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Comment by Kaotique | Hacker News Reader

The dream of owning a house, owning a car, owning land is disappearing with more and more lease contracts, investors scooping up everything with large sums of money.

Our society is fastly moving towards a feudal system. It will not take long until everything is owned by rich overlords.

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And this is why everyone my age jokes about eating the rich.

(Ha ha, only serious!)

What should these rich people do? Quit buying houses? Sit on their money? Buy yachts instead? You could argue that buying and renting out houses directly helps the proletariat, because it lowers rent.

They could quit buying houses, buy yachts (which, at the very least, are a consumer industry), or, you know, just give the money away. Or they could, and I know this will come as a shock, pay taxes.

How much taxes do you think rich people already pay?

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/11/the-rich-do-not-pay-the-most...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income...

> How much taxes do you think rich people already pay?

Sufficiently little that they're still buying up whole neighborhoods to rent-seek on people's basic needs, so, not nearly enough. If the rich don't want to pay "all" the taxes, they can let us shift to an economic model in which they don't take home "all" the money.

How about paying their employees better?

Ideally they would invest in the production of something new rather than trying to corner a limited market to engage in literal rent-seeking. I'm not anti-real estate investment by any means and own a few properties of my own but I think it has all gotten a bit silly and needs a cold shower.

If they buy houses and prices go up, doesn't that incentivize building?

Not necessarily. It seems to incentivize more buying. If real estate prices keep going up and actually building anything new is too much work why bother?

>actually building anything new is too much work why bother

If prices rise above the cost of building a house, you could make money by paying someone else to build a house, no work required.

> The dream of owning a house, owning a car, owning land is disappearing with more and more lease contracts, investors scooping up everything with large sums of money.

> Our society is fastly moving towards a feudal system. It will not take long until everything is owned by rich overlords.

I'm quite sure this was a known side effect to QE and governments dumping enormous amounts of cash into the markets.

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