The root cause is life and economic reality. Working for free is antithetical to survival and simply cannot be sustained over the long run.

Makes me wonder, what's the point?

I think the universe is instructing you to to become a landlord. Once this has been achieved, then you can spend all your time developing free software.

If you think that it is so easy and risk-free, why not take your own mortgage and let other suckers pay it off for YOU?

But I do not think OP's comment was fair to the landlords. It is not their fault that building materials are getting ridiculously expensive, that more and more people need to live in/near the cities to get a decent job and other factors that make owning your property less and less accessible.

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- it's against OP's values and principles - OP doesn't believe it's risk-free or easy (I don't believe they said that) - OP doesn't act solely based on financial incentives

> being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive

I would argue, that doing something that is not easy and taking risks is the opposite of lazily sitting around and doing nothing productive.

Even if it's not possible to eliminate that risk, there are various not particularly challenging ways to minimise it.

On a return-for-hours-worked-actively metric, being a landlord can be extremely easy.

And you can trade off money for more time by handing over more or less all of it to agencies and/or informal support.

And having to eat. It's equally appaling.

So what do you suggest? Free housing by the government? I'd love that too, but can I get a penthouse pretty please?

Other countries - notably Finland and Austria, among others - have no problem providing reasonable state housing at reasonable cost.

Finland houses its homeless as a matter of course because it turns out to be hugely cheaper than the alternatives, economically and politically.

Some of those countries also score well on affordable private home ownership.

America doesn't - because the idea of a government that buffers its citizens from private sector exploitation is against the guiding creed of economic narcissism.

Governments can and do create programs to support families (too bad for singles in my country) but at the end getting all this for free is probably a utopia.

Affordable home ownership exists everywhere, but nobody wants to move to most of those places, people need more than a roof above their heads, but that comes at a cost.

“Property must be destroyed before imagination can be developed any further.” (Berger)

“No matter how much it proclaims its pseudotolerance, the capitalist system in all its forms (family, school, factories, army, codes, discourse…) continues to subjugate all desires, sexuality, and affects to the dictatorship of its totalitarian organization, founded on exploitation, property, male power, profit, productivity… Tirelessly it continues its dirty work of castrating, suppressing, torturing, and dividing up our bodies in order to inscribe its laws on our flesh, in order to rivet to our subconscious its mechanisms for reproducing this system of enslavement. With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its programs… Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments.” (Guattari)

The fact that you own a computer capable of making your post is a testament to the evil effectiveness of capitalism.

Easily proven false.

I know a lot of nerds/geeks who make technology possible --- I'm one of them. And virtually all of them have a job of some sort working for money.