this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Lefty Memes
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So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free? It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don't know what that would look like. Landlords aren't any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won't allow you to just go take want you want of their crops.
Banks and monetary policy over the last 4 decades are what really drove the prices of housing up. But, as usual, poorer people wanted to keep those ultra low interest rates even though it meant richer people could buy up everything even faster. Same as poorer people wanted Walmart even though it drove out all the smaller businesses that paid living wages and sent manufacturing overseas. I'm not a landlord. But they aren't the only problem in a capitalist society and many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by same as any other people with a 'side hustle'.
Chef provided the labour and knowledge in preparing your meal. Farmer provided labour and knowledge in growing the crops.
Landlord provided buying the property first then charging you for the privilege of living there because a piece of paper says it's his.
The landlord did not build the house, and any maintenance costs come out of your rent to pay for someone else to fix.
Landlord apologism on a lefty sub... Always good to start the day with a laugh
Unless a dwelling is brand-new & freshly built, someone has already paid for it in entirety long before you ever moved in. Some dwellings have even been paid for in entirety several times over by all the different people who've moved in & out over the decades. The modern capitalist expectation that every person born suddenly becomes financially indebted to the housing industry even though all these homes have already been fucking paid for several times over....is nothing short of extortion.
Teaching? Medicine? Those are services provided for free to the public. Why is housing, a literal human right that literally everyone needs, not provided either free or extremely subsidized?
You're thinking of construction workers, the people sweating their asses to build the housing you inhabit, not the leeches between you and the housing that's already constructed.
How hard is "public rent either for free or for extremely low prices" to imagine?
Agreed, they're part of capitalism, capitalist business owners are the other part of the problem
Housing shouldn't be allocated based on how lucky you are to get a good landlord or not, people shouldn't be at the mercy of landlords to enjoy decent housing. It should be a guaranteed right.
Really insightful comment, regarding the overall pattern between welcoming Wal-Mart, and welcoming low interest rates for mortgages. And the inevitable outcomes. It's the very same mechanism of forcing individuals to clamor and claw for what remains within reach, while thereby fueling the exact machine that pulls it all further away.
I'd argue it's roughly the same class of people, doing the required clawing, though of course many, many people - on both sides of a divider I'd call "clawing for basic stability" vs. "clawing for a supposed retirement" - would completely disagree, about the similarities between the two groups ๐. It's the same picture.jpeg.
Aside from "landlords aren't worse than chefs" (yes, they are, but admittedly depending on both landlord and chef lmao), couldn't really agree more. Bad systems make for bad incentives make for bad personal decisions. Eventually (fucking eventually...), something gives.