simple. people shouldn't have to pay for food, either, and the fact that we've structured society in such a way as to deny people access to basic necessities is cruel and inhumane in the current era of abundance

even within the context of a non-socialist system, with food you're paying for the value of the labour that has gone into it: the people working the fields etc, the people transporting it, the people processing/packaging it, and the people cooking it and serving it to you (and some portion of the labour that went into making the tractors/trucks/processing machines etc). that labour needs to keep happening over and over to keep providing you with food. some portion of that is the pure ground rent on the farmland etc of course, but i think we can mostly leave that aside.

for rent, theres some portion that is the labour in building the house/apartment, but that's almost all labour that happened once and isn't being repeated, and is going to be the smaller part of the rent payment. the main part of it is paying some arsehole because they happen to own the land instead of you. theres no ongoing labour here that youre paying for, its made-up ownership (and if you trace the line of ownership back long enough, the "title" starts at some arsehole taking it at sword or gun point).

so for food, the lions share is paying for actual labour, for rent the lions share is paying for someone elses ownership of land

Being a landlord is violent. The basic "good" you provide as a landlord is a place to live which means if somebody doesn't pay you, you have to kick them out. Eviction is violence, you are threatening to physically remove them with force. In some neighborhoods calling the sheriff for an eviction could likely be a death sentence.

The basic premise of being a landlord isn't providing housing, it's denying it. You threaten to make somebody homeless if they don't pay you.

Profiting from food is bad too.

they bring up grocery stores/ restaurants profiting off of a person’s need for food.

Both of these things provide something from adding labour to the equation. They do work. The landlord does not do work. The landlord exploits via ownership of property and nothing else. He didn't build the property. The property exists without him.

The groceries do not exist without the grocery store. The grocery store is a necessity. The landlord is not.

The owner of the grocery store though? He can fuck off too. He's not a necessity just like the landlord.

When you buy from a restaurant, you're paying for the labour that goes into preparing and serving food. You pay money for goods and services.

When you pay a landlord rent, there is no good or service offered. The good - the housing - wasn't built by the landlord, it was built by builders. They're the ones who should be paid for it. The services - maintenance, heating, electricity - aren't provided by the landlord, they're provided by electrical companies, plumbers etc.

A landlord doesn't get paid for producing anything, they get paid for owning something. They provide nothing - not the housing or the furniture or anything else - that is all provided by various workers.

Profiting from food is the key thing here. I personally believe there should be state owned groceries so people can get food at the lowest possible price. At a restaurant you are paying for a specialty good, not a necessity. You may still need rent and grocery prices, I dont think communists ever did away with those entirely, but they exist as a necessary tool to allocate goods. But a landlord profits off doing nothing but owning the land. You are paying a middleman who is incredibly inefficient at managing housing on a social scale. Landlording shoupd be phased out in favor of home ownership, state housing, and cooperative housing. They are all objectively better than landlording

Tell them Adam Smith hated landlords

Grocery stores do profit off of a need for food. They destroy massive quantities of food in order to keep prices up.

The 'job' of a landlord is to gate-keep housing by absorbing risk for banks. It is inherently immoral because rent-seeking is immoral.

Essentially the capitalist system pushes people into a cycle of poverty by pricing them out of ownership. The price of a house is no longer tied to the price of land, building materials, and labor. The price of a house is tied to the literal maximum amount of rent which could be extracted from someone.

Essentially they act as highly inefficient middlemen in order to keep people from building wealth. Over the course of my life so far we have bought at least one house for our landlords by renting from them for decades.

I think the best simple explanation is, if renters can pay enough per month so that the landlord can pay their mortgage AND take profit, why can't they afford to buy a house?

You want an example that works on liberals.

Landlords exist because of a tax loophole. If they taxed rental income like any other it would not be profitable. They exist obly because of corruption.

Shit. Maybe it is true, but for sure any liberal wouldn't know.

:mao-wave:

I don't think I've ever had a liberal actually push back on that, they just kinda scoff.

Here are some talking points that might help:

• Food is also something that should be guaranteed and then decommodified.

• Landlords extract wealth from tenants, increasing the cost of housing overall. We could simply build that housing publicly and cut out the exploitative middleman.

• Landlords and slumlords are barely distinguishable in the vast majority of cases. Because their goal is to maximize profit for themselves, land + housing has natural monopolistic tendencies, and their tenants are in a weaker position than them, they don't have to actually hold up their end of the bargain. They let problems go until you move out and they want to raise rent. They keep your deposit even though you did everything expected. They raise your rent just because they can. This is not an efficient or effective means of providing housing.

• This is passive income through direct exploitation, which creates a class divide. Landlords are rarely on your side, they fight against the interests of the public. They gentrify, they fight against homeless shelters in their neighborhood, they rely on the cops for their evictions. We should remove/combat all such divides.

• Economically speaking, they are pure leeches. They contribute nothing, it would be far better to take their money and build public housing. They should be working jobs like the rest of us if they can and stand in solidarity.

You can argue that in principle it's also bad for grocery stores to profit off a basic human need, but in practice rent is a much more pressing problem.

Even before the pandemic, 38% of renters faced a rent burden (paying more than 30% of pretax income on rent. 17% of all renters were paying more than 50% of their gross income. This is, of course, worse for black and elderly people.

These figures were trending up pre-pandemic, and there's no indication that they've gotten any better.

So even by the standards of technocrat lanyard types, rent burden is a huge problem.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2018/04/american-families-face-a-growing-rent-burden

They might counter the food security js also a problem for many people, and that is correct. However, you can point out that rent burden almost certainly contributes to food security issues because rent is bigger proportion of household budgets, and much less elastic an expense than food.

Since it doesn't seem to have been said yet, I would also point out that landlords have a vested interest in maintaining a sub-adequate supply of housing on the market so as to increase rental values (and to spend as little as possible maintaining that housing). This isn't a marxian theory, but it fits into the liberal worldview and gives them a theory as to why development is not an actual strategy out of a housing crisis caused by private ownership.

Tell them that supermarkets and restaurant staff are real jobs that provide actual services, while landlordin' is a fake job that just takes up money for existing and owning land.

When landlords were complaining about rents not getting paid during Covid I would always retort with "Well, maybe they should get a job for once then"