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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Are there though? Beyond food, water, and shelter— stuff gets a lot more… easy to avoid. Food is something easy enough to shop elsewhere, and it’s possible for competitors to come in and undercut existing brands. Water is (for most of the US) relatively easy to acquire cheaply, or even free. But shelter is something that is pretty much impossible to compete with. Every area has a finite amount of space, and once it’s owned, it’s owned. Sure one landlord might lower their rent to attract new tenants, but it’s effectively guaranteed to never have more than a few competitors before you start moving a significant distance away. It’s one of the few things that’s impossible to avoid. You HAVE to exist somewhere, you can’t choose not to, and you can’t shop around endlessly like you can with other things.
You need to work to get the funds to pay for food, water and shelter. Or you go into debt to afford those things, which is probably worst.
By working you are serving the shareholders that will do their best to exploit you. Their greed will funnel it’s way to you in the workplace through shitty policies or a strict boss or low wages or whatever self serving bullshit they come up with.
I guess being exploited by a shareholder feels less direct than by a landlord. However, if all landlords became shareholders, the injection of of capital into company shares would make upper management have to serve the shareholder’s interests even more, ultimately resulting in an increase in the amount of exploitation we experience in the workplace.
I see where you are coming from with the inherent lack of housing supply, but we are nowhere close to running out of finite space. Especially when we are able to create way more homes by building vertically.
And I’m not saying landlords aren’t exploitative. I’m saying that other forms of ownership as just as exploitative.
Homelessness is worse than debt, just to be clear. You can survive with debt, there is no risk of death. Homelessness can, and often is deadly. This is just a fact.
We are at, and even past running out of space that is in commute proximity to an economic zone capable of supporting a non-impoverished lifestyle for the VAST majority of citizens. There’s tons of space in the middle of no where, but that space isn’t useful to anyone because no one can support themselves there. I don’t mean “find work” support yourself (though that too), I mean “have a grocery store within an hour drive one way from your house” support yourself.
As for working under capitalism, you’re right, it still sucks, but you can choose where you work, and there are choices to be had pretty much everywhere. The same is not true of housing, especially with the rise of suburban sprawl. You can choose to work remotely for any business you want, but you can’t choose to “exist” remotely. You have to take up space somewhere. Sure there’s space in the middle of nowhere, but how will you buy gas for your car with no gas station, food to feed yourself with no grocery store. Most of the country is like this. That is the whole problem, you simply can’t survive outside of an economic zone of a certain size, and all the housing in that area is being hoarded. I’m not arguing against the evils of capitalism, but to claim that not being allowed to exist anywhere isn’t a bigger problem then “I’m not being paid what I’m worth” is just a misunderstanding of the problem.