The same can be said of mortgage interest. The fair comparison to the renter with no savings is the homeowner owing the full value of the house to the bank, and the fair comparison to a mortgage-less homeowner is a renter with investments and savings equal to the price of the house they're in.
Better arguments for your position might be
1. Mortgage rates are lower than rental prices in many places,
2. Paying off a mortgage is "enforced savings". People leasing property mostly spend the difference instead of investing it.
3. Some kind of projection of house and rental prices rising more quickly than the market.
its unlikely that mortgage payments are lower than rent - otherwise, it'd be better to pay the mortgage than renting! You would buy a place, and rent out a room or two, and have the rent income plus your own money to pay the mortgage.
I m not against renting - but i just don't want people to think that a mortgage is some baggage that they are better off not having, and instead just pay rent. I want people to make the smartest choices, so that the only way rent rises is because costs to build houses rise, not because the landlord got greedy. To me, rent is like a tax on being alive.
I have friends doing just that. All it takes is the initial deposit capital (which many people don't have, or take years to save up) and credit rating.
In some places, they are, and it is. However, I would be incredibly surprised if there is anywhere where the mortgage payments on a 100% LTV mortgage are lower than rent; and this is one of the reasons why many settled people don't own their own home. They can't (yet) afford a sufficient deposit to make the repayments affordable.
When this is true, this actually is a very convincing argument. Not only that, but you can effectively arbitrage yourself into a lot of wealth this way. You buy a house and move into it for awhile, but then you buy a new house, move into the new house, and rent out the old house. (You get better mortgage terms that way.) Rinse and repeat whenever you can afford to do so and you eventually end up with a large portfolio of profitable properties.
Of course, it's arbitrage--if enough people do it, it stops working. You can keep it going with more money, if you can make larger down payments, since at that point you're turning a one time lump sum into an ongoing cash flow. But eventually you have to have more money to make money, so not even this might be workable.
In any case, if you buy a house at age 30, and you get the standard 30 year mortgage, you'll effectively be paying rent to the bank until you're 60 anyway. You would be very fortunate to own a home outright for most of your life. Some people never do.
You can make a rational calculation of what works out better using local rental rates vs property prices (sometimes one of them is grossly out of proportion to the other), applying a liquidity and mobility premium and your expectations of what the rental and property markets will do long term.