Abolishing landlords -- it's well past time

He also still hasn’t explained why housing is a higher priority than food and water, since he hasn’t yet claimed that people have the right to steal groceries.

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Oh, I’ll get this - people absolutely have the right to steal food if they’re starving, no question at all. Gets complicated if the person they’re stealing from is also facing starvation, but if your hypothetical gotcha is taking us back to pre-civilisation then I don’t really think it need concern anyone.

You should be questioning your beliefs then

Since people who now know they “absolutely” have a right to steal food if they’re starving will always revert back to a state of starvation (once they come down off that fullness high from the initial theft), why did you add that qualifier?

Can they steal just enough to stave off starvation momentarily, for the whole day, hoard enough food for them and their family (of 8, let’s say) for the week, month, year? And who are you to place any limits on an “absolute right” anyway. I mean, shit, even speech isn’t an absolute right.

Meh, I’m pretty confident that capitalism with controls is the best of a lot of bad systems. The problem we have is that the controls have steadily eroded.

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Property is abandoned. Joe squats for a long time. This is not like the way most people live, but it does happen. It’s not impossible that there are laws that allow this and for Joe to argue in court or whatever that the property was officially abandoned and the court award him legal residency.

@Sabo, change this “court” to a group of local residents and you still get to be an anarchist.

Hypothetical 1: Someone spends the night at their friend’s house. While they’re gone someone else moves in.

Hypothetical 2: Someone is away for years and does nothing to maintain the property. Someone else moves into their house.

H1 might be a crazy edge case, but the point is that some group of people, whether it’s a committee of people living in the building or a court are going to decide when occupancy is respected.

Even without legal ownership and courts and cops they have these issues at Slab City. And there is property rental.

There are a lot of options that can coexist. M4A is not capitalism with controls. It’s socialism. It can exist in one sector while another sector is more capitalism with controls and another sector is more laissez-fair and another sector is more anarchism.

Well, speaking of imagining worlds, you seem to be imagining a world where “evil”/etc is the issue here. Like there is some kinda lol-tastical “moral” calculus is involved, and squatting a site that is a “moral” issue regarding some future development. And… the lol-tastical hidden assumptions that (a) “good” naturally vanquishes “evil”, and (b) through unexplained reasons, the pre-pandemic status-quo is “good”. What a buncha crap.

These are the facts…

  1. Right now as we chat, Landlordism has objectively failed. No violent evictions. In a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the landlord class has taken their foot off the neck of renting folk.

  2. There is absolutely no way the landlord class can put their foot back on the neck of renting folks, unless renting folk allow that to happen.

Your job, with your fond desire to see the foot of the landlord class placed back upon the neck of renting folk is this… give a positive argument why renting folks should allow this foot to be placed once again upon their necks.

Capitalism is what causes those controls to erode

So if it’s not the renting out that’s the problem, it is that people can be thrown out on the street, what if there was some sort of public option (not like current homeless shelters but actual livable apartments available to anyone without means testing or other criteria? If this existed would it be ok for landlords to own luxury properties that were nicer than the public option and rent those out to people who wanted to pay to live somewhere nicer?

Or in the system with no landlords how does the government decide who gets to life where? Once someone is grandfathered into a city center apartment could they accept a fee from someone else who has an apartment in a less convenient location to live in each other’s place?

Make
Anarchy
Great
Again

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It’s mostly corruption imo. And other systems are also rife with corruption.

I already gave you an argument. It’s pretty simple. No society has ever or could ever operate successfully under your desired rules, or lack thereof.

This is the problem with these hyper-abstract theoretical positions. They simple collapse with the simplest thought experiment.

Just like the idea that it’s obviously ok if “starving” people steal food. Who would argue against that? Nobody wants people starving just like nobody wants people homeless. The problems arise when you ask how will this be accomplished? Who decides what it means to be “starving”? If the so called ownership class can’t charge rent why would anyone own a home if they are all free? If they are all free who decides who lives where?

Are you saying that as an anthropoligist?

Yeah how do I get the free beach house and ski condo?

Fair point. I should qualify that to say no large-scale modern society. No nation state.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I’d surmise it’s true for any large, non-nomadic societies.

I don’t think abolishing private property can work in a mostly capitalist system.

I don’t think the “non-nomadic” part is right. Small societies with permanent settlements operate very differently than our system. “Large”? Well, a different solution, but Cuba is large.

Yes. Situations where the necessities of life can be withheld are fundamentally different.

To digress a bit, these odd and irrelevant questions always puzzle me. To spew, I take it as a artifact of being immersed in a Christian culture. There is a hazy idea behind everything to us hat there is a god-like being who we beseech with our prayers or “moral reasoning”… and said god-like being decides what is “ok” for us. This is all a buncha crap.

This isn’t some kinda “moral” passion play. This is pure power dynamics. The landlord class is going to want their pre-pandemic position of power over renting folks back. There is no way for that to happen, unless renting folks allow it to happen. The relevant question isn’t about “moral”, it is this…

Should renting folk allow that to happen.