Don't make me tap the sign.
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@aredridel
while a single mother, renting out a spare room, might not think that is being a bad person, and it might not be the worst person. They have to be able to vet the applicants, evict people, likely involving law enforcement and ultimately end that persons stay in their home.It's a broken model. Lots of sympathy for single mums renting out a spare room, but they are a part of the problem. That tenant is going to be massively restricted in their behaviour.
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@lewiscowles1986 @aredridel No one here will argue that the system isn't fundamentally broken. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism," and all that.
But if you're going to target a single person doing the best they can, doesn't have any control of the system, and isn't exploiting the labor of others? First: abandon society and go live in the woods yourself before casting such stones, you are exactly the same problem. Second: save your stones for people who are actually problems.
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This reminds of a statement I saw awhile back.
"You can't be trusted to eat the rich, because what will happen is you'll eat a bunch of doctors and lawyers [including, e.g., public defenders] while the actual rich laugh"
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@hrefna @Azuaron @aredridel
I love this. Folks renting rooms are not in the same vein as doctors and lawyers though. They haven't mastered any skills past having one too many rooms.I Guess a real-life version could be what happened to farmers in a few revolutions.
So I ask if you know any farmers? I do, hard working, clever. Maybe not cash rich, but definitely not asset poor, and usually, the job has been in the family for generations.
Oh, they tend to rent out whole buildings, not rooms
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I literally live on a ranch property. I keep horses. My neighbors on one side raise cattle. The other side previously bred paso finos. Three doors down they grow crops, a mile and a half away there's a CSA.
Yes. I know farmers.
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@hrefna @Azuaron @lewiscowles1986 @aredridel If the poor had any idea how much the rich had...
When a rich person buys an asset without a loan they are just rearranging their balance sheet, not juggling their lifestyle. And yet that rearrangement winds up with them having the rents they can charge for the use of that asset.
For me that's the line: do you get to rearrange your balance sheet to extract rents at no cost or risk to your ability to have all your needs met. -
@Flux @hrefna @Azuaron @aredridel
For me it's not about the harmer, but the harmed.
If you inheritted a house, and then rented it to your child, I think it would meet your standard and mine.
If you were already paying your mortgage, or rent, but then bring in another so you have "a little extra", or "enough to get by"; I think the harmed doesn't change one bit.
Of course not everyone considers themselves harmed. :shrugs:
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This is quite possibly the most bizarre framing I've seen on this question.
What percentage of homeowners do you think _inherited_ a house?
Do you also extend this to food? The person who sells the vegetables from their back yard causing the same "harm" as a corporate farm?
What even.
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Every power analysis starts with questions of scale and the institutional power at play, not the experience of individuals. An individual may experience bigotry for being a male, but that's not the same as _misandry_ (as opposed to misogyny, which is systemic and structural).
An individual may experience bigotry for being white, but in the US you won't experience _racism_ for being white.
Because institutional power changes the nature of bigotry
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Even to the degree I agree that the dynamics are different for an "inherited" house (which I don't particularly, though it changes some of the individual morality involved, houses are still expensive, costs on them are highly variable, and there's a lot that goes into living together) it is not even in the same reality of harm as what happens with capital's involvement.
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@aredridel Either the sole proprietor has no employees or they hire employees. If it is the latter, why didn't they set up a worker coop?
Employment itself is the problem because employment, by definition, comes with unfair terms builtin. Namely, the requirement in all employment contracts to let the employer appropriate 100% of the positive and negative results of production that is carried out by the workers as employees. Workers should always be individually or jointly self-employed
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@jlou And that's why I drew the line where I did. But there's another option, the consultant. Subcontractors, we might call them in many industries.
I'm rather fond of cooperatives myself, and "why didn't they?" is a really interesting question to explore: our legal structure makes it hard, it cuts against the grain of our society, governance of coops is actually quite hard. There's reasonable reasons not to, even if it would be better if our whole culture practiced such things much more deeply.
(That'd be an "if everyone would just..." solution, and those are unreasonable, one has to build a path from where we are to where we want to go. That's some of the work I want to do.)
