If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
It’s funny that one probably-landlord downvoted this. You know who you are, scum-sucking leech.
It’s kind of a false dilemma to say everyone should do it or nobody should do it. There are a lot of things that would destroy the economy or even the world if everyone did it. I think there is a healthy amount of small family owned rental properties like the one in the meme.
It’s a simplistic statement, but it’s not meant to be that broad, it’s meant to be taken for this type of practice.
If everyone lived off leeching off someone else or from being middlemen, without producing anything, there would only be money moved with no products, labor, or services.
It’s not meant to be applied to something like “what if everyone’s business was just opening a pub?”. The economy would be destroyed without diversification and many kinds of businesses. But being a landlord isn’t anything like that. Particularly those that won’t freaking repair anything wrong with the house, just take their checks and the tenant is on their own.
This is like saying that if everyone had a small business it would destroy the economy. If you think a rental damages the economy, you have no idea what the economy is, or how it works.
Businesses buy and sell off each other and also create value. But sticking with the “if everyone did this” every one would run a one person business. Not efficient but would work. On the other hand if everyone is renting out houses, they can at most be renting out one (ignoring foe now second houses/holiday apts). Then everyone would be housed and paying each other in a circle. So, no, everyone doing what the post suggests can not work. All but the first house would be empty.
Then it should be illegal to have no children, because if everyone had no children, we would literally go extinct.
What? Your comment doesn’t make sense. If everyone did any profession solely we would destroy the economy. If everyone became doctors, there would be no engineers or pilots. We would still be doomed. A diversity of vocations are necessary regardless of which vocation.
*Edit. I was thinking maybe you mean investments. But the same holds true there. AND because of hedgefunds and private equity it’s becoming more and more of all the money funneling into a handful of companies. All the economists are sounding alarm bells on this. But considering the direction our leaders are taking us, I think this is all part of the plan.
Landlording is not a profession.
Handyman is a profession. Real estate management is a profession. Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
The economy can tolerate a finite number of leaches before dying. We currently have too many. The ideal number is zero.
Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
This actually applies to most all investments.
It’s also not capitalism.
Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.
In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.
I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.
Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.
It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.
Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.
The fact that landlording is bad and not a profession isn’t the point.
The point is that @MithranArkanere@lemmy.world’s argument failed to convincingly argue that because it was logically fallacious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
In other words, the fact that thing A would “destroy of the economy if everyone did it” is an emergent property of everyone doing it, which doesn’t apply to any single entity doing thing A.
It has little to do with the “profession” and more to do with the distribution of goods. If everyone owned rental properties, nobody would live in these rental properties, meaning for lords to exist there must be serfs.
That’s true for teachers, too.
If it is a lifestyle that would destroy the economy if everyone had it, then that’s another story.
If everyone went to work every day for 8+ hours for the direct benefit of the members of their community, the economy and the community would both be incredibly healthy.
If everyone purchased the tools that other people need to live and work and decided to rent those out instead of doing their own labor, the economy and community would fail.
This should be incredibly obvious.
All so that none of their tenants can afford any of those four things without constantly struggling!
That’s because they haven’t seen that tweet from a money genius who invented the cheat code on life. You just need more money streams for more money. Who knew? Here I was, just sitting with a gazillian dollars stuffed under my mattress nor knowing what to do with them.
My engineering brain is trying to figure out how it would actually be possible… Some kind of reverse scaffolding system that ratchets down instead of up.
Start with a tall platform, build the cap of the pyramid, then build an additional layer under, while also bringing the platform down by one layer. Repeat for each layer.
Cunk is hilarious though…
Step one: Have a shitton of money to buy property to rent out.
Oh, you don’t have enough money? Hhm, have you tried not being poor?
That’s the question. Are they dumb and mean it or are they just assholes? I also tend to think it’s the second.
The meme specifies Mortgage which means they also don’t have any money. They obtained a loan that they will be paying back for 15 to 30 years, at which point the property will deteriorate to a much lower value if any at all. If they sell the properties then they will owe depreciation recapture which works similar to a capital gains tax, as if it were additional income on top of the actual capital gains tax on the sale of the property itself. Plus closing costs to realtors.
They act like everyone could do this.
If everyone did this, the system would fail, because the profit here is scooped off the top with no actual production or service.
It would also require everyone to own 4+ houses which isn’t exactly feasible
It would require a lot of housing density for everyone to own four dwellings (and would kill rent demand well and good), but I wouldn’t call it infeasible. For everyone to have a quarter acre lawn and a 2,000 square foot house that shares no walls with neighbors? With those additional requirements having everyone own four is infeasible, sure, but a belief that’s the only dwelling worth owning is how we have throttled our housing supply in the first place.
The product/service is the use of the property for the specified time.
How is this any different from renting a SeeDo for an hour?
And if everyone did this when they were able to, rents across the board would be dirt cheap.
Landlords don’t contribute to society
Of course they do. Imagine that all of the landlords decide to start removing rental properties from the market if their tenants move out. What do you think that does to housing availability over the next 10 years?
