Sadly, this solution never works in the real world.
There's actually this great book called Basic Economics, for those interested.
Landlords aren't needed for a society to work. A lot of Eastern European countries have home-ownership rates way beyond 90% [1] - that allows the economies of these countries to be able to undercut Western European countries on wages despite everyday cost of life (e.g. electricity, food, gas) being similar to Western Europe (or, like in Croatia, often enough even more expensive than that!), as there are almost no landlords extracting value off of society and into the hands of the very few very rich.
The only place where landlords actually fill a valid gap are to serve those who have to move to a new place or who are in the country only for short/medium term.
It's not surprising that the countries with high homeownership rates are formerly Communist or (like the Nordics) strongly Social Democrat in history. A population is way happier when they do not have to fear eviction every day in life.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/155734/umfrag...
For healthcare, he is site says he wants a single payer system with no deductibles, so, entirely government funded… what’s the more left wing option?
- Gun control in almost any country is WAY stricter than in the US, and people in the EU are absolutely fine with the government interfering heavy-handedly in that subject. There would be riots in the street here if schools would need to have "active shooter policies" for example, we'd rather have a blanket ban on private firearm possession and have the police enforce that. In that sense, even Saunders seems quite fine to have a relatively hands-off gun policy and that lack of government regulation is typically more associated with the right than with the left.
- For healthcare policy, I only briefly skimmed his site but I don't think I actually saw a plan to have the government nationalize the hospitals and take them out of private hands? AFAIK in most EU countries most doctors/nurses are government employees with only a small minority working in privately owned clinics.
Nationalizing all the hospitals would put you way to the left in many EU countries. Most right of centre parties (and even some left of centre parties) in the EU are pushing for more private health care, not less.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8005513/
So at least we could say the idea of having publicly owned hospitals did fly in Norway and the Netherlands, for example. Unless I’ve misunderstood the data.
WRT guns, it is true that we have a crazy amount of guns in the US, more than one per person, which is totally absurd. But there’s significant state-level variation, for example I grew up in Massachusetts where we have around 7 guns per 100 people, which seems OK compared to some EU countries. Bernie represents a fairly rural state (and also one with gun manufacturers), so he’s more little-l liberal (in the “anything goes” sense) on guns than a lot of Democrats.
Anyway, I’d agree that he’s more left-leaning than most democrats and maybe he’s a little to the right of, at least, some centrist EU political parties. But IMO the fact that one of our most left wing politicians happens to be weak on guns is more of a coincidence that overplays the difference (which certainly isn’t to say there isn’t any difference). You could look at Liz Warren for someone who’s just smidge to his right, but is also more willing to restrict guns.
Another interesting departure from Democratic Party principles for Bernie was that he was more of a NAFTA (free trade in North America) skeptic, and is less of a proponent of immigration. In the US these are generally Republican-party aligned positions, so if we want to call the parties our arrows for “left” and “right,” that puts him more to the right. But, he came to those positions through worker protections concerns. And, it is not that uncommon for left wing parties in Europe to have similar concerns, I think? IMO, there are just too many issues to make a one or two dimensional map.
When you hear "landlord", you might think of a Duke enjoying a lavish meal while the tenants slave away in the fields to pay rent. Or a huge corporation. But there are a ton of middle and upper middle class people who are land "lords".
I was one myself. I rented out my house, after moving to another city for a job, to wait for a market recovery post the 2000s housing bubble. I was a landlord for 3 years. I couldn't wait for it to be over. It was a ton of work and tenants already have a ridiculous amount of power, even in a red state. I turned a small profit that only slightly helped paying rent on my new city.
If you think being a landlord is easy money, give it a try someday. I understand we need to ensure fairness for everybody, but the way isn't cartoonishly demonizing all landlords.
It starts to get shitty when you enter the zone of the dentist with a half dozen or more properties and gets worse as you go up. The incentives are to leverage the buildings to grow and depreciating the property while maximizing the revenue. Just like rent seeking in technology, it’s not pleasant.
We should be really targeted in our regulations, hit places with more than, say, 10 tenants pretty hard. Regulate them out of existence, even. Then you’d have had less competition.
The state does not operate as a landlord. Most of the population owns their property here.
...as a direct result of government policy that discourages landlording.
Anyone who prefers democracy would probably also prefer housing cooperatives and worker cooperatives.
> First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters
In real life you can't just take away people's assets with a simple update. In post-communist countries we've seen that happening and it's not pretty.