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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

It's likely natural to get a certain sense of schadenfreude here, particularly because "residential real estate" but anytime you buy stock, the goal is to benefit from the profits of the company without doing any work yourself. Same if you invest in a REIT, or mutual fund, or even a bank deposit, to an extent.

Bad management is bad management. The head of the featured company apparently stuck with floating-rate borrowing despite the lowest interest rates in history. Bad move. But plenty of CEOs have destroyed company value or imploded altogether.

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> but anytime you buy stock, the goal is to benefit from the profits of the company without doing any work yourself.

Which is arguably also bad for the same reason. Not bad, morally, though, and that's kind of the key thing. When you live in a society where scarcity (either real, or cultivated) creates constant precarity for you and your family, doing what you can to exit that precarity is not a bad thing to do, even if the thing you end up doing ends up being something that leads to an overall trend of society into more misery for more people. After all, it's not like you individually choosing not to be a landlord means society would suddenly turn into one that hadn't created a social niche for landlords to occupy.

>doing what you can to exit that precarity is not a bad thing to do, even if the thing you end up doing ends up being something that leads to an overall trend of society into more misery for more people

So your logic is: it's not bad, because even if you didn't do it, there'd still be an opportunity to do it? Not very convincing..

My logic is that just as you don't change the movement of a cloud of gas by changing the velocity of individual molecules one at a time, you also do not change society by imputing moral weight to individual actions. People constantly live in precarity and _should_ seek to exit it. We should also seek to build, _collectively_, a society where that precarity is minimized, and in the meantime, societies where the more deleterious ways to exit it have less incentive for being pursued.

> We should also seek to build, _collectively_

Capitalism has demonstrated over and over it's the best system to produce positive outcomes for the maximum number of people -- including the fastest and most effective way to reduce poverty. Yet somehow people continue to point to "collectivism", whether that is socialism, communism, or something else, as a superior alternative. Good luck to you.

I don't think it's demonstrated that at all, simply that it was better than feudalism. But China has built 15000 miles of high speed rail in ten years, and has functionally eliminated homelessness by the admission of the World Bank (not a pro-Communist organization!). Cuba (and China) had its healthy life expectancy surpass the US for the first time (despite over a half-century of the worst sanctions regime on the planet, save perhaps the one imposed on Palestine). The USSR went from a society of peasants to beating the US in space milestones over five decades. All of these successes have happened over the backdrop of a massively hostile international capitalist presence--imagine how different it could all be if said capitalist societies felt like they should compete on making their citizens happy, rather than by building hundreds of military bases around the world and being involved in violent conflict all but a handful of years out of the last two centuries (the US has eight hundred military bases and spends almost a trillion a year on its military!).

Any time you hear about how terrible ("authoritarian! undemocratic! oppressive!") a society that gives socialism a shot is, remember that it is coming from a context that has baked Cold War propaganda into _literally everything_ we have consumed from it, our entire lives. Question it!

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