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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

> You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing.

Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.

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You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics literature "commodification" means something is able to be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified, "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and "rare collectible art" is commodified.

Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that applies to literally every physical good in a market economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why some things are expensive and scarce.

yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between "marxist commodity"/"non commodity" as we have education as a public good and we also have public schooling.

I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.

PS, if you're interested in learning more, the wiki article is nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification

Actually, a lot of values can be obtained from other, more general, values. Not everything of course or we'd all agree on everything! But I wish people would do this more often when they make arguments about rights and wrongs. Something like "I agree with X because it's a special case of Y which I hold as an axiomatic value". Instead, they just seemingly randomly decide which side their opinion falls on then try to make up random pot-shots of excuses to defend it.

If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be bought and traded with fluctuations of value and expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit potential.

It isn't the price of housing that's the root problem, it's the arithmetic. There aren't enough homes in places people want to live for the people who want to live there. The price decides who gets them, but arithmetic causes the underlying suffering.

If there isn't enough food, someone goes hungry. The price just decides who. If there isn't enough housing, someone has to move out. The price just decides who.

Choosing "who" via a more equitable method than price doesn't reduce the amount of suffering, it just spreads it around better.

What you're saying is that price isn't the problem, scarcity is the problem. Price is just an inevitable consequence of scarcity – the symptom, not the cause.

yeah, housing should not be a commodity and should not be subject to market forces; instead, a benevolent committee of compassionate people (well-read into marxism, of course) should decide who gets to live where

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