The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.
It's appalling to think of just how much of our hard work and economic output is being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive while receiving all the rent money that so many of us have to pay as tribute, just to avoid being homeless.
All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage. Makes me wonder, what's the point?
The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.
The root cause is life and economic reality. Working for free is antithetical to survival and simply cannot be sustained over the long run.
Makes me wonder, what's the point?
I think the universe is instructing you to to become a landlord. Once this has been achieved, then you can spend all your time developing free software.
That mortgage is paying off the people that built the house. What remains after that is to pay for the landlord's food and medicals. Take the landlord and the house away and where do you live now?
I think the most charitable way to respond is to empathize with the person who has spent >=$X monthly for the last N years and did not had contribute that amount to a mortgage instead as an available option. It's easy to respond to your opponent by assuming that all the unbound variables are on your side. What if they aren't?
Don't get me wrong - I can empathise with how hard it can be to get your own house or flat these days.
But I do not think OP's comment was fair to the landlords. It is not their fault that building materials are getting ridiculously expensive, that more and more people need to live in/near the cities to get a decent job and other factors that make owning your property less and less accessible.
- it's against OP's values and principles
- OP doesn't believe it's risk-free or easy (I don't believe they said that)
- OP doesn't act solely based on financial incentives
The point is that you can live at a place you can't afford to buy. If not rent, then a mortgage is waiting for you, but at the same time your responsibilities increase quite a bit.
So what do you suggest? Free housing by the government? I'd love that too, but can I get a penthouse pretty please?
Other countries - notably Finland and Austria, among others - have no problem providing reasonable state housing at reasonable cost.
Finland houses its homeless as a matter of course because it turns out to be hugely cheaper than the alternatives, economically and politically.
Some of those countries also score well on affordable private home ownership.
America doesn't - because the idea of a government that buffers its citizens from private sector exploitation is against the guiding creed of economic narcissism.
Comparing developed nations to America is kinda unfair, but ok :) My point was that just because somebody is a landlord it's not the root of all evil. (I'm not one).
Governments can and do create programs to support families (too bad for singles in my country) but at the end getting all this for free is probably a utopia.
Affordable home ownership exists everywhere, but nobody wants to move to most of those places, people need more than a roof above their heads, but that comes at a cost.
“Property must be destroyed before imagination can be developed any further.” (Berger)
“No matter how much it proclaims its pseudotolerance, the capitalist system in all its forms (family, school, factories, army, codes, discourse…) continues to subjugate all desires, sexuality, and affects to the dictatorship of its totalitarian organization, founded on exploitation, property, male power, profit, productivity… Tirelessly it continues its dirty work of castrating, suppressing, torturing, and dividing up our bodies in order to inscribe its laws on our flesh, in order to rivet to our subconscious its mechanisms for reproducing this system of enslavement. With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its programs… Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments.” (Guattari)
The nerds who actually made technology possible did not care a bit about money. Now, capital did make mass technology possible. But it cannot have pure innovation, only financial and operations engineering.
Maybe then I should be paying rent to the construction workers who built the apartment I live in and the laborers who made the raw materials, as a thank you for all their hard work.
It's appalling to think of just how much of our hard work and economic output is being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive while receiving all the rent money that so many of us have to pay as tribute, just to avoid being homeless.
All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage. Makes me wonder, what's the point?