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Comment by frankfrankfrank | Hacker News Reader

If the people of the left and the right could set their banker fueled squabbles aside for a while, they could affect laws to, e.g., massively tax institutional home ownership, so it drives them out of the market and brings prices down, and massively tax anything over two homes and anything over a certain square footage per person, etc. all to drive the prices down. Or did that matter, simply not letting that bankers flood the country with foreign nationals that will drive prices ever higher and stoke inflation.

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The great red herring which divides ordinary people on the left and right has always been the "culture wars" - particularly political correctness/DEI/wokeness/whatever the flavor is depending on your decade and ideological leaning.

Elite Democrats, Republicans and members of the capital class are very experienced at fanning the flames of that divide so it continues to distract the working class from a historic multi-decade privatization and consolidation of wealth which these real estate acquisitions are just the next leg of.

America has fallen for that trick hook, line and sinker quite frankly, more so than seemingly any other country on earth

Having been the target of the right's culture wars, I can assure you it certainly does not feel like a "trick" to me and the idea that writing me off as a lost cause will magically fix all of America's problems is frankly disgusting. This reads as little more than a rationalization of bigotry.

Thanks for calling me a bigot, you're definitely elevating the discussion /s

The point isn't that there are no culture war issues that matter - for example I'm pro choice and pretty disturbed by recent right wing activity on that front

It's that the culture war is basically unwinnable and if people fixate on that to the exclusion of economic issues, everyone but Blackrock and Goldman Sachs will end up owning nothing.

Blackrock is laughing its way to the bank every time you start a flame war with some imaginary bigot. Classical Marxists, classical liberals, hell classical conservatives have actually been making this point for years and they've all been called bigots for it

> Thanks for calling me a bigot, you're definitely elevating the discussion /s

If you start a conversation by encouraging people to view my basic civil liberties as a "trick," there is no hope of elevating it. I won't bother dignifying you by responding further.

I would say the trick here is the convincing of the other tribe to see your civil liberties as something to attack. OP has a valid point, but completely undermined it by only describing the blue team's culture war dogma, while leaving out that of the red team (eg religious fundamentalism).

If things continue as they are with the Elites owning everything you won't have any civil liberties. And I think that's part of the person's point. Just look at what's happening in the UK, they've basically outlawed the right to publicly protest.

The difference between Occupy Wall Street to Rainbow Capitalism was pretty striking. Same demographics, very different reaction to the capital class meddling in.

>If the people of the left and the right could set their banker fueled squabbles aside for a while

I’m astonished that you’d think the impediment to your proposals would be the left.

Centrism discourse has run amok.

Unfortunately, most of the more politically organised or influential people like things that make property work as an investment. This means they fire up and defeat measures against it. I can't see a way out in Australia.

The right who like house prices going up and hate taxes would just have to have a temporary complete change of heart and direction

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