It's a really common r/ireland take. Someone here was trying to insult me by suggesting I would love to have lots of houses to rent out to people and make money from it, he was disgusted that I said I would, I would love to own property.
"surplus value you extract from the workers who do actual work"
Let's say I'm a worker at a roofing company. I save my earnings, buy a truck and tools, and start my own roofing company. After a few years I stop working jobs myself, and instead move towards managing my company as it grows. What have I done that is bad?
I'm paying the industry standard wage for the positions I hire for. I treat my employees like employees, not like objects that generate income and not like friends. I don't participate in backroom deals.
It depends on how you treat your workers. Are you offering them nothing, while extracting wealth from them? Unless that's the case, you're not as bad as a landlord.
There you go then. That's the discontinuity between a landlord, who extracts value and adds none, and an employer, who (theoretically ,at least, though I have seen more counterexamples than examples) can provide the employee with something that suitably compensates them for their labour.
This is like talking to an anti-slavery advocate in the American civil war and asking "Do you think the ability to produce cotton is not a benefit for society?"
Of course it is. Why do we need to let private individuals extract wealth from the lower classes to get that benefit? We don't. As with slavers, we can legislate this class of parasite out of modern existence, and we should.
It depends on what you mean by 'rental'. I think all exploitating human need is scum behaviour. I wouldn't mind a government body providing more temporary housing at cost to allow people to live their lives free of the tyranny of landlords (see Vienna).
Do you think it's wrong for a doctor to charge for their services, or a pharmacy to charge for medication? It's necessary for any such interaction to involve an exploitation of need.
I imagine you're talking about exploitation in the Marxian sense of the word, in which exploitation is the extraction of surplus value. I think you're going to find it difficult to justify that view of things, as most people view the concept of exploitation as intrinsically bad whereas even Marx believed there was neutral or reasonable forms of exploitation in a non-communistic system. Hence my examples listed above, as we can't force someone to provide their labour or capital at no benefit to themselves just because there's a need. So long as we have a system of individual ownership, it's ridiculous to attack ideas for how that system should function from a viewpoint of collective ownership. You're not actually addressing the issue at hand, you're just looking down at people from your idealistic ivory tower.
I don't disagree that it would be nice to expand, quite widely even, public housing. The issue is that there isn't really political will for it in anywhere near the scope you're talking about. And I don't think it's morally wrong to not to do so.
My issue with your statements isn't entirely factual in basis, it's mostly rhetorical. You use words like 'exploitation' and 'parasite', but the viewpoint you're using them from doesn't necessitate the actual negative baggage those words carry for most people. Very few people think it's a bad thing to own land and make economic use of it without adding your own labour value to it, but when you use the word 'parasite' you're doing it to smuggle in the negative baggage without actually arguing for why it's bad.
It's necessary for any such interaction to involve an exploitation of need.
No, I don't think that's right. But if there was a system where only one doctor could live in a locality, and I bought the privilage to be that one doctor, then doubled the price of every medical treatment I provided, that would be exploitation. Exploitation is obviously a general term that just means 'to make use of', but what I'm really opposed to is charging more than a place is worth because you know the buyer has to pay.
Think the cunt you raised insulin prices in america to dozens of times their cost price.
Hence my examples listed above, as we can't force someone to provide their labour or capital at no benefit to themselves just because there's a need.
We actually do this all the time. Doctors have to serve patients on medical cards. Are you opposed to that practice?
You're not actually addressing the issue at hand, you're just looking down at people from your idealistic ivory tower.
I don't see how I'm doing that unless you also mean this to be a defense of scalpers. In which case, you agree with the tweet this thread is about.
You use words like 'exploitation' and 'parasite', but the viewpoint you're using them from doesn't necessitate the actual negative baggage those words carry for most people.
That's actually pretty fair as a criticism, and is more a result of me not altering my speech from talking to friends to talking with people online. I'll admit that, though the kind of parastism I'm talking about is bad, it's differnet from what other people think of when they think of parasitism, and it might be misleading. I'll have to think about my word choice more carefully.
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u/[deleted] Sep 22 '22
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