Are you an absentee owner of (residential) property? Do you own other people's homes, or aspire to do so? It sure does sound like it to me.

I'm curious to understand why you aren't talking about the issue of people being unable to own their own home. Would you yourself really want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?

The fact that you focus on the market (and seeking a perfect calibration within the current capitalist system), and not on the original parasitic nature of absentee ownership and the bourgeois hoarding of capital (in this case housing stocks), already quickly shows me that you might not be very in touch with your fellow human beings and that you don't understand the real (and diverse) systemic oppression many people face (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 [use yt1s.com to download if not in US], and also in the global south: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I).

> For example, in the communist setting housing were provided "fairly" to anyone, so that the desirable locations had in them apparently all kinds of people. Only that many times the selection were far from random and you could bet value (in various forms) had to be exchanged under table. So Vienna? I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look I'd find something gaming the system at some level. Let's say, (hypothetically) that some club rents out properties to its members, and whereas rents are regulated, club membership fees aren't.

Your critique contains many unfounded assumptions, as well as generalizations, which distort what is really happening on the ground. The exact same argument you've made here could also be made about the current capitalist organization of housing: e.g. "I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look at the capitalist organization of housing I'd find something gaming the system at some level." Capitalists game the system with the help of the bourgeois state, and collude to violently force people to work within capitalist production using capitalist-owned means of production (in the case of a software engineer/knowledge worker, proprietary software/hardware systems). When capitalists withhold this means of production it leads to the division of labor and alienation (this reaction to exploitation, this alienation, being something that unfortunately capitalists gaslightingly weaponize and label as 'individual failures', and calling it 'depression' [1]). Capitalists, together with the capitalist state that enforces bourgeois laws (which benefit only a very tiny minority), coerce laborers to forever pay them to rent their homes. They are to be kicked out and made homeless unless they participate in the bourgeois property system and the bourgeois production system. You're suggesting that the status quo, and the rules of the game, are somehow fair, yet we live in era where there is an incredible gap between the rich and the poor, the dynamic between capital-owning capitalist exploiters and exploited wage laborers. [2]

Why do you not talk about people being able to own their own home? Would you yourself want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?

Alastair Parvin from Wikihouse has a great take on the origins of this weird thing called 'rent':

"The origins of our land system

Like all journeys forwards, we have to begin by going backwards.

So where did our land system come from?

Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’

And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.

So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.

In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.

If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.

So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.

“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”" [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...

[3] https://alastairparvin.medium.com/a-new-land-contract-684c3b...