> Well, the other reason stocks aren't scarce is that the company can print new ones. You'd expect this to reduce valuation and therefore have shareholders oppose it, but in practice that doesn't seem to happen lately.
If you're doing this in an above-board way, it's still scarce, because the whole reason why companies even issue new shares is to raise capital. When you're doing that, you're trading one scarce resource (capital) for shares, which means that the shares are also scarce. You can make an infinite amount of TVs given infinite raw materials, but TVs are still scarce.
>This is highly underrated as a reason. What's the fundamental improvement in Gamestop and Tesla causing their stock price to go up this year?
Any evidence that people bought exactly one share TSLA/GME just so they could hang on their wall and/or feel smug about it? In both cases it's far more likely they bought into it because of expectation of future profits (from greater fools or actual operating profits).
>Many people don't seem to understand how to separate them, leading to beliefs like "luxury apartments cost more because they have granite countertops" and "gentrification can be prevented by not building new buildings". You can't build houses forever, but you sure can build many more of them than the US does right now.
While there might certainly be people who think the housing crisis is caused by "developers only building luxury condos" or whatever, I doubt this is a popular view on HN. Any time a housing-related thread shows up on HN, that explanation almost never shows up, and the NIMBY/zoning explanation almost always does. I'm sure a decade+ member like yourself can see this. Therefore I don't really see much point in arguing this distinction, because you'd be preaching to the choir.