[ChuckNorris89]

You misunderstood, I wasn't advocating for communism but our current system is definitely flawed and unsustainable long term.

So you're telling me that we should allow people to own pieces of the planet earth forever? Sorry, but how is that sustainable? How is it fair the someone gets to own large swaths of the planet and use it as leverage to buy even more of it, just because his great granddad came to an empty country and got land basically for free which now make his grandchildren millionaire landlords even though they didn't contribute to society in any way to earn what they have and if they were to buy their property at current market rate they wouldn't be able to afford even 10% of it.

This may have been the foundation of societies, thousands or hundreds of years ago, but what was the population of the earth back then and what is it now? This system is not sustainable, and just like laws, it should be updated to account for current conditions.

Our current system is flawed as it just comes around full circle to creating a society of a few landlords owning most of the property and assets and the peasantry which can't afford to own anything. And looking back on history we know how that usually ends. We need a new system that resets the monopoly board fairly instead of waiting for social uprisings to boil due to increased wealth inequality.

[lelanthran]

> So you're telling me that we should allow people to own pieces of the planet earth forever?

Which country allows this? All "land-owners" pay land taxes, and if you stop paying "your" land will be confiscated.

> just because his great granddad came to an empty country and got land basically for free which now make his grandchildren millionaire landlords even though they didn't contribute to society in any way to earn what they have

And now we're back to the argument "to each according to his need". Until/unless you are willing to ruthlessly enforce that nobody gets anything unless they, personally, earn it, there will be large numbers of people who will have stuff that they did not earn.

Arguments along the lines of "to each according to his need" are broken, almost by design.

> We need a new system that resets the monopoly board fairly instead of waiting for social uprisings to boil due to increased wealth inequality.

IIRC, the last time I checked, the countries with the least wealth inequality were those with the strongest private ownership laws.

If it's wealth inequality you're targetting, then strong economies help. Countries with restrictions on ownership mostly, with some outliers, fare poorly on wealth inequality.

[robertlagrant]

> How is it fair the someone gets to own large swaths of the planet

No person owns large swathes of our planet.

> I wasn't advocating for communism

Hard to know where else commenters are going if they're saying the government should be allowed to seize property from people it defines as "people who deserve to have their property seized".

> This system is not sustainable, and just like laws, it should be updated to account for current conditions.

A large factor in current conditions is the constriction of supply by regulation. Trying to socially engineer cities has vote-winning, short term positive consequences (rent control means your rent doesn't change! Hooray!) and predictable but overlooked non-short term enormous negative consequences (it's not worth landlords' time to upkeep properties! It's only worth building luxury apartments!)

Before we say "the government should just come in and take property in the name of redistribution, the way they did in the USSR", perhaps we should consider some alternatives. Saying "there's a problem; here's a solution; if you disagree with my solution than you are saying there's no problem" is a syllogism as old as time.

[ChuckNorris89]

I never said the people should have their property seized like in comunism and that the government should redistribute it. But i can't endorse the current system either. Surely a better system can be designed if we put smart people up to it, no?

What's your solution? All you did was call me and everyone who thinks the current system is wrong, a commie.

>A large factor in current conditions is the constriction of supply by regulation.

Yes, which is why we're in this mess. It's a rigged system masquerading as the free market. Those who own property have vested interest in increasing the value of what they own and use it as leverage to buy more, at the expense of those who don't own and wish to buy in.

[robertlagrant]

> What's your solution? All you did was call me and everyone who thinks the current system is wrong, a commie.

No. I didn't do that, and I didn't only do that.

> It's a rigged system masquerading as the free market. Those who own property have vested interest in increasing the value of what they own and use it as leverage to buy more, at the expense of those who don't own and wish to buy in.

It is nowhere near a free market, and I don't believe it pretends to be.

> What's your solution?

My personal solution is to do the following:

Realise that most people have property because their parents or grandparents worked hard and sacrificed for years or decades or their whole lives to give a transformationally different life to their descendents.

This can't happen overnight or via regulation.

Take a hard look at the long term effects of policies that are short-term vote winners. The state intervening more in housing should be the last resort, not the first.

Undermine envy by remembering that most families with wealth lose it within 3 generations, and that many people move into the top 1% of earners during their lifetimes, if only for while.

I don't know if that would work for anyone else, though.

[ChuckNorris89]

>The state intervening more in housing should be the last resort, not the first.

Agree that too much gov regulations push prices up, but like it or not, the gov intervention is a necessary evil for quality housing that has infrastructure and won't fall on you after 10 years. Where I'm from in Eastern Europe housing is affordable due to the lack of gov regulations as developers go crazy and just build anything everywhere but those buildings while nice looking and modern, have no good infrastructure anywhere near them as neither the developers nor the government wants to spend money on it. So you get apartment buildings with no paved roads or parking lots, no schools, no kindergartens, no doctors, no bus stops, no parks or green spaces. Awful. Gov regulation could fix this but also make buildings more expensive for the developers and for the end buyers. In the end you can't just leave everything to the "free market".

>Realise that most people have property because their parents or grandparents worked hard and sacrificed for years or decades or their whole lives

Or, they got lucky to be born in a time when real estate, even in now red hot metro areas, was far cheaper for the average worker/family, as was getting education and a stable career and raising a family.

Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich is massive survivorship bias and young people have wised up to this fact.

>Undermine envy by remembering that most families with wealth lose it within 3 generations, and that many people move into the top 1% of earners during their lifetimes, if only for while.

That's so untrue for Western Europe where the wealthiest families go back hundreds of years, and due to high taxes and low skilled wages you can't really move to the top 1%.

In Austria, the country's top 100 richest people own a third of the wealth in the entire country, and during the covid pandemic, the gap between them and everyone else got even wider while they got richer and everyone else poorer. One city already voted a communist mayor into power. Their wealth goes back centuries and hasn't been lost in 3 generations and will survive 3 more generations.

[robertlagrant]

It's hard to debate without citations. Here are two things:

> Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich

I didn't say it's the key to getting rich. I said they worked extremely hard (no holidays / long hours of hard jobs / making sure their kids prioritised school and working hard) to ensure their descendents could afford something. Not get rich. Afford something.

> is massive survivorship bias

I'm not saying that these things guarantee a home. They're just the most likely path to getting one.

[pbhjpbhj]

You can apply all the logic you want, people who got there first (eg own land through inheritance) find a way to dismiss it.

[robertlagrant]

The issue isn't logic. It's in worldview.

If you're more left wing, you probably view the state as a parent who can be trusted to confiscate and dole things out fairly.

If you're right wing you probably view the state as a necessary evil for providing specific services that can't be provided fairly purely through people making agreements with each other.

If you're the former, you may well think that the state seizing property in the name of redistribution will solve more problems than it causes. If you're the latter, it's the other way round.