[Pants-of-dog]

No, it's actually demand for land. The housing just happens to be sitting on top of it.

No.

When I rent a home, I am not just renting a plot of land.

No, it's demand for the financial advantages appertaining to ownership of the land. Often it's more advantageous for tax purposes if a house, vacant or occupied, is sitting on the land, because it can be depreciated.

It is still demand for housing, just for a different reason.

Certainly. But in NYC, as in other highly unaffordable cities like San Francisco and Vancouver, the shortage is aggravated and rents much higher because they have had rent control for many decades.

Show me. I think you are incorrect about how housing operates in NYC.

[Truth To Power]

*But*, would you say that currency is totally *inert* -- ? Is it really as 'neutral' as you make it out to be -- ?

Monetary policy is not inert. You are conflating the function of money as the medium of exchange with how its function is distorted for political purposes.

I'll maintain that currency has *two* different valuations, its *face value*, and then its *market* value:

Currency is not the same thing as money, which is the measure of value.

What's at-issue here in my estimation is whether the consumer has any *bearing*, and *passive influence* (times 'x'-number of like-positioned consumers) on market pricing. The simple economic fact that the consumer has an intrinsic interest in *lower prices* means that they're *definitely* stakeholders in the economic exchange and will favor *lower prices* in the market, *impacting* the market's general pricing for any given item -- 'supply and demand'.

And if they succeed in reduce the price by non-market means, they will create a shortage for themselves.

Okay, thank you. That clarifies things with regard to the above because you had also made *this* statement, which is *contradictory*.

No it isn't.

Since you object to 'Marxist concepts', I'll use plain language to say that market pricing is *hardly* described adequately by simple supply-and-demand dynamics *solely* -- note the Turkish lira currency update above, where the article clearly notes the regular factors of [1] excessive current account deficit, [2] private foreign currency denominated debt, [3] lowered interest rates, [4] geopolitics / tariffs.

The political functions of currency are different from the market functions of money.

Where is the *value judgment* coming from -- from *qualitative*, let's-put-our-money-on-the-most-deserving-company kind of *quality*-based criteria, or is it let's-put-our-money-so-that-it-makes-more-money.

That's up to the person with the money. It's a fool's errand to second-guess them.

As noted previously, the capitalist political economy doesn't run on betting-on-the-right-horse, as may be *intuitively* felt, but rather on 'Can I get a *return* from this.'

There is a difference between a capitalist economy and a free market economy.

That's *flows of capital*, and *not* roundtable brainstorming on which potential property should get the 1st-place blue-ribbon.

See above.

It's not your delicate civil *sensibilities* that are being ruined here -- it's that every time a middleman shows up with a bag of cash for a piece of the action, that's just one more hand in the till, providing arguable 'financial services' (internal labor) for the company's revenue stream.

I have no idea what you incorrectly imagine your point might be. There are lots of ways someone with money could imagine making a profit on a deal in a capitalist economy. Some involve making a contribution to production, but that is usually riskier than taking advantage of privilege.

Consider *government intervention* in the markets -- would *big players* like the U.S. government usually cause *disruptions* to regular market pricing -- ?

Obviously.

You're *sidestepping* that this is about the *pricing* valuation under capitalism --

You continue to ignore the fact that I am not advocating, defending, or justifying capitalism, and to pretend that I am.

one singular value is not sufficient information for three different stakeholder parties with three different private-interest strategies.

Sure it is.

Yup -- here's my standing *critique* of that:

<Marxist drivel snipped>

[Truth To Power]

No.

Yes.

When I rent a home, I am not just renting a plot of land.

You have become confused and lost your way. We are not talking about you renting a home to live in, but of people buying homes and holding them vacant to obtain wealth without earning it.

It is still demand for housing, just for a different reason.

No, that is the voice of economic ignorance. If it was demand for housing, it could be satisfied by increasing the supply of housing. It can't.

Show me. I think you are incorrect about how housing operates in NYC.

It's the same everywhere.

[ckaihatsu]

Demand in the relevant sense of supply and demand.

We already have such a word: scarcity, the common condition of all living organisms. Atmospheric air to breathe is not scarce -- though it could certainly be made scarce by legally entitling someone to own it as their property, as land is owned. Water -- i.e., safe water to drink -- is scarce in many places -- indeed, millions of people, mostly children, die for lack of it every year. In such places, potable water has to be produced by labor, and merely needing it does not perform that labor. You seem highly resistant to knowing that fact.

The ultimate purpose of all economic activity is to relieve scarcity, and economics is the study of how people relieve scarcity through production, allocation and exchange. Marxists/socialists have merely decided not to know the fact that scarcity is only relieved when someone takes responsibility for, and performs the labor of, arranging for the necessary factors to be allocated to production of some specific good or service, thus earning ownership of said good or service.

Commons = chaos, and markets = efficiency. Got it.

legally entitling

Please tell me more about your political philosophy here.

someone takes responsibility

The *private sector* has private interests that run *counter* to a social-fabric-type ethos, as is empirically *required* by the markets / business.

The pools of debt the agencies gave their highest ratings to included over three trillion dollars of loans to homebuyers with bad credit and undocumented incomes through 2007.[2][3] Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of these triple-A securities were downgraded to "junk" status by 2010,[1][4][5] and the writedowns and losses came to over half a trillion dollars.[6][7] This led "to the collapse or disappearance" in 2008–09 of three major investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch), and the federal governments buying of $700 billion of bad debt from distressed financial institutions.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_ra ... ime_crisis

---

Instead of continuing to uphold *currency valuations* with your monetarist economics, maybe let that part *go*, because people's lives matter more than the ups and downs of the dollar.

You are conflating the function of money as the medium of exchange with the unintended effects of trying to overrule that function for political purposes.

<silly Marxist drivel mercifully snipped>

No, I stuck to the *private sector* -- the credit reporting agencies -- for the historical example above.

You don't get to just *pretend* that the empirical real-world conforms to your particular *ideation* of it. In *this* case you're pretending that the 'economic' can somehow be detached from the 'political', when in fact there's a good reason why the term 'political economy' exists -- because any given point on the left-right political spectrum is a combination of *both* politics *and* economics.


Anatomy of a Platform

Spoiler: show

Interpersonal Meanings

Spoiler: show

[ckaihatsu]

rent control

Economically you're a *reactionary*, TTP, because by arguing *against* rent control you're actually arguing *on behalf of* money itself, meaning *for* strong currency valuations (*monetarist*-type politics).

As the interest rate has recently been *raised*, that favors the capitalist economic faction of *rentier capital* -- which draws economic value from the larger *pre-existing* economy in the form of interest payments and rent payments.

The argument to decrease rent-control is basically an economic argument to *preserve* market-cap rentier property valuations *themselves*, regardless of how it impacts people's *housing* for the worse.

If your 'economic realm' really *was* detached from the social-political world, then your 'manipulations' wouldn't really matter because they wouldn't have *any effect* on the social world.

But in the *real world* economic policies that *disinclude* people -- like reducing rent control -- *do* have real-world effects on people's lives like people having lesser-equitable-access to the housing market, for one's home.

[Truth To Power]

Commons = chaos, and markets = efficiency. Got it.

Strawman.

Please tell me more about your political philosophy here.

The legitimate function of government is to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all its citizens to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

The *private sector* has private interests that run *counter* to a social-fabric-type ethos, as is empirically *required* by the markets / business.

Only if economic institutions are set up to enable that.

No, I stuck to the *private sector* -- the credit reporting agencies -- for the historical example above.

It's still irrelevant.

You don't get to just *pretend* that the empirical real-world conforms to your particular *ideation* of it. In *this* case you're pretending that the 'economic' can somehow be detached from the 'political', when in fact there's a good reason why the term 'political economy' exists -- because any given point on the left-right political spectrum is a combination of *both* politics *and* economics.

Obviously politics affects economic outcomes. But it doesn't affect economic law any more than the political choice of where and how big to build a bridge affects the physical laws that govern how the engineers will design it. People just like to imagine they can change economic law to suit their wishes.

[Truth To Power]

Economically you're a *reactionary*, TTP, because by arguing *against* rent control you're actually arguing *on behalf of* money itself, meaning *for* strong currency valuations (*monetarist*-type politics).

No, I'm arguing against rent control because it aggravates the very problem it pretends to address; and I favor stable money value because that fulfills its economic function better than unstable value. You advocate rent control and monetary inflation because you think you can change the laws of economics to suit your wishes, and do not know enough economics to understand why those policies are actually self-defeating.

As the interest rate has recently been *raised*, that favors the capitalist economic faction of *rentier capital* -- which draws economic value from the larger *pre-existing* economy in the form of interest payments and rent payments.

You have no idea what you are talking about. None. Increased interest rates make it harder for owners of privileges ("rentier capital") to pay the interest on loans taken out to acquire them, which is why housing (land) prices are plummeting.

The argument to decrease rent-control is basically an economic argument to *preserve* market-cap rentier property valuations *themselves*, regardless of how it impacts people's *housing* for the worse.

Garbage. The argument against rent control is the same as against any price ceiling below equilibrium: it causes a shortage. There are other factors that make rent control even worse, but you have no hope of understanding them.

If your 'economic realm' really *was* detached from the social-political world, then your 'manipulations' wouldn't really matter because they wouldn't have *any effect* on the social world.

No. You think you can build a bridge according to your wishes. I am identifying the fact that a bridge built according to your wishes will fall down when people try to use it.

But in the *real world* economic policies that *disinclude* people -- like reducing rent control -- *do* have real-world effects on people's lives like people having lesser-equitable-access to the housing market, for one's home.

People do not have less equitable access to housing because market rents increase. They have less equitable access to housing because their natural individual liberty rights to use land have been removed without just compensation, and made into the private property of landowners. As long as you refuse to know the cause of the problem, you will be unable to solve it, and your proposed solutions, like rent control, will actually just make the problem worse. It's like you think the problem with slavery is that the slaves aren't getting enough nutritious food, don't have good housing, etc., and you are trying to solve the problem by making slave owners pay for those things when that will only make them work the slaves that much harder and scrimp on other expenses like their medical care. You can't understand how economic law will not only thwart your desires but cause worse outcomes than if your policies were not implemented.

[Pants-of-dog]

It's the same everywhere.

So economics is the same in modern NYC as it is among Amazonian Indigenous communities, despite the fact that different regions have had different economic histories and contexts.

That is so obviously wrong that I will ignore your claims unless you provide evidence.

[ckaihatsu]

Strawman.

---

legally entitling

Please tell me more about your political philosophy here.

The legitimate function of government is to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all its citizens to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

So if it wasn't for the *genocide*, everything would be *peachy* because things would have gone *correctly*, but they *didn't*, and so now *genocide* is woven into the national historical fabric.

I'm beginning to think that your *entire politics* is one big *should've*, because there's no logistical way to situate the initial *premise* of your geoist politics from where things stand today.


---

The *private sector* has private interests that run *counter* to a social-fabric-type ethos, as is empirically *required* by the markets / business.

Only if economic institutions are set up to enable that.

Are we suddenly talking about 'institutions' now -- ?

If you're going to *pretend* to respond to the topic of 'private interests', then you're *way off* by changing the subject.

Private interests are economically *disparate*, though historically they've enjoyed *hegemony* in the political economy and body politic.

The shorthand term here is 'fiscal policy'.

It's still irrelevant.

What's irrelevant to *what* here -- ?

That the credit reporting agencies were *bullshitting*, over the total value of half a trillion dollars -- ? Remember, the preceding idea here was that of *executive-type* social organization, back to your glorification of one particular kind of white-collar executive, the CEO.

You think value firehoses out of the CEO's ass, and that's all *anyone* needs to know and believe about capitalist economics.

Obviously politics affects economic outcomes. But it doesn't affect economic law any more than the political choice of where and how big to build a bridge affects the physical laws that govern how the engineers will design it. People just like to imagine they can change economic law to suit their wishes.

So, to *clarify*, does politics affect economic outcomes, or *doesn't* it -- ?

Sure, people *like* to imagine they can change the dynamics of the markets, or stop time, or any other movie plot, but capitalist economic dynamics are *impersonal*. My current slogan is 'I don't want to feed the invisible hand any longer.'

No, I'm arguing against rent control because it aggravates the very problem it pretends to address; and I favor stable money value because that fulfills its economic function better than unstable value. You advocate rent control and monetary inflation because you think you can change the laws of economics to suit your wishes, and do not know enough economics to understand why those policies are actually self-defeating.

No, you're *imputing* all of that -- I'm *not* a reformist, though I will go-along with whatever socially-constructive reforms may happen to have momentum at the moment, like a rent moratorium.

Maybe a better way of putting it is 'Let's have some of that policy wiggle-room in favor of the *dispossessed*.' You *don't* want rent control, but that only benefits *past purchasers* of whatever non-commodity-productive assets and resources, like rental units or works of art.

It's *insane* that society should reward customers for their past purchases, over and over again, when the product is *inert* and *non-productive* of any commodities, as with land.


---

As the interest rate has recently been *raised*, that favors the capitalist economic faction of *rentier capital* -- which draws economic value from the larger *pre-existing* economy in the form of interest payments and rent payments.

You have no idea what you are talking about. None. Increased interest rates make it harder for owners of privileges ("rentier capital") to pay the interest on loans taken out to acquire them, which is why housing (land) prices are plummeting.

You're not *addressing* what I'm talking about, though, so your objection is baseless. You're tangentially going off on something about 'loans', vaguely, which I'm not going to address because you've chosen to hear yourself talk.

Garbage. The argument against rent control is the same as against any price ceiling below equilibrium: it causes a shortage. There are other factors that make rent control even worse, but you have no hope of understanding them.

So then it's not about *pricing*, it's about supply-and-demand, or the *lack* of supply (of new construction) when it comes to the housing market, chronically. The shortage was *already there*.


---

If your 'economic realm' really *was* detached from the social-political world, then your 'manipulations' wouldn't really matter because they wouldn't have *any effect* on the social world.

No. You think you can build a bridge according to your wishes. I am identifying the fact that a bridge built according to your wishes will fall down when people try to use it.

This isn't about *nation-building*, as you're implying. You seem very *defensive*, and I can assure you that I'm not a rival nationalist. I would support *Lumumba*, historically, but that would be the extent of my nationalism, if any.

People do not have less equitable access to housing because market rents increase. They have less equitable access to housing because their natural individual liberty rights to use land have been removed without just compensation, and made into the private property of landowners. As long as you refuse to know the cause of the problem, you will be unable to solve it, and your proposed solutions, like rent control, will actually just make the problem worse. It's like you think the problem with slavery is that the slaves aren't getting enough nutritious food, don't have good housing, etc., and you are trying to solve the problem by making slave owners pay for those things when that will only make them work the slaves that much harder and scrimp on other expenses like their medical care. You can't understand how economic law will not only thwart your desires but cause worse outcomes than if your policies were not implemented.

That's quite a *stretch* to make there, between market affordability, and... *being patronizing to slaves* -- ? What's *wrong* with you? You may want to rephrase.

Again, I'm *pro-rent-affordability*, or against all private property, ultimately, but I don't *seek* reforms within the prevailing bourgeois capitalist political economy.

[ckaihatsu]

You can't understand how economic law will not only thwart your desires but cause worse outcomes than if your policies were not implemented.

viewtopic.php?p=15258737#p15258737

'Desires' -- ?

I don't that's *quite* the word to use here since politics is *necessarily* about interests-in-common, according to *standards*, and is *not* about any given individual, typically.

Regarding 'economic-law-versus-my-desires-and-my-policies', *again*, this isn't about 'me' or 'my', particularly. I've written for years now and made dozens of diagrams, but that doesn't mean in any sense that I've 'proprietized' socialism itself.

*Organizational* politics is a subset of politics more *generally*, and *any* organization numerically trumps my own, individual, self-professed 'politics-on-paper'.

'Thwart my desires' -- ?

x D


You're back to your *comic-book* language, I see -- affinity for pulp drama -- ?

x D

It's like you think the problem with slavery is that the slaves aren't getting enough nutritious food, don't have good housing, etc., and you are trying to solve the problem by making slave owners pay for those things when that will only make them work the slaves that much harder and scrimp on other expenses like their medical care.

It's interesting -- *Wilde* agrees with you on this one, though one could readily critique this overall position as being 'accelerationist', not that *I'm* saying that.

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/

[ckaihatsu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity


---

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by
restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during
the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy
of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation,
capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were
prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this,
too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted
were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was
how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real
wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by
continuous warfare.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives,
but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces,
or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable,
and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are
not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of
expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that
would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with
further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle
the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might
exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is
a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on
as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups
somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity
increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the
distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early
twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere,
laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy
his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the
better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three
servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world
from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have
a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call
'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the
possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and
poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and
therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste
seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but
accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would
be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building
temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But
this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a
hierarchical society.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four