With astonishment I read the following bit of news in the paper this afternoon:
Amsterdam owners of two houses are forced to rent second house.
The rent they can ask is set so low that it doesn’t come close to covering the mortgage.
If they don’t comply, the house will be confiscated by the city.
What the fuck is going on? How does one respond to such a policy?
That is a beautiful policy, honestly. No greedy douche-bags get to own and make money off of something they cannot use, but is a basic necessity of life for others. Flawless.
Forcing someone to pay for someone else is “flawless”? If the rent they’re allowed to charge is less than their mortgage payments… on what principle do you justify that? By what right?
I see, everyone who is in the position to invest in a second home is a greedy douche bag.
You couldn’t have phrased the socialist position more eloquently.
I have no idea where you got the idea that these college professors, lawyers, doctors and business owners who have a pied-a-terre to enjoy in the weekend have no use for this home, or how they make money off of it. They don’t want to rent it, they want to live in it. But that’s not allowed anymore.
By the iron fist of the state. Might makes right.
Except the might of the state will steadily decline if it treats its college professors, lawyers and doctors this way.
Huh? What is going on is that rich people are being prevented from exploiting people’s basic needs for profit while doing absolutely no work and creating no value in the process. They’re Social parasites - Getting other people to pay part of their mortgage while they collect 100% of they equity, and in exchange for nothing at all.
What’s your problem with this exactly? You’re upset that people cannot exploit the basic necessities of life and get over 100% of their mortgage paid in the process? LOL
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As opposed to what? Someone who happens to have extra money gets to use it and make more money while creating no value and doing no work, all at the expense of people who don’t have extra money, and it’s okay because it’s called an “investment”. Yeah, dude, that is a fucking greedy douche bag in my book, pathetic as well. Ridiculous even.
that’s no more totalitarian than, say, drug laws in America - every state resembles a totalitarian regime in some ways, whether it’s a socialist state or not
doesn’t mean it’s not fucked up, but so is the fact that there are people in jail for life for stealing bicycles or selling marijuana - capitalism doesn’t preclude totalitarianism any better than socialism.
You have it all wrong, I argue the above precisely because I think property is a right, precisely because it is a basic necessity of life.
The question now, of course, is how can we be arguing nearly opposite positions based on the same principle. The answer is that, for you, property isn’t a right at all. At least if “right” means anything close to it’s common usage in things like “right to life”, “right to religious freedom”, “right to security of person” and so on.
So how does your conception of right to property not match any other commonly held right? Well, for starters you say you value a right to property, but at the same time you say not everyone has a right to actually own stuff. How can that be? How can you claim you believe in the right to property while simultaneously defending a position where not everyone actually owns anything significant. That certainly isn’t how the other rights work. We wouldn’t say that someone has a right to religious freedom, while simultaneously denying that person religious freedom and claiming that they can obtain it at some point in the future if circumstances warrant it. The same goes with the right to life, security, and any other commonly held right. So what is your uncommon definition of “right to property”.
It is a hypothetical right that may be suspended by circumstances outside ones control as long as it is the case that if those conditions were different and the property- less person had different means they would be able to acquire property. I don’t know exactly how to classify this position because there is nothing like it, but it seems somewhat correct to call it the “hypothetical right to property”. In fact, I would take a step further and say that your definition of “right to property” does nothing but allow for tyranny whereby people control the necessities of life, and thus control other people’s life.
Not me, I think everyone should actually have control their home and instruments of labor. Property is many times Freedom, and in line with Proudhon I will call this personal property to distinguish it from your hypothetical right to property([i]“private property”[/i)].
Stitt is the only one making sense.
Sitt and Xun are the only ones making sense.
You seem to be under the impression that the guy who buys both houses somehow “earned” or otherwise “became owner of” both houses without the aid of others…
How did it become “your property” to begin with?
The natural way ownership works is: you own what you can take, keep and defend!
If the people around you only agree to help you take and defend ONE home, but not two or more, without you agreeing to certain conditions (assuring you don’t use that ownership to screw over others), then that seems pretty reasonable to me.
i hate to say, Churro is the one making sense here . . .
unless someone can demonstrate how owning two homes infringes upon the rights of those who don’t own two homes, then there is no justification for giving the government the power to limit parties to a single home, and even less justification for the government allowing a party to use their personal resources to aquire two homes and THEN forcefully siezing control over one of those homes - that’s just theft, not promotion or protection of any social good - which promotion or protection would ostensibly be the mandate under which any government of a free society would endeavor to take the actions described in the OP
No it’s more like they agreed “oh and btw… If you’re planning to obuse this second home by either making someone homless rather than rent out the place, or rent it out but charge people an unreasonable amount for living there, then you can go fuck yourself!”
It’s more like you DON’T have the right to own two homes so long as there are others out there that NEED one, and could afford it if they didn’t have to pay for the interest on YOUR debt!
They took away your right to screw over other people… and they didn’t care if you’d borrowed money and invested it in doing so…
I’m ok with that.
I have two counters to this. My first counter is that it is just obviously wrong, and my evidence for this is the fact that we live in societies, and have things like infrastructure, basic sanitation, police forces, and laws in general. The philosophic point to be made here is that without society we’re all slaves to the basic necessities of life. It is only with society that we can branch out. We are assured in our branching out because we have “rights”. Without society everyone has to be a gun-man, and a carpenter, a water collector and a farmer, and securing these things by ourselves would take up 100% of our energy and our time individually. No one would be free at all. Every right in a society requires others, that is what society is. I do not intend to turn this into a discussion about what society is, I just felt like a basic widely held conception of what society is directly contradicts your position.
My second counter is a direct corollary, and is that we live is societies. This counter has no philosophic argument, though, as it is an argument about the “facts on the ground”. It has two points. The first point is that in practice other people are required for us to meet our basic rights. The right to food and water, which is included in the right to life, is the perfect example. Many of us live in urban and suburban environments where it is impossible for us to produce our own food and water. Obviously this right requires other people because of the way society is structured. Secondly, we live in societies which means that we cannot just go out, find a piece of land, and fell trees for construction in the nearby forest. Everything is already owned, which is a direct affront to our right to personal property.
I guess the point is that “rights”, if they are rights, will always survive incidental changes. The fact that we live in society means absolutely that we rely on others to meet our basic necessities, yet this does not transmute rights into hypotheticals. If it did, then they wouldn’t be rights.
Wealth, resources, and land are finite and determinable within a given country. Per capita income in the United States is roughly 37,500, which may or may not be just enough to own a modest home. This means quite literally, that for every person that collects and hoards resources above 37,500 a year, someone else loses the ability to own a home. For every second home built above the purchasing range of 37,500/y some average worker loses the ability to own a home.
The economy can be just as oppressive and controlling as any government. Yet, for whatever reason, since the economy isn’t determined by laws people view this oppression actually as freedom. It is control nonetheless.
Of course not. Such a discussion would demonstrate the glaring, gaping flaws in your reasoning. So I agree. Better to avoid a discussion of what “society” is. Better to just use a broad, ambiguous definition that suites you.
By rational choice or consent. Not force. It makes rational sense for individuals to live in close proximity with other individuals. There is no “mystery” about that fact.
The “right” to food and water? Really? What if you can’t find any food in the forest? Do you hold your breath and stomp your feet and demand that your “right” be satisfied? Interesting reasoning…
You choose to live in an urban environment, and rationally trade your ability to grow/hunt food for the opportunity to specialize in a field that interests you. Again - not rocket science.
Yes, imagine that. Life isn’t “fair”. You have to actually go out and earn that which you value. It baffles me - how some can reason that simply “needing” something ought command it be yours.
The fact that we live in societies does suggest we must rely on others to meet our basic necessities. But how you warp and twist that into some moral obligation or “right” to demand that others serve you - is beyond me.
Right everyone can just go out into the country side and work the land, because the 18th century economy and human relation to the environment exists today, and there are definitely large tracts of fecund land laying in abeyance just for that. Oh, and people can just opt out of society.
There was something delightfully puerile about your post, like I was reading out of a 6th grade social sciences textbook that idealizes everything into their hypothetically simplest terms.
I never suggested they could. That’s your - to borrow your word - puerile interpretation - the limits of your reasoning apparently.
Is name calling necessary Sitt? Really? After only a couple of posts? That didn’t take long. 
What do you expect when you arbitrarily chop my post up into so many individual unrelated parts that I don’t even recognize it as my post anymore. I link things for a reason, I order my sentences purposely. I get it, it allows you to then respond to each piece with some sort of half-baked folksy truism with the air of realism, but “life isn’t fair”, or blah blah “rational choice”, are still just puerile catch phrases.
If a single statement contains numerous points that I feel require specific attention - how do you propose I respond in the future? A bulleted list?
It is interesting that instead of responding to my “half-backed folksy truims(?)” - you have elected to name call and whine… interesting indeed.
I’m sure they link together to make a coherent whole for you, but the side effect of dismantling my paragraphs into isolated bits is that you respond in isolated bits. I personally have no interest in discussing isolated bits because it makes the discussion about catch phrases and puerile folksy truisms. If that’s your thing, cool, but no thanks.