Re:Innovation around houselessness fails so much
by 0xy on Sunday March 20, 2022 @02:31AM
(#30740617)
This argument would make sense if people voted according to their interests, but they don't. For example, San Francisco renters overwhelmingly vote against the development of new housing that would help with housing costs. Black voters overwhelmingly supported Bill Clinton for president, and he signed the 1994 crime bill into law which was the worse thing to happen to black Americans since slavery, decimating black communities and ruining lives. There's countless other examples as well.
The worker doesn't want to share his job.
The saver doesn't want to share his savings. (primarily the rich)
The tax payer doesn't want to share his income.
The land owner doesn't want to share his land.
I don't think this is an exhaustive list but it is a starting point to understand why our markets don't appear to behave like the theory predicts. By that I mean that a market should obviously allocate jobs, savings and land to those who need them most the same way a market allocates products and services to those who need them most. Okay, I have lied, over the long term, revolutions tend to revert the allocation of these things back to how people perceive they should be allocated. One should now wonder why violence is necessary and what it is trying to overcome.
Marx would argue that private property is the root of all evil but I'm not 100% convinced. Democracy still involves centralized control by authorities. It's not much better than a authoritarian government in practice. The bigger difference is that politicians constantly enter and leave their positions of power. That simply doesn't happen fast enough in our economy, we have to wait for the wealthy and powerful to die and revolutions may just be an ugly way of accelerating deaths that are useful to society by people who don't have decades to spare. One could argue that power and wealth cannot die, so we must kill the bearer instead.