Almost feels like my brain is broken or some shit.
I’m looking at the pricing of houses in my area and comparing it to my salary, and how the actual fuck is anyone affording a house these days? We’re talking almost half a million for a house that takes <2 days to build and is practically an irl copy and paste of some of the homes down the street. What the actual fuck. It seems like I’m the only one (though I know I’m not) who sees how this is completely at odds with everything I learned about the world.
Also, so salaries. How the fuck are they determined? Because it certainly isn’t the result of how much actual work you do, I’m making nearly six figures and I do jack shit yet I’m supposed to just be OK with how morally repugnant that is, as if I’m not also a piece upholding the same utterly corrupt system as well?
Fuck if I know, I try to say this shit to people irl and they just tell me that the world’s not fair blah blah blah. Yeah homie, “not fair” is quite possibly the biggest understatement ever.
I very much understand what people say when they say that money is not real. Feel free to grill my complete ignorance of Econ too if you wish, maybe it’s just something I’ll never understand
Just off the top of my head:
-“House Flipping” culture
-Short-term rentals and AirBnb
-“Professional Landlordism”
-Corporate residential landholding
-Rabid boomer landowners who lose their minds when any rise in property tax gets mentioned, which results in artificially inflated property valuations
-No rent control
Obviously the REAL answer is Capitalism, but the above phenomena create ripple effects across the whole housing market, which is something that the r*dditors always overlook when they quote stats that say “corporate ownership of residential properties only represent a small fraction of the market.” Yeah, maybe they do, but even that small fraction ripples out to housing precarity for millions of people.
Every time they do that, I always ask myself “Are these anglos aware that they’re acting out their own stereotypes about Jews?” if I didn’t know any better, I would think that they were all doing an antisemitic minstrel show, but nope, this is their actual values at work that they will always blame on Jews whenever.
Every accusation a confession.
This is the point that Marx was making in his Jewish question essay, that all of the stereotypes of Jews were just the bourgeois projecting their own fucked up behaviors under capitalism onto a scapegoat. Of course he approaches it by accepting the initial premises of antisemitism as a rhetorical way to prove how ridiculous it is, so some of the statements seem a little iffy out of context
Yeah, it’s like the inverse of how libs operate as Thomas Frank describes them in Listen, Liberal.
“For Daniel Gross, writing in 2000, it all came down to ‘arrogant’ capital versus ‘humble’ capital - meaning that selfish and stuck-up investment bankers were republicans while modest and unpretentious ones were democrats. For the journalist David Callahan (among other things) a matter of the ‘dirty rich’ versus the ‘clean rich’.”
Just swap Mr. Gross’ words (fitting name) here with ‘democrat’ when you see ‘republican’, ‘liberal’ when you see ‘conservative’, and vice versa. Boom, you now have broken down fascism’s core tenants.
Blue fascism
And if it didn’t, they’d buy a bigger slice to make damn sure of the ripples.
To be honest, I think a lot of the above are very minor reasons compared to just the effective cartel between landlords and property developers - If poor people had any meaningful mechanisms to own or build their own houses at or near cost, the rest wouldn’t matter at all. But I guess I also admit that I’m edging very close to just ‘the answer is capitalism’.
The university swears to you that “90% of their classes have less than 15 students”. Meanwhile, most of the remaining 10% are lecture halls of 120+ students, bumping up the lecture hall’s share of the average student’s experience to over half.
Same thing with apartment buildings.