[polygamous_bat]

Thanks for making exactly the point OP was trying to convey.

> You can always find something to do with property to generate income.

Where do you think that income is coming from? Especially when we are talking about a limited resource like housing, the dollar of your “extra income” is a dollar that a young family could have saved for their future.

[boringg]

Now here's the next step in your small thought experiment. Expand income coming from for everything. Whatever you do now at the company (assuming you are working) where does that money come from? Work through the logic on income.

People love to demonize small property owners who have a rental property and take a moralistic campaign but don't look at how their own lives are funded.

[carlosjobim]

The origin of all wealth is labour, there are no exceptions. Somebody needs to work to create the resources and do the services that others purchase. There are no exceptions and this is the most fundamental fact of economics.

You are arguing as if workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare. They receive their wages in exchange for their labour.

If you think that wealth actually comes from the monetary supply, then you'll have to go down the Zimbabwe route and print trillion dollar bills.

[boringg]

I didn't bring in economic money supply to the conversation so your comment is unrelated to mine. You created a strawman.

I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."

And I want to just highlight that "all wealth is labour" is actually not a universally held truth nor a fundamental fact of economics but is the basis for one theory of economics: the Labor theory of value (Smith and Marx).

Build your argument from a solid foundation and not something that is easily picked at apart by inaccuracies if you want to yield influence.

[carlosjobim]

Well, if you go down the route of "where the money is coming from" you arrive at the central bank that creates that money out of thin air. That's why it's fundamental to understand that wealth can only be created by labour. It can then be distributed according to any system imaginable, but it is always created by labour. Wealth as in real physical goods and services, not as in the number in your account.

I'm not saying that all labour creates wealth. That's something else and I don't believe it. Trench warfare is the most laborious thing imaginable and it certainly creates no wealth.

> I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."

You absolutely did not, but I sensed that angle. The difference is that a worker will never receive any wages in exchange of not doing anything, while a landlord will always receive his wages for not doing anything. "How their own lives are funded" are through their labour when it comes to the worker and through the worker's labour when it comes to the landlord.

[boringg]

You are really just trying to get to rent-seeking behavior provides little value. My argument is that a lot of tech companies are providing rent-seeking behavior at a huge scale - and if you work for one of those companies in which you are deriving your income from that very behavior - how can you be so high and mighty about a small time landlord deriving small money from rent-seeking behavior except for, when of course, it hurts your own pocket.

[carlosjobim]

"Small money" is relative. Rent is the largest expense for most workers.

Most tech companies operate on a free market where nobody is forced to pay them if they don't want to. Nobody is strictly dependent on their services, while we are all dependent on having shelter. And painting with a broad stroke you can't say that tech companies are rent-seeking, information technology is highly beneficial for the economy at large, in practical ways that are too numerous to list.

It's not one small-time landlord, it is millions of small time landlords. Just like one small time police officer demanding protection money from local businesses is not a problem for the economy of a nation, but millions of police officers doing that is.

You could say that people can go somewhere else if they don't like it. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And that is true, I think a lot of people will go somewhere else and are already doing that.

With that said, I've never worked for a company engaging in rent-seeking and never done that myself, tech or other industry, so in that aspect I'm completely clean even though I'm a sinner like all of us.

[mycologos]

And here's yet another step: most other markets aren't as resource-constrained as housing is. If the Yankees win the world series and more people want Yankees caps, manufacturers can just make more. Demand goes up, supply goes up, everybody's happy.

Housing, at least in the USA, often doesn't work like this. The population grows and more people want to live in place X and the current NIMBY occupants of place X go to the government to make sure more housing can't appear in place X. The current occupants make some arguments about neighborhood character that are really about preserving their own lives and investments and another family goes to a worse district or a worse house or no house at all.

Housing is a unique investment category, pretending it's like everything else is disingenuous.

[boringg]

I agree that housing is a complicated market with a lot of varying factors. It never really fits a simple model that people like to package it in. Each market is regional with some national/international overlays and its tied to the economic power of that market. It is impacted by policies both economic, financial and political.