If you continue to post flamewar comments to HN we will ban you. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The user posited the question "am I contributing to society - Not really". He himself knows he is contributing nothing, and drawing an income. It's a fact that he is a rentier, this is an economic term used by Adam Smith and Keynes.

Hence, I wrote:

> You are taking from society through rentier activity

There is nothing personal about this, I'm not talking about the guy's hair or his dress sense. There are no insults there, which is what "flame war" implies. Only the use of an economic term which has been in active use for over 100 years. It's an economic term.

I can make this point no more succinctly than I did.

Your problem is the fact, not the delivery.

They are providing capital for others to use and contribute to society. Plus I'm sure doing all that stuff they will have a chance to teach someone else or provide feedback online.

The land already exists. The land gets the rent. Just playing a rigged system as a rentier, as defined by Adam Smith.

https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...

“Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which best bear to have a particular tax imposed upon them.”

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”

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my reply to the above as hacker news censors all rentier debate with their fake "you're submitting too fast", which they only do for anti landlord comments:

Wrong. The majority of the rent is ground rent. Try renting a facsimile of an apartment in the middle of nowhere and in a city. Did he create the value? No.

The parent doesn’t seem like they’re renting land though. It seem like they are renting houses which doesn’t suffer from the problems of ground rent because there’s actual service being provided.

I don't think anybody will mind if the rent was say 1$. The concern is really about the size of the rent, astronomically increased by limiting supply.

We should increase supply. Oh, and wealth tax for rising inequality too.

Correct, I rent out furnished residential properties on medium term lets. Nice ones. I’m not a dickhead landlord, I had enough of them when I rented.

For what it’s worth, I took abandoned or ruined houses in desirable areas, bought them cheap, and spent my own (and my wife’s) time and labour renovating and furnishing them. I created housing stock from mouldy rubble.

Also, please note, I did not invent capitalism. I would much rather everybody could live like this.

I would be happier about capitalism if the government was not actively trying to increase profits and socialize the losses.

"Stop restricting the housing supply, and don't prop up house prices by buying mortgage bonds" I shout to noone in particular.

If you have a single dollar in your pocket right now, you're a rentier too. We're all modern franctional slave owners. So, you might as well enjoy it.