> I want a free house too.
Well yes, for many of the young working class - rent is eating up over 2/3rd of their paychecks.
We are being scammed by the Bourgeoisie with inherited wealth.
This explains our situation well imo:
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"So where did our land system come from?
Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’
And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.
So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.
In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.
If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.
So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”
Fast forward a few hundred years, to post-civil-war America and that’s exactly what played out. The plantation owners could no longer own slaves, so what they said is ‘Ok, I’ll pay you, say, $2 dollars a day’ — but by the way, I own the land, and the rent is… $2 a day.’’. Which, incidentally, led to the invention of a clever invention called a ‘chattel house’ which was a kind of kit house that gave families of plantation workers the ability to relocate to try to escape exploitative landlords."
Fast forward again to today, and land is still the fundamental mechanism of racial inequity. To be blunt, all across the UK and the US, there are tenants with black and brown skin paying rent to landlords and mortgage lenders with white skin. Or commuting for hours. Or both.
I imagine all of you have seen the speech made a couple of weeks ago by a young American writer called Kimberly Jones — if you haven’t, do — it’s absolutely the most eloquent piece of public speaking I’ve seen in a long time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4). In it she uses this incredible image of getting white people to imagine what it feels like to play “four hundred rounds of Monopoly” with the game rigged against you, enforced by violence. There’s an interesting backstory here, that you may know, which is that the game of monopoly was first invented by a woman called Elizabeth Magie — and originally called ‘The Landlords Game’ and it was created so that… basically one day someone could make exactly the speech that Kimberly Jones just did.
So, broadly speaking — and I’m simplifying here — there were two positions in this power diagram. Tenant and landlord.
And over time that piece of paper became a tradable asset, as well as an inheritable one: so you can literally buy the right to extract taxes from people. And it’s amazing to me that we don’t find that more weird than we do — it’s right there hidden in plain sight in the language we use: landlord.
But such an extreme overclass/underclass diagram is politically hard to sustain. So, over time we saw the slow emergence of a middle position, which is for those who could get together just enough money to buy their own freedom from rent. Again, that’s why we have the word ‘Freehold’; it’s not free as in ‘no cost’ it’s free as in, ‘liberty’."
Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3...
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"There are many kinds of monopoly, from utilities to pharmaceutical patents, but the greatest – the ‘mother of all monopolies’ as Churchill described it – is land. Land rents are a weird leftover of the medieval feudal system: a privatised location tax that is suffocating every Westernised economy today."
"It is worth remembering that there is no political argument —Left, Liberal or Right — that even attempts to justify economic rent-seeking on the basis of principle. You will not find one in any book. Adam Smith was against it, Karl Marx was against it, Keynes was against it, Friedman was against it. Even Ayn Rand was against it. Economic rent-seeking survives only in the dark, by obfuscation, distraction, corruption and perverse incentives. It endures only because it has not been part our political language for the last century, and in the tussle of everyday life, we are all susceptible to quietly putting our own short-term convenience ahead of our principles if we can get away with it (then justifying it to ourselves later)."
Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/progress-again-6f6213bdcd...