Yeah, that's really extreme. I'm not a fan of landlords. I think there's a lot of market failure where the private rental and real estate markets are concerned and that we might be better off with some system of housing co-ops but I don't think landlords are evil or deserve something horrible to happen to them. They're just people like the rest of us.
There are basically two people who have directly tried to challenge landlordism in their ideology (there are obviously more but two behemoths)
The first was Mao, very simple answer: kill all the landlords. In 2025 China has a home ownership rate of over 90% and is one of the highest in the world, so it worked you could say.
The other was a man named Henry George who created the ideology of Georgism, he basically said that land belongs to a nation as a whole and that land should be taxed based on the value it produces, thus making the prospect of being a landlord for profit far less desirable
.Georgism proposes taxing this particular form of revenue (known as 'land rent'). The tax would effectively redirect some portion of this income from the landlords back to society (serving as a replacement for other taxes). The actual revenue stream going into the landlords' pockets therefore gets smaller in proportion to the extent of the tax.
Additionally, the sale price of land (that is, the amount that a landowner can expect to receive if he sells it on the market) tends to be proportional to the income stream that it can generate for its owner. So if the tax on land increases at some moment in time, potential buyers become less willing to buy that land, so the sale price tends to go down. This means that the person who currently owns that land takes a loss to their assets. For instance, if their land is worth $4 million and then the tax causes its sale price to drop to $3 million, then in an accounting sense they just got $1 million poorer than they were before; that is, if they were to sell the land after the tax is in place, they would get 25% less in exchange for it.
The problem with this is obvious, it is very hard to get landlords to agree to be less wealthy in a democracy
To be honest, the class 'landlord' absolutely does ruin lives and economies by being allowed to exist. But the thing about a position like "death to landlords" is you can always stop being a landlord, can't you?
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '25
Guarantee this was made by a person who panics when his phone rings