The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another. It's easy to forget that these exist and that everyone must always be on guard, defending the world against ones own baser instincts and defending oneself against humanity at larges baser instincts. As we collectively forget, or consciously ignore, our duty to one another we mortgage humanities future with collective suffering today. Eventually the bill on these ills come due, one way or another the sociological debt is always repaid.
That's not exactly true. "Markets" are made of people, and the morals principles and ethics of each participant imbue any given market with certain characteristics. The market doesn't reflect the exact morals of one particular actor, but it is nevertheless a product of them. Think matrix multiplication.
For examples look at Roman civilization, Jewish civilization, the meeting of the two. Or look at the Wire.
This happens through competitive pressure. If, as a market player, do something slightly shady to get an edge, I'll get ahead and my competitors will either have to do the same, or risk losing. When enough market players go along, the slightly shady things becomes a baseline, "standard business practice", and morality on the market is that much eroded. Then someone else starts getting ahead on being even more shady, and the process repeats.
(Ironically, we often call this chipping away at ethics/morality "innovation".)
nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law - which mostly works.
Why do you think in a country where the law enforcement failed (such as a failed state) breaks down in to chaos so easily? Where's the "Principles, Morals, Ethics" then?
You’ll be happy to know (I hope) that plenty of us (perhaps even the majority!) don’t have any intention to murder and rape, and it’s neither law nor religion which compels us to be minimally decent towards others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AwebTX3rk3E
Landlords are people and subject to the same qualities and defects as other humans.
Perhaps they are “not know” for the positive because people make a kerfuffle when things go badly, not when they go well.
Here’s a positive story of a landlord having a major positive impact on hundreds of tenants: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-...
What is stopping their landlord from raising the rent, since they obviously have money to spare?