I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
The same people crying about this "capital class" are often turning a blind eye to rampant migration and fiercely protesting against the deportation of illegal aliens. As if the laws of supply and demand have no effect on housing when it might conflict with one's liberal ideals.
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company