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7 points

I’m not sure how you define value, but I’m using it to mean “the price or amount that someone is willing to pay in the market” this could be for a tangle thing, like the house itself, or a service, like renting it.

That’s close to the truth, but not quite. Supply and Demand distort the price around a central Value.

My point is that landlords successfully find willing persons to rent their house for some amount of money. Therefore there is by definition value because it’s happening, whether this is ethically OK or being rented for a fair amount is a separate argument.

Not really, the fact that something is purchased doesn’t mean the “risk” or “liability” created the Value behind it.

When I was a university student I didn’t have enough capital to buy an apartment, but I found value in being able to rent one.

You found it useful, ie renting allowed you to fulfill the Use-Value you needed, shelter. You appear to be using Subjective Value “Theory,” ie the idea that Value is a hallucination different from person to person, which is of course wrong.

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1 point

You found it useful, ie renting allowed you to fulfill the Use-Value you needed, shelter. You appear to be using Subjective Value “Theory,” ie the idea that Value is a hallucination different from person to person, which is of course wrong

I’m not using value in this way, I literally googled “ value in a market economy” because this is what I meant by value and I cut and pasted the common definition of this usage. There is no hallucination or subjectivity, I’m using value to objectively mean what people are actively paying for. If something exists in the market, and it is being exchanged for something in return, it has “value” by this definition.

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6 points

You are indeed using SVT, where Value simply means a good is useful. We aren’t talking about the same thing.

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2 points

“Subjective value theory” as opposed to marx’s “theory of value” which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as “labor theory of value” actually an earlier development that Marx refined into his own theory

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0 points
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I think we have different definitions of value and I will not pretend to be an economic theorist, this is out of my depth. My argument comes from a very practical perspective of supply and demand. There is obviously demand for renting property otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

I do think that capitalism at large creates an economic barrier and if one is below the barrier it is difficult to build capital and if you’re above the barrier it is easy. Picking on just land-lording is only picking at one instance of some larger systemic issues that capitalism brings with it. This will not change unless the government adds regulations that add “fairness” to pure capitalism.

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5 points

This will not change unless the government adds regulations that add “fairness” to pure capitalism.

This is an impossible dream. Capitalism demands that the majority of people are perpetually in an underclass (with some shuffling of who specifically is in it). You can’t have an entire population of small business owners, most people need to be wage-laborers or some equivalent.

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-2 points

I didn’t say anywhere that regulation will make it work or make it better, I just meant that it will certainly not change without some form of regulation.

I’m also not claiming that capitalism is perfect or even good, all economic theories are idealized, I actually don’t think there is a magical system with a simple set of rules that will actually work. The real world is complicated and messy and has exceptions all over the place.

I think there probably is some mixture of free market and socialist ideas that do work, and most countries work like this today.

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4 points

I think we have different definitions of value and I will not pretend to be an economic theorist, this is out of my depth. My argument comes from a very practical perspective of supply and demand. There is obviously demand for renting property otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Supply and Demand are only part of the factor, they orbit around Value. What determines the price of a commodity when Supply and Demand cover each other? The answer is Value.

I do think that capitalism at large creates an economic barrier and if one is below the barrier it is difficult to build capital and if you’re above the barrier it is easy. Picking on just land-lording is only picking at one instance of some larger systemic issues that capitalism brings with it. This will not change unless the government adds regulations that add “fairness” to pure capitalism.

I pick on all of Capitalism, I’m a Communist. Landlording just happens to be the topic at hand. At that matter, regulations and “fairness” will never fix Capitalism, just make its worst aspects more bearable until it collapses under itself.

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-1 points

I pick on all of Capitalism, I’m a Communist. Landlording just happens to be the topic at hand. At that matter, regulations and “fairness” will never fix Capitalism, just make its worst aspects more bearable until it collapses under itself.

Isn’t this an argument that could be applied against communism though? Communism is government regulation to enforce fairness, if it can’t fix capitalism, why would it work in a communist economy?

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0 points

Supply and Demand are only part of the factor, they orbit around Value. What determines the price of a commodity when Supply and Demand cover each other? The answer is Value.

Yes and renting of houses pretty uniformly exists under all market conditions I.e. even when supply and demand “cover each other”. So by your definition there must still be some value since it has a place in the market.

The value offered is a service, just like a hotel room. What is an alternative to renting that could enable someone to have a place to live without having the capital to buy property?

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