Potemkin wrote:My point was that capitalism, left to its own devices, cannot solve the problem of homelessness.
Right, because capitalism removes people's individual liberty rights to use land and makes them into the private property of landowners. So if someone can't afford to pay a landowner for permission to live, landowners
collectively make them homeless.
The market value of homes, at equilibrium between supply and demand, will always price some people out of the market.
No. If people have their liberty rights to use land, as in a geoist economy, they can easily provide themselves with homes. This is seen in the favelas of Latin America even when people
don't have their rights to liberty: the governments are merely lax in enforcing landowners' exclusion of the landless.
And even if we do not leave capitalism to its own devices, we have the problem of unintended consequences of any intervention in the market - market forces and the profit motive will tend to erase any good we try to do.
More accurately, the Henry George Theorem shows that anything governments try to give the landless, landowners will just take.
Ultimately, only socialism can resolve the problem of homelessness.
No, geoism would accomplish it far better by utilizing market incentives.
Crises of overproduction are a thing, @Pants-of-dog.
No. They aren't crises of "overproduction." That's just stupid Marxist garbage. They are crises of
debt caused by the debt-money system of finance capitalism.
The logic of capitalism leads to it, @Pants-of-dog. If it didn’t, then rent control and zoning would have solved the problem of homelessness long ago. And it hasn’t.
No. The logic of capitalism does not lead to overproduction, that's just stupid Marxist garbage. And zoning and rent control certainly can only make the problem worse. The three least affordable rental markets in North America are NYC, San Francisco, and Vancouver. All have draconian zoning laws, and all have had strict rent control for more than 50 years. Hello?
The problem is not that the rents are too damn high, the problem is that we live in a capitalist system.
Right, because under capitalism, the community has no right to the land rent the community creates. It must be given away to private landowners in return for nothing. Marx never understood that because he was the Anti-Economist.
The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by making mortgages too easy to obtain by people who could never have realistically repaid those loans.
Which bankers always want to do under the debt-money system.
This led to an artificially inflated demand for housing stock, which led to a crisis of overproduction in that sector of the economy. Hence the scenes we saw of street after street after street of brand new, empty houses left to rot.
No. The problem was not that too many houses were produced. The problem was that landowner privilege and the debt-money system drove up land prices to the point that
affordable housing could
not be produced. No builder can put a new house on the market for $300K when the land costs $400K. In fact, he can't even get buyers to pay $500K for a $100K house on a lot that costs $400K, because a $100K house never looks like it is worth $500K.
Crises of overproduction are a thing, @Pants-of-dog.
No, they're just stupid Marxist garbage. Marx did not know anything about production, money, or economics, so he just made $#!+ up.
And capitalists never learn from their mistakes. How can they? This is the whole point that Marx was trying to make when he wrote Das Kapital - capitalism cannot be saved through reform or better management.
But Marx completely misunderstood
why. The problem with capitalism is not the employer-employee relationship. It is the landowner-land user (i.e., everyone) relationship.
Capitalists cannot “learn from their mistakes”, because these ‘mistakes’ are inherent to capitalism itself as a mode of production.
No. The mistakes are inherent to capitalism as a mode of
ownership, not as a mode of
production. Marx was wrong about that, too.
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