Moved from @pingveno

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • The problem is landlords who don’t give a fuck about their tenants and are fixated on squeezing the most out of them. I currently own my house, but my previous landlords were very diligent with repairs and kept rent increases to inflation. They knew we were dependable tenants who paid rent on time and were going to leave the place in decent shape.

    But yes, renting can absolutely have unscrupulous landlords. Large investors especially use rental pricing software to press tenants to their absolute limit. It becomes a form of price fixing.







  • And looking more broadly, how much of any given system’s death toll should be counted, and in what way. Mao caused massive amounts of death with the Great Leap Forward, which arguably would not have happened under a system that relied less on central management and more on capitalism’s distributed feedback mechanisms. Then there were purges, suppression campaigns, and land reforms that resulted in productivity losses.

    But comparing that with a capitalist country that is a liberal democracy is hard. There are a lot of factors involved. Case in point: there was solid growth in China and the USSR. But we can’t make a direct comparison between them and the West. China and the USSR were playing catch up using technologies produced by capitalist countries. Take tractors, which immensely boosted productivity. Those were sourced from the West, at least initially.