[asdfqwer234]

Housing has been a bitter historical and cross-cultural source of class conflict and oppression. In its current form in America, the bourgeois accumulate as much as they can like any unethical entity, and leverage it to maximize personal utility at the cost of the living conditions of the masses. It's always interesting to see how people use capitalism to indirectly (which is no excuse) cause this natural brutal nature of existence, to cause the common man (or woman) to "groan and sweat under a weary life".

[mindslight]

To be fair, a continual rent treadmill that forces everyone to work full time is the explicit overt policy of the Federal Reserve. But any candidate that brings this up gets memory-holed by the mainstream propagandas.

[jdc]

Woah. What kind of language do they use to describe said policy?

[mindslight]

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12848.htm

> The objectives as mandated by the Congress in the Federal Reserve Act are promoting (1) maximum employment, which means all Americans that want to work are gainfully employed, and (2) stable prices for the goods and services we all purchase

The qualifier "want" is a distraction, as everyone "wants" to work if that's what it takes to have a reliable bed to sleep in.

Furthermore, "stable" prices are untenable in the face of technological progress that makes everything less expensive. In order for the CPI average to keep going up, the price of housing has to shoot through the roof.

edit: Try drawing out the basic feedback loop. The Fed acts by creating new money. It doesn't simply give this money away to everyone (which would cause across the board price inflation), but it can only be accessed by taking on loans. Anything that can be financialized becomes awash in this new money - housing, cars, education. Consumers then have to settle for paying interest payments (rent) on sky-high asset valuations, rather than having smaller loans that can be paid off early to achieve economic bargaining power.

[KoftaBob]

This conclusion you're coming to is quite the massive reach based on the logic you used to analyze that sentence.

[oneplane]

I suspect American English, but I suppose we could look it up.