Repost because @Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com’s original post got removed from !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net for dunking outside the dunk tank
Reposting from the other thread
ConfuzedAZ: “I’m a pretty left leaning person”
Also ConfuzedAZ:
of course theyre a landlord
“im a pretty left leaning person but i also want to leech off peoples wages and drive up the price of housing”
oh, how magnanimous of you, barely making a profit. YOU ARE GETTING SOMEONE ELSE TO PAY FOR YOUR HOUSE. it’s all profit since it all goes to equity in the houses, maintenance, or straight to their pocket. these scumbags will say anything to make themselves feel better when they know they are despicable
a bare minimum profit
YOU GET TO KEEP THE HOUSE MOTHERFUCKER. How the hell is “a free house in 30 years” not a shit load of profit? Dingus doesn’t even do his own maintenance.
Doesn’t even do their own landlording, they pay a property management company to do the villainy for them (pay them out of their tenants’ rent checks, that is)
400k/house in 15 years? Frankly the only way to not be making profit is to actively be paying their tenants for keeping the place clean.
i tied the future of my kids to these houses, have you thought about that huh? every house you take from me you’re taking from the tiny toddler hands that i personally put them in, stop being so mean :(
To give a serious answer, landlords have a material class interest in conducting the unearned expropriation of rents from workers/tenants (and to be honest, literally everyone who isn’t a landlord). Even from a classical liberal perspective (i.e. Adam Smith) landlords have done nothing to merit these rents, they’ve simply partaken in the principal expropriation (that is, the expropriation of what once was and ought to be the provenance of all people, the land and nature more broadly). Landlords do not merit the revenues of their property, since any revenues they obtain are generated from the value of the property itself: all the landlord does is own it (i.e., “passive income”), and that ownership was/is established by a system of violence. In the modern day, landlords rely on the state system of violence to protect their property and force others to fork over rents to use it, which is a change over the original landlord system, where the landlord and their armed flunkies would have to do it themselves. So, an individual landlord can preach liberal platitudes, but when it comes to the fundamental economic relationships, their existence as a class is predicated on the preservation of a fundamental/primordial injustice and the deprivation of their fellow human beings.
In summary:
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
-
Ever-increasing land values (largely financial speculation and the creation of housing-limiting regimes).
-
Private ownership of housing as a profit-generating asset (commodity) rather than a human right.
-
State violence in the form of the police, who function to protect private property interests.
-
The direct extraction of working people’s money simply because you have more than they do. You could afford the down payment, they could not. Now they pay for your mortgage and more simply because they are poorer.
-
Landlords are traditionally shitty people that think of others, particularly their renters, as trying to pull one over on them.
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
People are more complicated then that, you really think this is an accurate point of view?
Engels was a dirty blue blood who owned a factory but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that ConfusedAZ’s idea of ‘left-leaning’ is more right wing than Boris Johnson.
I think it’s subjective, but this quote seems to align with my perspective:
Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”
