I just saw this post about landlords being parasitic. While I agree in some points - mainly that by owning more property than you need for yourself, you’re driving up the price for others who want to buy a property. However, I don’t want to buy property when I move. I don’t have the funds for it, and I’m happy with a rented flat. Sure I want to get my own property at some point, however I’m also sure I want to move at least two more times in my life. Buying and selling each time sounds like a lot of hassle. Also, I live in a shared flat, that just sounds like a legal nightmare if the ownership changed every time someone moved out. How does this fit together? Are there solutions to this that don’t require landlords to exist?
To draw a parallel to the problem of health care - in systems of socialized medicine, a health insurer does de-facto exist, so health insurance does not get entirely abolished when switching to socialized medicine. It’s just that the health insurer is now the government, and the system is no longer ran to optimize for extracting money out of the system, but instead to optimize for population-level health.
Similarly, when trying to reform the housing market, landlords don’t fully go away - you can for example imagine a system where the government becomes a very large landlord and optimizes the system for maximum level of ‘people housed’ (or whatever you want to optimize this system for).
There are also various forms of housing cooperatives, where the landlord is a body consisting of all the tenants collectively.
The landlord most people want to be rid of is the rent-seeking kind, which optimizes the system for extracting money.
To us, for something to be labeled as socialized it must be operated for human welfare. But, most governments would gladly label something as socialized and continue to operate it for profit.
I think we’d agree about this word. In this post I’m only trying to clean up some ambiguity so others can more easily perceive the grift.