this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Yup. Basically. Although it is worth noting that the type of government we currently have, beholden to capital, is not trustworthy. Their priorities first and foremost are to serving corporate interests, which is probably why you trust them so little. Any power or public capital they are entrusted with gets pumped into private companies whose sole purpose is to make as much profit as possible for as little expenditure.
Any government brave enough to outlaw private landlords is going to have much more socially oriented priorities and will be much more inclined to serve the public good rather than the almighty market.
Is this government controlled by the bourgeois or the proletariat class? If I can't afford to buy a home (and even then, unless I'm rich enough to buy with cash I'm going to be beholden to the bank I get the loan from) I'm going to have to rent from the bourgeois class no matter what under capitalism, I just get a choice in which member of the bourgeois I get to rent from, they're gonna be taking my money regardless. If the working class is in control of the state I actually get a say in who's running the housing authority in my city, I can vote and advocate for housing policies I like, potentially I can make housing totally free, or at least cheap as dirt, cuz it's not being run as part of the profit motive anymore, which is good for me as a renter. Or I can promote policies where the state build housing for people to own, Cuba for example has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world because the government funds the construction of very cheap housing that people basically "rent to own".
depends on problem you are going to solve, if you want to provide people with affordable housing, then challenge your beliefs in almighty market.
While he's doing that, perhaps you could challenge your belief in the efficacy of big government. Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.
I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.
hehe considering market propaganda in education, on every media it is hard for me to not challenge my "belief" on a daily basis.
unfortunately in your comment you repeating neoliberal propaganda, please check guardian article on "free market zone libertarian experiment" tldr it led to low wage sweatshops and workers repression (and spoiler even this libertarian experiment relied on governmental support)
I argued that the solution is both, not one or the other. You provided me an example of an extreme in the other direction. I also think libertarianism and anarchy does not work. Please re-read my comment.
In general it means less government control over the markets. And less means libertarian concept (see article again). If you mean something in between , there is need in very detailed scale to find difference between current regulated markets, non regulated markets (libertarian nonsense) and balance that you want.
You're really going to have to define your metrics for "tend to do really poorly over time".
I get the point about anarchy (power vacuum arguments apply across implementations), but libertarianism is such a huge category that I'm not sure what you're getting at. Libertarianism isn't an economic system, there are socialist and capitalist extremes. It's also not a government structure, it houses both anarchists and bigger government ideas.
It's a philosophy that values the principles of individual liberty and non-aggression first and foremost, and everything else is discussed on those terms (I.e. how can we solve the problem with more liberty). There are different views about property rights, validity of certain types of taxes, etc, so you usually can't generalize unless you believe we need authoritarianism or something.
If you could be more specific, we could probably have a constructive conversation.
If we, the workers, are the ones running that government monopoly and not an oligopoly of landlords and other speculators then yes, that would be more fair. It's also a vastly more efficient way to guarantee that everyone is housed, as history shows
ok, so you want a society where people, yourself included (though I have a feeling you like to pretend otherwise), can end up homeless and destitute because.. They don't have enough of this imaginary thing some people made up so they could centralise their power and commodify the existence of the rest of us for profit, so they deserve to be left for dead, and that is something you agree with..
In other words - you're oblivious scum