[serviceberry]

I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.

You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.

[schmidtleonard]

Why wouldn't they? It's an easy and profitable way to pump their property values. Obviously they make an exception when they stand to profit, but I invite you to attend any county zoning meeting ever if you think this doesn't happen. The meetings are nothing but catfights of this exact description.

I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.

[numpad0]

Rent is charged monthly, and everyone consumes the value at the exact same pacing of 1/30th the rent per day. Consumers has no leverages, save for weak protections that won't be statistically significant, against price hikes. I think it's reasonable to assune it's more efficient at capturing UBI than regular commodities that can be rationed or splurged on.

[riehwvfbk]

> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically

It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.

Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.

One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.

[em-bee]

One workable version of UBI was Communism

what you describe doesn't sound workable to me...

[riehwvfbk]

It lasted just over 70 years. The current proposals - if implemented - would implode in less than a decade.