in that common good, and you start to wonder why a third of your productive output goes to things you had no direct choice over, and why the people who make those decisions get richer and richer. Half of the top ten richest counties in the country[2] are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Does that make you feel good? And guess what happens if you try to keep more of your productive output? You go to jail. That's what people mean by "slavery". Or at any rate, this is my attempt at steelmanning that argument. [0]: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-stat... [1]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
- ryaneager 3y ago
  It doesn’t work in a capitalistic society, as capitalism only benefits, those who own. It’s my belief that we create enough resources in this world for everyone to live a comfortable life but we don’t love one is because a few thousand people hoard all the resources and say we have to keep working.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > as capitalism only benefits, those who own A rising tide lifts all boats, and that is what has borne out by historical fact for capitalism. The easiest way to see how it benefits everyone, even the poorest, is to look at the median person's living standards in places that don't have "capitalism" (which in this context is shorthand for rule of law, strong private property rights, and a market economy). > a few thousand people hoard all the resources The mega-ultra-rich (the top richest few thousand people in the world, like you said) aren't piling vaults with gold, Scrooge McDuck style. Their wealth is the productive assets they own, almost always companies that generate value for consumers. Besides, the net worth of all American billionaires combined is about four and a half trillion dollars[0]. Even if you could magically confiscate all of that "money" at that same valuation (which you can't, since you cannot liquidate a stock and expect it to fetch the same price) and redistribute it to everyone, that's a whopping bonus of $13.5k to every man, woman, and child in this country. Do you seriously imagine everyone can stop working and live happy lives with that money? Put another way, $4.5T is not even five years of Social Security. What happens next? > we have to keep working I'm not really sure what you think the alternative is. As pg said, wealth is what people want[1], whether that's an AC unit to keep yourself cool if you live in a hot place, or heating oil to keep yourself warm if you live in a cool place, or a flight to Paris for a vacation, or filet mignon, or rice and beans, or a can of Coke, or a glass of wine. Every single one of those things takes labor to produce. If all rich people ceased to exist, it will not change the fact that you cannot wave a magic wand and put food on your table. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291685/us-combined-value-billionaire-wealth/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291685/us-combined-valu... [1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
- seanw444 3y ago
  Welcome to 2023. Everything's a human right.
vlucas 3y ago
Nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right. That's not how rights work.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25: > Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
  - voidpointercast 3y ago
    So enforce it.
  - churchill 3y ago
    I think the comment above yours is referring to 'natural' rights which are generally negative (i.e., no one can take them away from you). If anything can become a right simply via declaration or popular vote, can 60% of a country's population vote themselves the right to the property of the 40%? By that logic, the Nazis had a right to exterminate the Jews because the Nazis were democratically elected. I understand wanting to protect Hawaii's heritage, etc. but landowners should be free to sell the property to whosoever they deem fit, at whatever price.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    Just because it's written on a document titled "Human Rights" doesn't make it so. The UN UDHR is really just a wish list of things that would be nice to have in any country. It is emphatically not a well thought-out legal document that would form the basis of a a country's laws. Read about the recent Chilean constitution reform for what happens when people try to write a constitution based on things that would be nice to have, without seriously considering all of the nth-degree complexities that would result if those nice things were to actually be put into reality with the might of the state.
pixl97 3y ago
No, you're wrong, I your local trillionaire am totally allow to buy up all the housing on the planet and let you rats sink! There is nothing that could possibly go wrong with this idea, it's what pure capitalism demands!
- churchill 3y ago
  Buy it up, and then? If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), new buildings will flood the market once you jack up prices. A true monopoly can only survive by using government regulation to enforce its position - if not for senseless zoning regulation (government-granted land use monopolies granted to the middle-class in return for votes), housing wouldn't be an issue in the US. So, it's not a capitalism/free market problem, dislocations in market are caused by government meddling.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), If you live in binary land, yea... to bad we live in the real world where things are a lot more complicated. Lets say we lived on an island that had the water resources for 1000 residences. Cool, now we've set limits on the total number of people we can support without things falling apart or costs massively increasing. In rational world the democratic representation sets up a government and creates a set of rules zoning this. In your backwards broken shithole, the first developer with a billion dollars comes in and builds 10,000 houses and everyone is fucked. These things are very hard to balance. And you're correct, the 'average' voter which tends to correlate with homeowner will vote in their best interest of increasing home prices once they own one. When you strip that away you typically get massive developers wanting to create as many houses as possible, which may or may not work depending on the limitations of the land this occurs on.

It almost as if housing is a human right and not an investment opportunity for the wealthy to exploit.

rednerrus 3y ago

How is it a human right? How does that work?

throwaway655368 3y ago
Every human has a right to enslave three other humans and force them to build a house. When a house is finished they have to be released though to prevent infringing of their own human rights.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  I refuse to believe that you actually believe that's how "rights" work when it comes to rights that require the labor of others to provide. Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Children have the right to a K-12 education. Do you consider the entire public school system to purely be slaves? If I go to an emergency room, I have the right to life-saving treatments even if I can't pay. Are the doctors slaves? No, of course not. They all get paid. They're all free to quit their jobs at any time.
  - johngladtj 3y ago
    The prison-school complex is not the example you think it is Buddy
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Let's steelman GP's argument, which obviously was hyperbolic. But it's true that positive rights (or entitlements) are always paid for by the labor of others. K-12 public schools are generally majority paid for by local property taxes, and we all know what happens if you stop paying property taxes. The average American worker already pays close to quarter of their earnings in labor-related taxes[0], which doesn't include property tax, sales tax, or any other kind of tax that people pay. I think we can safely estimate that at least a third of everyone's labor is already spoken for by various layers of government; this lines up with the pre-Covid US government expenditure as a percent of GDP, which was around ~35%[1]. Of course, all of that spending was decided by a democratically-elected government and people more or less buy in to the idea that it is for the common good of the country. But as that spending increases monotonically over time, and as people share fewer things in common with each other (I mean, try putting a 22-year-old college graduate working at a nonprofit in Brooklyn and a 22-year-old journeyman electrician in Iowa City in the same room), it gets harder and harder to believe in that common good, and you start to wonder why a third of your productive output goes to things you had no direct choice over, and why the people who make those decisions get richer and richer. Half of the top ten richest counties in the country[2] are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Does that make you feel good? And guess what happens if you try to keep more of your productive output? You go to jail. That's what people mean by "slavery". Or at any rate, this is my attempt at steelmanning that argument. [0]: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-stat... [1]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
ryaneager 3y ago
It doesn’t work in a capitalistic society, as capitalism only benefits, those who own. It’s my belief that we create enough resources in this world for everyone to live a comfortable life but we don’t love one is because a few thousand people hoard all the resources and say we have to keep working.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > as capitalism only benefits, those who own A rising tide lifts all boats, and that is what has borne out by historical fact for capitalism. The easiest way to see how it benefits everyone, even the poorest, is to look at the median person's living standards in places that don't have "capitalism" (which in this context is shorthand for rule of law, strong private property rights, and a market economy). > a few thousand people hoard all the resources The mega-ultra-rich (the top richest few thousand people in the world, like you said) aren't piling vaults with gold, Scrooge McDuck style. Their wealth is the productive assets they own, almost always companies that generate value for consumers. Besides, the net worth of all American billionaires combined is about four and a half trillion dollars[0]. Even if you could magically confiscate all of that "money" at that same valuation (which you can't, since you cannot liquidate a stock and expect it to fetch the same price) and redistribute it to everyone, that's a whopping bonus of $13.5k to every man, woman, and child in this country. Do you seriously imagine everyone can stop working and live happy lives with that money? Put another way, $4.5T is not even five years of Social Security. What happens next? > we have to keep working I'm not really sure what you think the alternative is. As pg said, wealth is what people want[1], whether that's an AC unit to keep yourself cool if you live in a hot place, or heating oil to keep yourself warm if you live in a cool place, or a flight to Paris for a vacation, or filet mignon, or rice and beans, or a can of Coke, or a glass of wine. Every single one of those things takes labor to produce. If all rich people ceased to exist, it will not change the fact that you cannot wave a magic wand and put food on your table. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291685/us-combined-value-billionaire-wealth/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291685/us-combined-valu... [1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
seanw444 3y ago
Welcome to 2023. Everything's a human right.

vlucas 3y ago

Nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right. That's not how rights work.

gizmo686 3y ago
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25: > Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
- voidpointercast 3y ago
  So enforce it.
- churchill 3y ago
  I think the comment above yours is referring to 'natural' rights which are generally negative (i.e., no one can take them away from you). If anything can become a right simply via declaration or popular vote, can 60% of a country's population vote themselves the right to the property of the 40%? By that logic, the Nazis had a right to exterminate the Jews because the Nazis were democratically elected. I understand wanting to protect Hawaii's heritage, etc. but landowners should be free to sell the property to whosoever they deem fit, at whatever price.
- gottorf 3y ago
  Just because it's written on a document titled "Human Rights" doesn't make it so. The UN UDHR is really just a wish list of things that would be nice to have in any country. It is emphatically not a well thought-out legal document that would form the basis of a a country's laws. Read about the recent Chilean constitution reform for what happens when people try to write a constitution based on things that would be nice to have, without seriously considering all of the nth-degree complexities that would result if those nice things were to actually be put into reality with the might of the state.

pixl97 3y ago

No, you're wrong, I your local trillionaire am totally allow to buy up all the housing on the planet and let you rats sink! There is nothing that could possibly go wrong with this idea, it's what pure capitalism demands!

churchill 3y ago
Buy it up, and then? If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), new buildings will flood the market once you jack up prices. A true monopoly can only survive by using government regulation to enforce its position - if not for senseless zoning regulation (government-granted land use monopolies granted to the middle-class in return for votes), housing wouldn't be an issue in the US. So, it's not a capitalism/free market problem, dislocations in market are caused by government meddling.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), If you live in binary land, yea... to bad we live in the real world where things are a lot more complicated. Lets say we lived on an island that had the water resources for 1000 residences. Cool, now we've set limits on the total number of people we can support without things falling apart or costs massively increasing. In rational world the democratic representation sets up a government and creates a set of rules zoning this. In your backwards broken shithole, the first developer with a billion dollars comes in and builds 10,000 houses and everyone is fucked. These things are very hard to balance. And you're correct, the 'average' voter which tends to correlate with homeowner will vote in their best interest of increasing home prices once they own one. When you strip that away you typically get massive developers wanting to create as many houses as possible, which may or may not work depending on the limitations of the land this occurs on.