Also, if you're living in a mobile home on land that's not your own, you're still paying rent, so how exactly does that help anything?
(Maybe you can get more housing for your rent money. I live in a small MH myself that's about the size of a 1br apartment, with my own living room and kitchen and bath and no shared walls, and paying in rent about the same as I was paying for a bedroom in someone else's house for most of my life. It's a small step in the right direction, but it's still renting. Ugh.)
Also: the only government coercion going on in that not-so-hypothetical is the enforcement of private property rights, which surely you're not advocating against? The only reason the "not"-slaves in that scenario can't legally live or work anywhere is because everywhere they would live or work is owned by someone else, and it's illegal to live or work someone else's land without their permission, which only comes with your acceptance of the conditions that are tantamount to slavery.
Some people would say that the problem in that scenario is the legal enforcement of private property ownership at all. I wouldn't go that far. But the problem is definitely not some kind of big-government nanny-state, because all the government in that scenario is doing is saying "yeah, do what the owner says or get off his land", which is about as minimal as government gets. About. It can get slightly more minimal than that, without quite doing away with private property enforcement entirely. And I think it should.
Indeed it is called serfdom. Serfdom is just barely one step removed from slavery. And I'd argue that a capitalist market with rent and interest in it is just one step removed from serfdom. The lords whose lands we live on and work can be different lords, and we can switch them up, but at the end of the day we're still working the capital of someone with the capital to be worked (because we don't have our own) and giving a huge chunk of the product of that work to live on the capital of someone with the capital to live on (because we don't have our own). That's not a truly free market. Only when the serfs live on and work their own lands (or at least work each others' lands in even proportions, dividing the different types of labor up but keeping the capital well-distributed) will they stop being serfs and become true freemen.
I am using my car and can't part with it, but if I had another car I wasn't using, I'd gladly sell it to you. Not rent. Sell. That's how it should work.
I agree that unearned income is the hallmark of capitalism, and I am opposed to capitalism because of that. Note that capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. I am highly in favor of free markets. I'm also in favor of investing in ways that aren't just unearned income, like owning shares of companies, where you share in both the risk and the reward. That's a very different kind of investment than rent, which is just leveraging an advantage to exploit money out of people who have less than you.
I don't know where the hell you live that renting costs more than buying, that's simply not true in anywhere I've ever lived, but there are services that could be provided on a truly free market that would provide all the benefits of rent, at a cost (which you're already paying while renting), while not actually being rent, thus freeing people who don't want to rent and only do because buying is not an option from being stuck in unending debt. I discuss some of these ideas elsewhere in this thread, just search my username and you'll see some of the posts.
What I want is nothing like what the USSR had though. I want a free market economy without the distortions imposed by rent / interest / capitalism. A world where people own their own things, instead of most people borrowing them from others, and a few people owning everyone else's shit. A world where if you want to enjoy leisure, it will cost you your assets, and where working hard your whole life will accumulate assets; where capital is naturally redistributed from those who have more to those who have less in the process of the rich selling it off to fund leisure and the poor working it hard to buy it, in absence of the rent-driven processes that then takes that capital and gives it right back to the rich to lend back out again indefinitely at no cost to themselves.
Which is unearned. You didn't trade anything for the payment you got. And the end of the day, you get your asset back and their money, and they still have no asset and are out some money. You are able to extract money from them because you have an asset you don't need for your own use, and they need to use an asset they don't have. The only reason they are giving you money is because you already have more than they do and that puts you in a position to demand it, which is the definition of unearned income.
Not all investing comes from rent. You're damn right that rent is an integral part of capitalism though; I'll argue that it is the defining feature of capitalism. Get rid of it, and you can have a free market that is also socialist (= not capitalist). In fact I'd argue that "free market capitalism" is a contradiction in terms, because the rents that define capitalism are by definition unearned income that would not exist in a truly free market.
Everywhere I've ever rented has had a similar clause. Not that that excuses it at all, just... it's not uncommon. They want to make sure you'll be able to make the rent after you pay for all your other expenses.
Imagine an agrarian society where all the land is divided up into huge plantations, and the only place that anyone can legally live or work (the land) is on one of them, and the only conditions under which anyone will allow you to live and work their land are the conditions under which slaves lived and worked.
You have the right to refuse that, if you're find with having nowhere to live and no way to survive. Basically, you're free to not be a slave, so long as you're OK with dying as a consequence. Not that anyone's going to actually kill you, just that you won't be able to survive unless you submit "voluntarily" to slavery.
Because letting rich people chase poor people out of their homelands is totally not a problem at all, right?
Imagine if for some reason some impoverished third world country became really attractive to rich Americans, who went there and bought up all the land and pretty soon none of the poor natives can afford to live in their own country anymore. That's no problem, right? Fuck them, they're less powerful than us, that gives us the right to move in and push them out and if they can't compete, their loss and our gain. What difference does it make if the power and competition in question is economic rather than military?
It might exchange "evil" landlords for "evil" flippers for the people who want to (effectively) rent, but it would allow the people who don't want to to avoid the evils of either.
The rest of your complaints are based on the screwed-up way we deal with property transactions now, and would not apply in a more sane world like I advocate.
All I'm really advocating is that if someone is paying money for housing, they should own some housing in exchange for that payment, and anything that doesn't accomplish that is an injustice. Simple as that. How exactly to unravel the mess we have now and get to that end is a complicated discussion, and one I'm not willing to have until that basic end (that you should get something when you pay something) is acknowledged as a good one.
That is exactly the fucking problem. Someone making too little income cannot save it, even if they make more than it costs to cover their consumption, because having too little assets and being forced to borrow them from those who have excess assets allows the latter to charge the former all the money that they would be saving to better their position, and give nothing back.
The problem is that the poor can pay and pay and pay for housing their entire lives, pay more than it would have cost to build a house, and not get any housing to their names for all that effort in the end.
I don't know that I agree completely with all of that, but I definitely agree with the sentiment of it: people should own their own homes and businesses, and even if income equality was achieved (not that everyone makes the same income, but that income is normally distributed, so the average person makes an average share of the GDP, unlike now where more than half the population make less than half of the income per capita, i.e. the median is about half the mean), there would still be a huge problem of asset inequality, with those few possessing the bulk of the assets profiting off of the many who lack the assets they need, creating NET income inequality because the asset-poor, even while making the name nominal income as anyone else, have to pay a huge chunk of it to service their debts to the asset-rich, and the asset-rich in turn get a higher net income at the expense of the asset-poor who borrow from them.
income from rent is necessarily less than those expenses you listed
Sorry, I misspoke; I meant income from rent is necessarily more than those expenses; or conversely, those expenses are necessarily less than income from rent.
Speaking of morons who never studied economics: you're apparently one, otherwise you would realize that income from rent is necessarily less than those expenses you listed, otherwise nobody would ever rent to anyone as it would be unprofitable. Since you don't have to do those things yourself, and most landlords don't, just owning the property allows you to get a continuous stream of income (the rent paid to you minus the cost of paying for maintenance) for no work on your part, i.e. unending source of free money.
There are complications in such calculations now because even if you "own" a home, as we do it these days, you likely still have a mortgage and are paying interest on it, which is just rent on money, so you're still renting, and the cost of home-"ownership" is artificially inflated by that rent-on-money / interest which should be abolished as well.
For me, the biggest reason why I want to own a home (free and clear) is the security of not having to pay someone every damn month just for the privilege of existing somewhere; the knowledge that if I go unemployed, broke and starving, at least I won't also go homeless along with it -- I will have a secure home base to fall back to and from which to build back up.
Long-term there will still be maintenance costs, yeah, but it's better to have a broken water heater and be unable to fix it, and take cold showers, than it is to be unable to pay your rent, get thrown into the street, have all your stuff stolen by other homeless people and be absolutely destitute beyond what you can fit in a backpack.
And property taxes are still a thing, yeah, but (A) those are way the fuck cheaper than rent (otherwise rent would not be profitable to the landlords), and (B) those are a problem that I'm opposed to as well. Asset taxes are totally unjust.
See my response in this subthread for a start. There are genuine, honest-to-goodness services that would be landlords could offer and would-be renters could purchase, that would accomplish the same things as rent, for the people who want it and are willing to pay the price, without trapping everyone who just want a place to live into an infinite, unending debt.
The people who want to own other people's things are the fascists that want to control other people's property. Why the fuck, in any sane world, would you want to own someone else's home, i.e. rent a home to someone? Oh right... because you can extract money from them that way, i.e. exercise control of their property.
I want everyone to have control of their own property, and nobody else to own anybody else's anything, so that nobody can exploit anyone else, and everyone has complete control of their own domain.
This is not about property developers, or even corporations. Of course people who build houses have to get paid. This is about the people (or corporations, no difference to me here) who buy properties and then have an unending source of free money, at the expense of people who already don't have enough money to buy into that game.
It's modern feudalism. In actual feudalism, the serfs don't have land to live on or to work on, so they have to borrow it from the lords who (as a class, no one individually) have all the land, and that costs them a huge chunk of the product of their labor, allowing the lords to live a life of leisure off the work of their serfs indefinitely. That's very different from if the lord were selling a parcel of land slowly to the serf, so that the serf temporarily worked harder and the lord temporarily worked less and eventually the serf had land of his own and the lord lost that land. That would be fair. But accumulating wealth simply by virtue of the fact that you already have it and someone else doesn't it completely antithetical to free trade.
And yes, absolutely everyone should be able to own a house. That is the only reasonable standard. The alternative is that some people are serfs to other people and that's not acceptable in any sane world. I'm not talking about tax-funded wealth redistribution to buy people houses, mind you. I'm talking about how the money that people are already paying to live somewhere should go toward them accumulating ownership of their homes, instead of lining the pockets of the people who already have enough to buy their way into such a sweet deal in the first place.
You use "socialism" like it's a bad word which lets me conclude you are an idiot.
And the economic utility of renting can be provided by things that aren't rent, to people who want them, without forcing the cost of that on people who don't want them and just can't escape them. See the other thread below.
Yes, in fact, in my vibrant owner-dominated world you would be able to move quickly, because there would be a high demand for that, so there would be people in the business of readily buying and selling things (like housing, but also other goods) that would otherwise have been rented. Of course they'd be buying on short terms (so the seller can cut and run) and consequently at lower prices, and in turn selling on long terms (to attract buyers quickly) but consequently at higher prices, so it would likely cost you something compared to moving more slowly and not having to sell to such a business. But that cost would still be less than the money you'd lose down a hole by renting instead, where "thousands of dollars" is just a few months' rent money that you'll never see again and get zeor assets in exchange for.
In a fair market, the cost of such convenience of easy moving, and of having someone else do maintenance for you, and so on, should add up to whatever a truly fair profit from rent would be. But in my world, people would have the choice of whether or not to purchase such services, or whether to sacrifice convenience and such in exchange for long-term savings. People who stay put for a long time and keep their homes in good condition wouldn't have to be throwing money down a rent-hole just because they can't afford a down payment (it cost me $60,000 to stay for ten years in a place where they never did any maintenance while I was there). People who want to breeze through a bunch of places in rapid succession and have someone else clean up after them will pay more just like they would renting.
The fact that there is any class of people who "have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market" is completely inexcusable. That's like accepting that there is just a permanent underclass of people who are in perpetual debt; because rent is a kind of debt (you're borrowing housing directly rather than borrowing money to pay for one), except you're stuck forever paying just the interest on it (interest is nothing more than rent on money), so it is an inexcusable atrocity to have anyone at all stuck for their entire goddamn lives paying and paying and paying and paying and paying for housing, to someone else's profit, without ever getting a single cent of assets to their name, and no hope of ever escaping from that cycle.
Rent (including interest) is precisely what breaks a free market and causes the runaway concentration of wealth and the destruction of the middle class. Every single instant of anyone renting anything to anyone is a case of wealth being redistributed from those who have less of it to those who have more already; because you can't rent out something if you need to use it yourself, so the only rentiers are those with more wealth than they need for their personal use, and nobody would rent anything if they already had one of their own, so the only renters are those without enough wealth for their own personal use, so rental arrangements profit the rich at the expense of the poor. It is completely inexcusable and rental contracts should be simply unenforceable, period.
And before someone swoops in and says "well then all those currently renting and unable to buy will go homeless!": what do you think the people owning the rental properties are going to do with a bunch of excess property that's no longer of any use to them when they can't rent it out for profit? The only way they can benefit from it then is to sell it. But nobody's going to want to buy it unless they need a house of their own for their own use now, since there's no point in owning a rental property just for investment. But all those poor people will be looking to buy then, and will be the bulk of the market, and so what they can afford will determine what price the market will bear for those houses for sale. And they'll be the ones least able to budge in negotiations, so it falls to the former-rentiers to sell their formerly-rental properties on terms that the former-renters can afford, or else there's no deal and their "investment" properties are worthless. In other words, without the crutch of rent in the middle, the former-rentiers will be forced (by the market) to sell their properties on terms (lower prices and longer installments) that the former-renters can afford, and BAM, everyone's a homeowner.
Or, looking at it from the other direction, from a world where rent isn't already considered normal: the imposition of rent in an otherwise free market distorts that market, raising the price of housing, and causing a class division into people who already have more housing than they need for themselves (who can then profit and acquire more and more), and those who have less housing than they need themselves (who then incur a burden that keeps them from ever escaping that fate). Rent breaks the free market.
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Also, if you're living in a mobile home on land that's not your own, you're still paying rent, so how exactly does that help anything?
(Maybe you can get more housing for your rent money. I live in a small MH myself that's about the size of a 1br apartment, with my own living room and kitchen and bath and no shared walls, and paying in rent about the same as I was paying for a bedroom in someone else's house for most of my life. It's a small step in the right direction, but it's still renting. Ugh.)
Also: the only government coercion going on in that not-so-hypothetical is the enforcement of private property rights, which surely you're not advocating against? The only reason the "not"-slaves in that scenario can't legally live or work anywhere is because everywhere they would live or work is owned by someone else, and it's illegal to live or work someone else's land without their permission, which only comes with your acceptance of the conditions that are tantamount to slavery.
Some people would say that the problem in that scenario is the legal enforcement of private property ownership at all. I wouldn't go that far. But the problem is definitely not some kind of big-government nanny-state, because all the government in that scenario is doing is saying "yeah, do what the owner says or get off his land", which is about as minimal as government gets. About. It can get slightly more minimal than that, without quite doing away with private property enforcement entirely. And I think it should.
Indeed it is called serfdom. Serfdom is just barely one step removed from slavery. And I'd argue that a capitalist market with rent and interest in it is just one step removed from serfdom. The lords whose lands we live on and work can be different lords, and we can switch them up, but at the end of the day we're still working the capital of someone with the capital to be worked (because we don't have our own) and giving a huge chunk of the product of that work to live on the capital of someone with the capital to live on (because we don't have our own). That's not a truly free market. Only when the serfs live on and work their own lands (or at least work each others' lands in even proportions, dividing the different types of labor up but keeping the capital well-distributed) will they stop being serfs and become true freemen.
I am using my car and can't part with it, but if I had another car I wasn't using, I'd gladly sell it to you. Not rent. Sell. That's how it should work.
I agree that unearned income is the hallmark of capitalism, and I am opposed to capitalism because of that. Note that capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. I am highly in favor of free markets. I'm also in favor of investing in ways that aren't just unearned income, like owning shares of companies, where you share in both the risk and the reward. That's a very different kind of investment than rent, which is just leveraging an advantage to exploit money out of people who have less than you.
I don't know where the hell you live that renting costs more than buying, that's simply not true in anywhere I've ever lived, but there are services that could be provided on a truly free market that would provide all the benefits of rent, at a cost (which you're already paying while renting), while not actually being rent, thus freeing people who don't want to rent and only do because buying is not an option from being stuck in unending debt. I discuss some of these ideas elsewhere in this thread, just search my username and you'll see some of the posts.
What I want is nothing like what the USSR had though. I want a free market economy without the distortions imposed by rent / interest / capitalism. A world where people own their own things, instead of most people borrowing them from others, and a few people owning everyone else's shit. A world where if you want to enjoy leisure, it will cost you your assets, and where working hard your whole life will accumulate assets; where capital is naturally redistributed from those who have more to those who have less in the process of the rich selling it off to fund leisure and the poor working it hard to buy it, in absence of the rent-driven processes that then takes that capital and gives it right back to the rich to lend back out again indefinitely at no cost to themselves.
Which is unearned. You didn't trade anything for the payment you got. And the end of the day, you get your asset back and their money, and they still have no asset and are out some money. You are able to extract money from them because you have an asset you don't need for your own use, and they need to use an asset they don't have. The only reason they are giving you money is because you already have more than they do and that puts you in a position to demand it, which is the definition of unearned income.
"Get someone else to pay for your kids' college", you mean.
Not all investing comes from rent. You're damn right that rent is an integral part of capitalism though; I'll argue that it is the defining feature of capitalism. Get rid of it, and you can have a free market that is also socialist (= not capitalist). In fact I'd argue that "free market capitalism" is a contradiction in terms, because the rents that define capitalism are by definition unearned income that would not exist in a truly free market.
A market with rents is not free. Rents are by definition a form of unearned income, which shouldn't exist in a truly free market.
Everywhere I've ever rented has had a similar clause. Not that that excuses it at all, just... it's not uncommon. They want to make sure you'll be able to make the rent after you pay for all your other expenses.
Imagine an agrarian society where all the land is divided up into huge plantations, and the only place that anyone can legally live or work (the land) is on one of them, and the only conditions under which anyone will allow you to live and work their land are the conditions under which slaves lived and worked.
You have the right to refuse that, if you're find with having nowhere to live and no way to survive. Basically, you're free to not be a slave, so long as you're OK with dying as a consequence. Not that anyone's going to actually kill you, just that you won't be able to survive unless you submit "voluntarily" to slavery.
That makes it totally not slavery anymore, right?
Because letting rich people chase poor people out of their homelands is totally not a problem at all, right?
Imagine if for some reason some impoverished third world country became really attractive to rich Americans, who went there and bought up all the land and pretty soon none of the poor natives can afford to live in their own country anymore. That's no problem, right? Fuck them, they're less powerful than us, that gives us the right to move in and push them out and if they can't compete, their loss and our gain. What difference does it make if the power and competition in question is economic rather than military?
Thank you, that's a poignant question that I overlooked.
It might exchange "evil" landlords for "evil" flippers for the people who want to (effectively) rent, but it would allow the people who don't want to to avoid the evils of either.
The rest of your complaints are based on the screwed-up way we deal with property transactions now, and would not apply in a more sane world like I advocate.
All I'm really advocating is that if someone is paying money for housing, they should own some housing in exchange for that payment, and anything that doesn't accomplish that is an injustice. Simple as that. How exactly to unravel the mess we have now and get to that end is a complicated discussion, and one I'm not willing to have until that basic end (that you should get something when you pay something) is acknowledged as a good one.
That is exactly the fucking problem. Someone making too little income cannot save it, even if they make more than it costs to cover their consumption, because having too little assets and being forced to borrow them from those who have excess assets allows the latter to charge the former all the money that they would be saving to better their position, and give nothing back.
The problem is that the poor can pay and pay and pay for housing their entire lives, pay more than it would have cost to build a house, and not get any housing to their names for all that effort in the end.
I don't know that I agree completely with all of that, but I definitely agree with the sentiment of it: people should own their own homes and businesses, and even if income equality was achieved (not that everyone makes the same income, but that income is normally distributed, so the average person makes an average share of the GDP, unlike now where more than half the population make less than half of the income per capita, i.e. the median is about half the mean), there would still be a huge problem of asset inequality, with those few possessing the bulk of the assets profiting off of the many who lack the assets they need, creating NET income inequality because the asset-poor, even while making the name nominal income as anyone else, have to pay a huge chunk of it to service their debts to the asset-rich, and the asset-rich in turn get a higher net income at the expense of the asset-poor who borrow from them.
income from rent is necessarily less than those expenses you listed
Sorry, I misspoke; I meant income from rent is necessarily more than those expenses; or conversely, those expenses are necessarily less than income from rent.
Speaking of morons who never studied economics: you're apparently one, otherwise you would realize that income from rent is necessarily less than those expenses you listed, otherwise nobody would ever rent to anyone as it would be unprofitable. Since you don't have to do those things yourself, and most landlords don't, just owning the property allows you to get a continuous stream of income (the rent paid to you minus the cost of paying for maintenance) for no work on your part, i.e. unending source of free money.
There are complications in such calculations now because even if you "own" a home, as we do it these days, you likely still have a mortgage and are paying interest on it, which is just rent on money, so you're still renting, and the cost of home-"ownership" is artificially inflated by that rent-on-money / interest which should be abolished as well.
For me, the biggest reason why I want to own a home (free and clear) is the security of not having to pay someone every damn month just for the privilege of existing somewhere; the knowledge that if I go unemployed, broke and starving, at least I won't also go homeless along with it -- I will have a secure home base to fall back to and from which to build back up.
Long-term there will still be maintenance costs, yeah, but it's better to have a broken water heater and be unable to fix it, and take cold showers, than it is to be unable to pay your rent, get thrown into the street, have all your stuff stolen by other homeless people and be absolutely destitute beyond what you can fit in a backpack.
And property taxes are still a thing, yeah, but (A) those are way the fuck cheaper than rent (otherwise rent would not be profitable to the landlords), and (B) those are a problem that I'm opposed to as well. Asset taxes are totally unjust.
See my response in this subthread for a start. There are genuine, honest-to-goodness services that would be landlords could offer and would-be renters could purchase, that would accomplish the same things as rent, for the people who want it and are willing to pay the price, without trapping everyone who just want a place to live into an infinite, unending debt.
The people who want to own other people's things are the fascists that want to control other people's property. Why the fuck, in any sane world, would you want to own someone else's home, i.e. rent a home to someone? Oh right... because you can extract money from them that way, i.e. exercise control of their property.
I want everyone to have control of their own property, and nobody else to own anybody else's anything, so that nobody can exploit anyone else, and everyone has complete control of their own domain.
This is not about property developers, or even corporations. Of course people who build houses have to get paid. This is about the people (or corporations, no difference to me here) who buy properties and then have an unending source of free money, at the expense of people who already don't have enough money to buy into that game.
It's modern feudalism. In actual feudalism, the serfs don't have land to live on or to work on, so they have to borrow it from the lords who (as a class, no one individually) have all the land, and that costs them a huge chunk of the product of their labor, allowing the lords to live a life of leisure off the work of their serfs indefinitely. That's very different from if the lord were selling a parcel of land slowly to the serf, so that the serf temporarily worked harder and the lord temporarily worked less and eventually the serf had land of his own and the lord lost that land. That would be fair. But accumulating wealth simply by virtue of the fact that you already have it and someone else doesn't it completely antithetical to free trade.
And yes, absolutely everyone should be able to own a house. That is the only reasonable standard. The alternative is that some people are serfs to other people and that's not acceptable in any sane world. I'm not talking about tax-funded wealth redistribution to buy people houses, mind you. I'm talking about how the money that people are already paying to live somewhere should go toward them accumulating ownership of their homes, instead of lining the pockets of the people who already have enough to buy their way into such a sweet deal in the first place.
You use "socialism" like it's a bad word which lets me conclude you are an idiot.
And the economic utility of renting can be provided by things that aren't rent, to people who want them, without forcing the cost of that on people who don't want them and just can't escape them. See the other thread below.
Yes, in fact, in my vibrant owner-dominated world you would be able to move quickly, because there would be a high demand for that, so there would be people in the business of readily buying and selling things (like housing, but also other goods) that would otherwise have been rented. Of course they'd be buying on short terms (so the seller can cut and run) and consequently at lower prices, and in turn selling on long terms (to attract buyers quickly) but consequently at higher prices, so it would likely cost you something compared to moving more slowly and not having to sell to such a business. But that cost would still be less than the money you'd lose down a hole by renting instead, where "thousands of dollars" is just a few months' rent money that you'll never see again and get zeor assets in exchange for.
In a fair market, the cost of such convenience of easy moving, and of having someone else do maintenance for you, and so on, should add up to whatever a truly fair profit from rent would be. But in my world, people would have the choice of whether or not to purchase such services, or whether to sacrifice convenience and such in exchange for long-term savings. People who stay put for a long time and keep their homes in good condition wouldn't have to be throwing money down a rent-hole just because they can't afford a down payment (it cost me $60,000 to stay for ten years in a place where they never did any maintenance while I was there). People who want to breeze through a bunch of places in rapid succession and have someone else clean up after them will pay more just like they would renting.
The fact that there is any class of people who "have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market" is completely inexcusable. That's like accepting that there is just a permanent underclass of people who are in perpetual debt; because rent is a kind of debt (you're borrowing housing directly rather than borrowing money to pay for one), except you're stuck forever paying just the interest on it (interest is nothing more than rent on money), so it is an inexcusable atrocity to have anyone at all stuck for their entire goddamn lives paying and paying and paying and paying and paying for housing, to someone else's profit, without ever getting a single cent of assets to their name, and no hope of ever escaping from that cycle.
Rent (including interest) is precisely what breaks a free market and causes the runaway concentration of wealth and the destruction of the middle class. Every single instant of anyone renting anything to anyone is a case of wealth being redistributed from those who have less of it to those who have more already; because you can't rent out something if you need to use it yourself, so the only rentiers are those with more wealth than they need for their personal use, and nobody would rent anything if they already had one of their own, so the only renters are those without enough wealth for their own personal use, so rental arrangements profit the rich at the expense of the poor. It is completely inexcusable and rental contracts should be simply unenforceable, period.
And before someone swoops in and says "well then all those currently renting and unable to buy will go homeless!": what do you think the people owning the rental properties are going to do with a bunch of excess property that's no longer of any use to them when they can't rent it out for profit? The only way they can benefit from it then is to sell it. But nobody's going to want to buy it unless they need a house of their own for their own use now, since there's no point in owning a rental property just for investment. But all those poor people will be looking to buy then, and will be the bulk of the market, and so what they can afford will determine what price the market will bear for those houses for sale. And they'll be the ones least able to budge in negotiations, so it falls to the former-rentiers to sell their formerly-rental properties on terms that the former-renters can afford, or else there's no deal and their "investment" properties are worthless. In other words, without the crutch of rent in the middle, the former-rentiers will be forced (by the market) to sell their properties on terms (lower prices and longer installments) that the former-renters can afford, and BAM, everyone's a homeowner.
Or, looking at it from the other direction, from a world where rent isn't already considered normal: the imposition of rent in an otherwise free market distorts that market, raising the price of housing, and causing a class division into people who already have more housing than they need for themselves (who can then profit and acquire more and more), and those who have less housing than they need themselves (who then incur a burden that keeps them from ever escaping that fate). Rent breaks the free market.