bingoUV is acknowledging that, and making the distinction that, apart from truth and falsehood, there's a separate axis of honesty and deception, that is orthogonal to that of truth and falsehood. A more accurate statement than "lies can become truth" would have been "falsehoods can become honest"; though they may have started out as lies (deliberate falsehoods), they can quickly become honest beliefs. Still false beliefs, but honest ones, no longer lies.
I'd bet that if someone were to introduce a sci-fi style personal force field right now, it would probably be banned as "military hardware" or something tantamount to "we can't let people just be invincible, how the hell would we control them with the threat of overwhelming force then?"
Viability isn't just technological know-how. If we aren't ready to build biodomes in Anarctica or the Sahara or the seafloor, or to deploy the technologies used in them to regulate the "biodome" that is the whole planet -- even if it's just for economic or political reason -- then we're obviously not ready to build them in space either.
Is shade really a "resource" when it comes to agriculture? Plants are powered by sunlight. The wide open fields of the breadbaskets of the world aren't exactly shady. They just get plenty of rainfall in addition to all that sunlight, which is what the Sahara is really missing.
By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.
Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.
There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.
It's not floating by hull displacement like a boat does. It's not pushing out the higher-density lower atmosphere and letting the lower-dentity higher atmosphere fill in; that wouldn't even make sense, we're talking about a continual gradient of gasses, there is no liquid surface to float on. You just fill it with Earth-sea-level-density gasses, which are less dense than much of Venus' atmosphere, and then let it float where it floats, which will be up around the range of where those same gasses exist on Venus. The weight of the hull will drag it down some, but size is largely irrelevant to that. The weight of the hull is like the weight of the rubber in a balloon. How big you inflate the balloon isn't really important; the fact that it's filled with helium and thus lighter than sea-level air is what matters.
There's a whole lot of them. Almost every ethical theory seriously entertained by contemporary philosophers (many if not most of which theories support some concept of rights) is something other than divine command theory ("from God") or ethical subjectivism ("people just made it up").
I don't know what you're referring to so I'm going to go with "no", but I also get the feeling that you completely missed my point.
Does logic come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does mathematics come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does reality come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does morality come from God or is it just something people made up?
False dichotomies, all of that. (And not even a dichotomy at that, because "coming from God" means someone -- God -- made it up. "Nobody made it up, it just is" isn't an option?)
Might I suggest The Database Engineering Perspective on Gay Marriage, which humorously explores the formal, structural similarities and differences between different kinds of marriage (straight, gay, poly, intransitive... asymmetrical? reflexive? etc) in a milieu that readers of this site should appreciate.
California may be "generally considered more liberal" abroad but it's really only liberal in federal elections. State elections tend to swing pretty conservatively. And broken down county-by-county, it's a shockingly perfect microcosm of the US as a whole: liberal on the coasts except for the south coast, and conservative inland except around the big lake on the border.
Here's a fuller illustration of that toy model of a market to more completely illustrate how the existence of rent breaks it.
This market consists of two identical people, one kind of consumable good (food), one kind of capital (land), and one kind of labor (working the land to produce food). There is exactly enough land to produce enough food for normal consumption for two people. The two people agree on what the rules of acceptable behavior (laws) and division of property are, so we don't need to worry about external law enforcement here. We will explore a couple of different scenarios of different laws and different divisions of property.
If the land ownership was evenly divided, the normal state of affairs would be for each person to work his land to produce food for his own consumption. Trade between the two people could be possible still -- one could give the other some of his food in exchange for the other taking over some of his labor, or they could divide the labor up into different types (planting, watering, harvesting, etc) and each do that for the other in exchange for some quantity of food -- and if the law includes laws against violence, then neither can coerce the other and all their trade would be free. Sounds wonderful.
But now, say one of the people (Alice) only owns 1/4 of the total land, while the other (Bob) owns 3/4 of it. Alice now cannot produce enough food for her own normal consumption, whereas Bob could produce an excess. Of course that means Alice is also working half as much as she would, and Bob is working one and a half times as much, so maybe that seems fair, but there are now pressures at work that will quickly make it unfair. Alice isn't eating enough, and Bob has more land than he really need to provide for his consumption, so Bob offers Alice a deal: "I'll let you borrow my extra land to work, in exchange for just half of its normal yield." So Alice gets some more food, and Bob gets more food too so he has to work less, and they both win right? So this is an obvious no brainer for both of them, a totally voluntary, free market transaction, right? Everything's great?
Except that now Alice is working a normal full work load but only getting 75% of a full crop from it, and Bob is getting a full crop but only working 75% as much for it. And this will continue indefinitely, and never end. Just because Bob started out with more than Alice, Alice is now stuck permanently getting less for her work than Bob, and Bob can permanently live a life of leisure on the back of Alice. Not because one of them did anything to win this position, not because one of them is better than the other, because remember we stipulated that they are identical; it's just because one of them began with more capital than the other.
But wait, it gets worse! Alice is still not eating enough, and desperate for anything that she can to get more. And now that Bob only has to work 75% of his land to meet his own consumption, he's got another quarter-field now lying around that he could lend out to Alice as well... in exchange for part of its normal yield again, of course. Which means Alice is now working even more than a normal full load and still not getting a full crop, and Bob can work even less and still get a full crop. Which means Bob now has another portion of his field he's not working anymore, and Alice still isn't eating enough, so she'll gladly work that too, in exchange for a part of it's yield sure, she needs the food so it's better than not. The endgame of this progression is that Alice has to work both fields in full if she wants to get a full crop to herself, meaning Bob doesn't have to work at all, still gets a full crop to himself, and Alice is his slave.
(Worse still, if Bob was really smart and Alice was desperate enough to fall for it, Bob could keep working full time, trade the excess he gets from Alice back to her in exchange for her land -- bought, not borrowed -- and gradually own even more and more of the land and make the whole scenario above worse and
You can do whatever you want with your property (so long as it's not harming someone else or their property).
What you can't (shouldn't be able to) do is create contractual obligations whereby people owe you money (or anything) in exchange for you allowing them to do things to your property.
Which means if you want to profit from your excess, you have to sell it. You don't get to get paid for something and also keep the thing. You want money for something? You lose the thing in return.
There are simple arrangements of sales that emulate rent in that capacity (a "rental shop" would sell above market price on long installment terms, and buy back below market price in one lump sum). The same kind of arrangement would also be fine for land, and would serve the functions where people actually want "rental" housing, while automatically becoming more like a sale for people who really just wanted a sale in the first place (or who just find themselves renting for so long that they might as well have just bought one... and it turns out, they technically did, and eventually it's paid of and done).
And then when it expires, all the places they would have turned to rent instead are now owned by rich Americans and priced out of their range, the bulk of the country (the poor, the renters) are forced to move. Their landlords are happy with the whole deal of course, that's why they sold, but the majority of the populace are fucked. That they may be a slight delay in their fuckedness is immaterial.
The people who were forced to move were not the same people who chose to sell. A small portion of the natives owned the land and rented it out to the rest, as is what usually happens everywhere. That small portion decided to cash out and sell their land to the rich Americans, and walked away laughing, while all their tenants suddenly can't afford to live in their homeland anymore.
The reason this problem exists is rent. Without it, there would be no problem, nobody could be forced out of anywhere, and if they left it would be their choice and they would profit from it.
Yes, it is exactly like feudal Europe. I'm glad you came to that conclusion by the end of your post because I was just about to make it clear for you.
And yes, feudal Europe came into existence because of runaway "capitalism" (not under that name), and worse, outright theft. Not because of free markets though, because the forces that allow a market to collapse like that make the market not free.
In a the worst kind of unfree market, people will just force other people to serve them at gun- or swordpoint, and that's slavery. The powerful, the slave-owners, will of course collude to assist each other in keeping their slaves, and since they, being the powerful, will constitute the government of their society, that collusion to keep the slaves enslaved will amount to the force of law.
In a slightly freer market, where somehow enough people with enough collective power have agreed to disallow such violent coercion, slavery like that isn't quite allowed, but some people are still allowed to own all of the resources and "defend" them against unauthorized use at gun- or sword-point, and everyone who's not a part of that owning-everything club must pay their feudal lords or else be forced off the land... onto someone else's land where they face the same deal.
In a slightly freer market still, the kind we have today, people have a bunch of different work options besides just farming someone's land, and the distribution of capital is slightly more widespread and more diverse than just land, but most people still have to work upon the capital owned by a small percentage of the population, and live on the land owned by a similarly small percentage of the population, and the fact that they get to work one lord's "land" and then live on another lord's land doesn't change the fact that they're still paying a big chunk of the product of their labor to both those lords for the privilege, and they have no other option because everything is owned by someone and you can't even just go live in a tent in a field somewhere and garden for food without paying someone else for the privilege of doing so.
In a truly free market, everyone would own their own homes and businesses (or own each others' businesses, because stock investing is a good idea; and work each others' businesses, because division of labor is a good idea too), and just owning something wouldn't be a mechanism by which to generate income from those who own less. The rich would enjoy leisure only at the cost of losing their riches, and the poor who worked to provide for that leisure would accumulate riches in the process, creating a natural and voluntary redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, in the absence of a mechanism like rent that then takes the riches paid to the poor and gives them right back to the rich to pay the poor with over and over again, allowing the rich to live at leisure indefinitely, on the backs of the poor.
So yes, runaway capitalism leads right back to feudalism, just like runaway feudalism leads right back to slavery. Rent (including interest) is the defining feature of capitalism, and the last modern vestige of feudalism, and if we want a truly free market that's not going to slide constantly back toward feudalism and slavery, we need to be rid of it.
The rich are the goddamn parasites, and rent is the exact fucking mechanism by which they parasitize. A gigantic portion of the income of the poor goes to paying the rich for the privilege of living on their borrowed capital, which the rich then use to acquire more capital and bilk the poor even more.
And what the fuck do you mean the poor have the same opportunities... are you a blind fucking idiot? How the fuck is the child of a crack whore and a dead gangbanger going to get the same opportunities as a trustafarian growing up in Martha's Vineyard?
The original homeowner doesn't get to force the buyer to sell it back a month later; and the buyer can choose to sell it to someone else instead, if he can find a better deal elsewhere. But if a bunch of different people all want the original homeowner's place for a month at a time and don't want to bother looking for someone else to buy, and is willing to accept that $1500 loss for the convenience of a temporary place to stay, then sure, they can do that, and you've got something that looks just like rent.
On the other hand someone who just wants to stay there permanently can keep paying those $1500/mo payments and 16-ish years later they will own a house, which is what you should fucking expect if you spent $300,000 on housing, but what doesn't happen today because people get stuck renting instead, and then decades later have paid way more than a house would cost and yet have no house to their name.
Yeah, that was all supposed to be an analogy for things like that happening on a smaller scale domestically; it just seemed like the injustice of it would seem more poignant if we were talking about rich Americans pushing poor foreigners out of their homes, rather than just Americans and other Americans.
Well in my case, I had been trying to save for a down payment on a real house, and meanwhil dealing with the hell of living in a rented bedroom in a house full of ever-cycling shitheads, and then I found a tiny MH that I could buy outright with what I had saved so far, that had space rent the same as I was paying for the bedroom. So I don't have a mortgage on it, I'm still paying the same rent, but now I have a tiny space all to myself not full of shitheads. (Although I have some other shitheads uncomfortably close to my place just across the alley).
But I'm aware that I got a spectacularly good deal on this place. Still, even looking at more normal (and bigger) mobile homes, they look like a reasonable stepping-stone on the way to a real house. Buying one outright would cost less than the down payment on a real house, and the space rent would be less than the interest on a mortgage, so I'd get something closer to a real house than my tiny trailer while continuing to save at the same pace toward buying a real place eventually. And maybe even more quickly, if the value of the MH appreciates faster than the money I would have stashed somewhere else instead would have.
Yeah, and that's all fucked up too. But it's still a step above the poor schmucks renting from the people who're renting from the banks who're renting from the government; every step down the feudal hierarchy just adds more shit and more burden to pay for the privilege of being a poor fuck in someone else's world.
Ok then how's this deal sound: I'll set up a college fund for my kids. You can pay into it, and then when they're old enough, I'll spend it all on my kids. Hurray! I got "income" and "I" paid for my kids college! You totally didn't fucking pay for it at all.
Ok, right, you want something in return if you're going to pay for my kids' college. Ok, so I'll let you borrow something of mine while you're paying for it, but once it's paid off, I get the thing back. I get to keep your money too. It's win-win! I win, and also, I win! And you lose, you stupid fucking loser. Try not being poor and maybe you can win-win like I do, and get someone else to pay for your kids' education! It's super easy if you just have way more capital than you need and can let people borrow it for a while. You don't even have to give it to them, just let them borrow it, you get it back, and you get to keep their money too! Hahah! Poor people are fucking suckers! Why the fuck did they ever choose to be poor? The idiots.
Copying is irrelevant. Both copyright income and rental income are making money by being the gatekeeper of something, without actually having to give up something, and in any case not getting expectd income is not the same as losing money, only even more so in the case where there's not even the possibility of you doing something and not getting paid for it (which would be a real loss), because the income you were expecting wasn't for doing anything in the first place.
And the landlord is most definitely not paying his own goddamn mortgage if someone else is paying him the money that he pays to the bank, and then the landlord gets to keep what that money buys and the person who actually paid it gets nothing to their name. How does this sound to you: I'll take out a loan, buy something with it, and then you can pay the loan back for me. Sound fair? I'll even let you borrow the thing I buy with it until you're done paying it off, but afterwards it's mine, I get the thing, and you don't get a fucking cent back. That would be so nice if you would buy me that thing, and I'd be so grateful I'd let you borrow it for a bit if you did. So you'll totally buy me the thing right?
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bingoUV is acknowledging that, and making the distinction that, apart from truth and falsehood, there's a separate axis of honesty and deception, that is orthogonal to that of truth and falsehood. A more accurate statement than "lies can become truth" would have been "falsehoods can become honest"; though they may have started out as lies (deliberate falsehoods), they can quickly become honest beliefs. Still false beliefs, but honest ones, no longer lies.
I'd bet that if someone were to introduce a sci-fi style personal force field right now, it would probably be banned as "military hardware" or something tantamount to "we can't let people just be invincible, how the hell would we control them with the threat of overwhelming force then?"
Viability isn't just technological know-how. If we aren't ready to build biodomes in Anarctica or the Sahara or the seafloor, or to deploy the technologies used in them to regulate the "biodome" that is the whole planet -- even if it's just for economic or political reason -- then we're obviously not ready to build them in space either.
Is shade really a "resource" when it comes to agriculture? Plants are powered by sunlight. The wide open fields of the breadbaskets of the world aren't exactly shady. They just get plenty of rainfall in addition to all that sunlight, which is what the Sahara is really missing.
By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.
Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.
There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.
It's not floating by hull displacement like a boat does. It's not pushing out the higher-density lower atmosphere and letting the lower-dentity higher atmosphere fill in; that wouldn't even make sense, we're talking about a continual gradient of gasses, there is no liquid surface to float on. You just fill it with Earth-sea-level-density gasses, which are less dense than much of Venus' atmosphere, and then let it float where it floats, which will be up around the range of where those same gasses exist on Venus. The weight of the hull will drag it down some, but size is largely irrelevant to that. The weight of the hull is like the weight of the rubber in a balloon. How big you inflate the balloon isn't really important; the fact that it's filled with helium and thus lighter than sea-level air is what matters.
There's a whole lot of them. Almost every ethical theory seriously entertained by contemporary philosophers (many if not most of which theories support some concept of rights) is something other than divine command theory ("from God") or ethical subjectivism ("people just made it up").
I don't know what you're referring to so I'm going to go with "no", but I also get the feeling that you completely missed my point.
Does logic come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does mathematics come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does reality come from God or is it just something people made up?
Does morality come from God or is it just something people made up?
False dichotomies, all of that. (And not even a dichotomy at that, because "coming from God" means someone -- God -- made it up. "Nobody made it up, it just is" isn't an option?)
Might I suggest The Database Engineering Perspective on Gay Marriage, which humorously explores the formal, structural similarities and differences between different kinds of marriage (straight, gay, poly, intransitive... asymmetrical? reflexive? etc) in a milieu that readers of this site should appreciate.
"Rights come from God" and "rights are just made up by people" are not the only two options.
California may be "generally considered more liberal" abroad but it's really only liberal in federal elections. State elections tend to swing pretty conservatively. And broken down county-by-county, it's a shockingly perfect microcosm of the US as a whole: liberal on the coasts except for the south coast, and conservative inland except around the big lake on the border.
Here's a fuller illustration of that toy model of a market to more completely illustrate how the existence of rent breaks it.
This market consists of two identical people, one kind of consumable good (food), one kind of capital (land), and one kind of labor (working the land to produce food). There is exactly enough land to produce enough food for normal consumption for two people. The two people agree on what the rules of acceptable behavior (laws) and division of property are, so we don't need to worry about external law enforcement here. We will explore a couple of different scenarios of different laws and different divisions of property.
If the land ownership was evenly divided, the normal state of affairs would be for each person to work his land to produce food for his own consumption. Trade between the two people could be possible still -- one could give the other some of his food in exchange for the other taking over some of his labor, or they could divide the labor up into different types (planting, watering, harvesting, etc) and each do that for the other in exchange for some quantity of food -- and if the law includes laws against violence, then neither can coerce the other and all their trade would be free. Sounds wonderful.
But now, say one of the people (Alice) only owns 1/4 of the total land, while the other (Bob) owns 3/4 of it. Alice now cannot produce enough food for her own normal consumption, whereas Bob could produce an excess. Of course that means Alice is also working half as much as she would, and Bob is working one and a half times as much, so maybe that seems fair, but there are now pressures at work that will quickly make it unfair. Alice isn't eating enough, and Bob has more land than he really need to provide for his consumption, so Bob offers Alice a deal: "I'll let you borrow my extra land to work, in exchange for just half of its normal yield." So Alice gets some more food, and Bob gets more food too so he has to work less, and they both win right? So this is an obvious no brainer for both of them, a totally voluntary, free market transaction, right? Everything's great?
Except that now Alice is working a normal full work load but only getting 75% of a full crop from it, and Bob is getting a full crop but only working 75% as much for it. And this will continue indefinitely, and never end. Just because Bob started out with more than Alice, Alice is now stuck permanently getting less for her work than Bob, and Bob can permanently live a life of leisure on the back of Alice. Not because one of them did anything to win this position, not because one of them is better than the other, because remember we stipulated that they are identical; it's just because one of them began with more capital than the other.
But wait, it gets worse! Alice is still not eating enough, and desperate for anything that she can to get more. And now that Bob only has to work 75% of his land to meet his own consumption, he's got another quarter-field now lying around that he could lend out to Alice as well... in exchange for part of its normal yield again, of course. Which means Alice is now working even more than a normal full load and still not getting a full crop, and Bob can work even less and still get a full crop. Which means Bob now has another portion of his field he's not working anymore, and Alice still isn't eating enough, so she'll gladly work that too, in exchange for a part of it's yield sure, she needs the food so it's better than not. The endgame of this progression is that Alice has to work both fields in full if she wants to get a full crop to herself, meaning Bob doesn't have to work at all, still gets a full crop to himself, and Alice is his slave.
(Worse still, if Bob was really smart and Alice was desperate enough to fall for it, Bob could keep working full time, trade the excess he gets from Alice back to her in exchange for her land -- bought, not borrowed -- and gradually own even more and more of the land and make the whole scenario above worse and
You can do whatever you want with your property (so long as it's not harming someone else or their property).
What you can't (shouldn't be able to) do is create contractual obligations whereby people owe you money (or anything) in exchange for you allowing them to do things to your property.
Which means if you want to profit from your excess, you have to sell it. You don't get to get paid for something and also keep the thing. You want money for something? You lose the thing in return.
Your machine is apparently magic as it requires no input whatsoever on your part.
There are simple arrangements of sales that emulate rent in that capacity (a "rental shop" would sell above market price on long installment terms, and buy back below market price in one lump sum). The same kind of arrangement would also be fine for land, and would serve the functions where people actually want "rental" housing, while automatically becoming more like a sale for people who really just wanted a sale in the first place (or who just find themselves renting for so long that they might as well have just bought one... and it turns out, they technically did, and eventually it's paid of and done).
And then when it expires, all the places they would have turned to rent instead are now owned by rich Americans and priced out of their range, the bulk of the country (the poor, the renters) are forced to move. Their landlords are happy with the whole deal of course, that's why they sold, but the majority of the populace are fucked. That they may be a slight delay in their fuckedness is immaterial.
The people who were forced to move were not the same people who chose to sell. A small portion of the natives owned the land and rented it out to the rest, as is what usually happens everywhere. That small portion decided to cash out and sell their land to the rich Americans, and walked away laughing, while all their tenants suddenly can't afford to live in their homeland anymore.
The reason this problem exists is rent. Without it, there would be no problem, nobody could be forced out of anywhere, and if they left it would be their choice and they would profit from it.
Yes, it is exactly like feudal Europe. I'm glad you came to that conclusion by the end of your post because I was just about to make it clear for you.
And yes, feudal Europe came into existence because of runaway "capitalism" (not under that name), and worse, outright theft. Not because of free markets though, because the forces that allow a market to collapse like that make the market not free.
In a the worst kind of unfree market, people will just force other people to serve them at gun- or swordpoint, and that's slavery. The powerful, the slave-owners, will of course collude to assist each other in keeping their slaves, and since they, being the powerful, will constitute the government of their society, that collusion to keep the slaves enslaved will amount to the force of law.
In a slightly freer market, where somehow enough people with enough collective power have agreed to disallow such violent coercion, slavery like that isn't quite allowed, but some people are still allowed to own all of the resources and "defend" them against unauthorized use at gun- or sword-point, and everyone who's not a part of that owning-everything club must pay their feudal lords or else be forced off the land... onto someone else's land where they face the same deal.
In a slightly freer market still, the kind we have today, people have a bunch of different work options besides just farming someone's land, and the distribution of capital is slightly more widespread and more diverse than just land, but most people still have to work upon the capital owned by a small percentage of the population, and live on the land owned by a similarly small percentage of the population, and the fact that they get to work one lord's "land" and then live on another lord's land doesn't change the fact that they're still paying a big chunk of the product of their labor to both those lords for the privilege, and they have no other option because everything is owned by someone and you can't even just go live in a tent in a field somewhere and garden for food without paying someone else for the privilege of doing so.
In a truly free market, everyone would own their own homes and businesses (or own each others' businesses, because stock investing is a good idea; and work each others' businesses, because division of labor is a good idea too), and just owning something wouldn't be a mechanism by which to generate income from those who own less. The rich would enjoy leisure only at the cost of losing their riches, and the poor who worked to provide for that leisure would accumulate riches in the process, creating a natural and voluntary redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, in the absence of a mechanism like rent that then takes the riches paid to the poor and gives them right back to the rich to pay the poor with over and over again, allowing the rich to live at leisure indefinitely, on the backs of the poor.
So yes, runaway capitalism leads right back to feudalism, just like runaway feudalism leads right back to slavery. Rent (including interest) is the defining feature of capitalism, and the last modern vestige of feudalism, and if we want a truly free market that's not going to slide constantly back toward feudalism and slavery, we need to be rid of it.
The rich are the goddamn parasites, and rent is the exact fucking mechanism by which they parasitize. A gigantic portion of the income of the poor goes to paying the rich for the privilege of living on their borrowed capital, which the rich then use to acquire more capital and bilk the poor even more.
And what the fuck do you mean the poor have the same opportunities... are you a blind fucking idiot? How the fuck is the child of a crack whore and a dead gangbanger going to get the same opportunities as a trustafarian growing up in Martha's Vineyard?
The original homeowner doesn't get to force the buyer to sell it back a month later; and the buyer can choose to sell it to someone else instead, if he can find a better deal elsewhere. But if a bunch of different people all want the original homeowner's place for a month at a time and don't want to bother looking for someone else to buy, and is willing to accept that $1500 loss for the convenience of a temporary place to stay, then sure, they can do that, and you've got something that looks just like rent.
On the other hand someone who just wants to stay there permanently can keep paying those $1500/mo payments and 16-ish years later they will own a house, which is what you should fucking expect if you spent $300,000 on housing, but what doesn't happen today because people get stuck renting instead, and then decades later have paid way more than a house would cost and yet have no house to their name.
Yeah, that was all supposed to be an analogy for things like that happening on a smaller scale domestically; it just seemed like the injustice of it would seem more poignant if we were talking about rich Americans pushing poor foreigners out of their homes, rather than just Americans and other Americans.
Well in my case, I had been trying to save for a down payment on a real house, and meanwhil dealing with the hell of living in a rented bedroom in a house full of ever-cycling shitheads, and then I found a tiny MH that I could buy outright with what I had saved so far, that had space rent the same as I was paying for the bedroom. So I don't have a mortgage on it, I'm still paying the same rent, but now I have a tiny space all to myself not full of shitheads. (Although I have some other shitheads uncomfortably close to my place just across the alley).
But I'm aware that I got a spectacularly good deal on this place. Still, even looking at more normal (and bigger) mobile homes, they look like a reasonable stepping-stone on the way to a real house. Buying one outright would cost less than the down payment on a real house, and the space rent would be less than the interest on a mortgage, so I'd get something closer to a real house than my tiny trailer while continuing to save at the same pace toward buying a real place eventually. And maybe even more quickly, if the value of the MH appreciates faster than the money I would have stashed somewhere else instead would have.
Yeah, and that's all fucked up too. But it's still a step above the poor schmucks renting from the people who're renting from the banks who're renting from the government; every step down the feudal hierarchy just adds more shit and more burden to pay for the privilege of being a poor fuck in someone else's world.
Ok then how's this deal sound: I'll set up a college fund for my kids. You can pay into it, and then when they're old enough, I'll spend it all on my kids. Hurray! I got "income" and "I" paid for my kids college! You totally didn't fucking pay for it at all.
Ok, right, you want something in return if you're going to pay for my kids' college. Ok, so I'll let you borrow something of mine while you're paying for it, but once it's paid off, I get the thing back. I get to keep your money too. It's win-win! I win, and also, I win! And you lose, you stupid fucking loser. Try not being poor and maybe you can win-win like I do, and get someone else to pay for your kids' education! It's super easy if you just have way more capital than you need and can let people borrow it for a while. You don't even have to give it to them, just let them borrow it, you get it back, and you get to keep their money too! Hahah! Poor people are fucking suckers! Why the fuck did they ever choose to be poor? The idiots.
Copying is irrelevant. Both copyright income and rental income are making money by being the gatekeeper of something, without actually having to give up something, and in any case not getting expectd income is not the same as losing money, only even more so in the case where there's not even the possibility of you doing something and not getting paid for it (which would be a real loss), because the income you were expecting wasn't for doing anything in the first place.
And the landlord is most definitely not paying his own goddamn mortgage if someone else is paying him the money that he pays to the bank, and then the landlord gets to keep what that money buys and the person who actually paid it gets nothing to their name. How does this sound to you: I'll take out a loan, buy something with it, and then you can pay the loan back for me. Sound fair? I'll even let you borrow the thing I buy with it until you're done paying it off, but afterwards it's mine, I get the thing, and you don't get a fucking cent back. That would be so nice if you would buy me that thing, and I'd be so grateful I'd let you borrow it for a bit if you did. So you'll totally buy me the thing right?