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Comment by honeycrispy | Hacker News Reader

Every time I think I have money I get massive insurance bills, massive property tax bills that increase seemingly every year, a fence I had to install so my kids don't get mangled by the pitbull 2 doors down that was $12k that was $4k 10 years ago. I know because my parents installed the same fence at their house. I'm paying a not insignificant portion of my income into a social security program that I'll never see a dime of. And I'm in my 30's. I can't imagine what kids in their 20's are going through.

When I was a kid I used to think that theives would break through my windows and steal my TV. Now that I'm an adult, I realize I'm being robbed daily through legal channels.

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I feel you. My property tax has gone up more in the past decade than it did during the previous 3 decades.

Cost and necessity of permits for renovations plus re-asessment of property after renovation for tax increase means every path forward is much more expensive than it would have been in decades past.

FWIW the traditional path for renovations was to add "sweat equity" by doing the work yourself, slowly and without permits. You can still do this today, perhaps even more effectively than previously with Youtube videos/LLMs. Although you might need to hire more "handymen" to replace what would have been bartered labor with friends/family (tying back to the social capital concept of the article).

(I'm not trying to detract from the thrust of your comment though! I'm describing a dynamic of coping rather than sustaining)

The flipside is a lot of municipalities have become a lot more aggressive about enforcement, and changing regulations (especially regarding gas and electric) and manditory inspections mean that there's less that you can get away with.

Mandatory inspections? Like the city insists on periodically inspecting the inside of your home?

I have no desire to deal with gas in my home, and my state exempts homeowner electrical.

I think the bigger issue is that the market doesn't really value renovation much any more - it's quite content with beige and builders' grade! And the low-effort fashions change so often you're never going to win that game on DIY timescales. So it's not so much sweat equity any more, but rather sweat comfort and convenience.

IMHO, municipalities are much more serious about these permits and, at the same time, neighbors seem even more sensitive to any kind of noise or even a visual disturbance. If your house is close to the street, good luck keeping any kind of renovation off your town's radar.

I think a couple of things are play here

1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.

2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.

The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.

> the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices.

The only promise of capitalism is that you are allowed to own capital. Competition and prices come from markets, not capitalism.

You have it backwards.

People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.

The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.

Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned.

There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".

"Robbery" is a very immature and totally counterproductive way to think about rising costs.

When you are captive to the system, the costs changes are not external to you.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/us-inflatio...

> Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds

1. Voluntary transactions (even if high-margin for one side) is not "robbery"

2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits

"Voluntary" is bullshit.

You can call these transactions "voluntary", but when a huge percentage of the people in America do not make enough money to save, period, that means that all their income is going to necessities (with "a few small luxuries" also being a necessity for any human being).

Many of the companies making the biggest profits are also the companies that own the highest percentage of their respective markets.

People don't have a choice.

The reason people can't save is almost entirely due to the cost of rent/mortgage, which is overwhelmingly driven by the cost of land, especially since the cost of land is modulated directly by the local wages (so there's no such thing as high-income, low-cost areas).

Has nothing to do with "the biggest corporations" reaping "the biggest profits". The largest companies that sell basic needs to Americans make like 10% overall profit.

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