there is a risk for the worker and renter, too. and opportunity costs.

my shelter not being destroyed is extremely more important to me and my life than my landlord who has insurance for such things, especially in a place with a housing vacancy less than 1% (aka very very hard to find housing). if i leave, they will have no problem finding a tenant to take my place. any repairs and maintenance are essentially paid for by my rent. they raised property taxes? no problem, just raise rent...

from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a landlord.

Other than the risk of being evicted from your rental, a homeowner has most of the risks of a tenant, plus more. And there are a fair number of protections for renters to lower that risk. There are some risks of the landlord being a bad player, which makes the renter's life worse.

The landlord has the risks that the renter doesn't (that a homeowner does); which is risk offloaded from the renter to the landlord. The landlord then has the risks of the tenant being a bad player, which can be extremely financially risky (worse than being fired from your job).

> from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a landlord

Your point of view is extremely far from the truth. Especially for landlords that have one or a few places they rent out, it can be extremely risky. Everything from tenants just deciding not to pay (and taking a year+ to evict) to a Pacific Heights situation, where the place is destroyed with no real recourse. Or, on the lower end, tenants just leaving the place in bad shape, with bugs/mice/whatever; that itself can cost tends of thousands of dollars to recover from.

a couple of days ago, i learned that my lease is terminated outside of my control. you want to help me find a new spot? it's very hard with a cat and a dog in this area. all of the available apartments will be at least $300-500/month more with an hour radius of where i currently live.

this puts my life in a very tenuous place (especially bc i don't have full-time employment, took an actual risk to make a living on my own). i don't think the landlord has that risk.

Places with 1% vacancy rates only exist when the government prevents more housing from being built, or makes it unprofitable to be a landlord.

> the founder loses their investment

So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not) subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing all the risk of investment in our financialized economies.

I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but as soon as you start sharing ownership that dichotomy simply disappears.

Sure, but using tax-payer money to save malfunctioning banks is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.

Crony-capitalism is capitalism, if you don't fall for the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

We don't collectively contribute to save shareholders. When a bank goes under the depositors are made whole through government insurance programs. Shareholders get nothing.

In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable people can say that the bailouts were excessive and introduced moral hazard for sure).

> When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner.

Workers generally risk their lives or simply injury. Owners "risk" capital. I put that in quotes because our government is typically set up to rescue failing businesses and by that I mean bailing out the owners. If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker.

So who is really taking a risk here?

> When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of owning a property to someone else.

We shouldn't treat housing as an investment vehicle. It is shelter and necessary to live. Every level of government is subordinate to the cause of increasing property prices as society increasingly views housing as a vehicle to build generational wealth.

The majority of housing in vienna is state-owned (so-called "social housing"). Any kind of state housing has been successfuly propagandized as a "slum" ("project") but there's no need for that to happen. The UK, prior to Thatcher coming along and dismantling the whole thing, almost completely got rid of landlords simply by being the buyer of last resort for owners that wante dto sell.

> None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money while others are starving

Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit.

What are you suggesting as a better system?

To withold basic needs for profit, you need to be able to provide basic needs in the first place.

All of the alternatives I know of can't even reach that point.

A free market of cooperatives is an alternative. One might call it „cooperatism“, if it needs a term.

After some initial mistakes, the Soviet system did provide basic needs. It was inefficient, badly led, conservative, repressive, ultimately undemocratic, and often produced very mediocre output (crappy houses, etc), but it ensured that everyone had food, shelter, work, healthcare, and education.

Neither full-collectivism nor full-capitalism are the final answer.

The Soviet system only was able to provide basic needs when it decided to overlook the black market. It also allowed farmers to farm owned plots of land and sell their produce as they saw fit. This was the only way to stop the mass starvation.

"some initial mistakes" is quite something to describe 9+ million people dying from hunger in Ukraine during the great famine.

More careful historians, such as Snyder, put the figure at around 3.5 million.

Doesn't detract from your overall point though, which is quite valid.

And how many famines were there under the Tsars?

Depends on the field what you risk. Many white collar jobs will not risk their lives or injury, plus nowadays regulations should reduce these extreme risks.

Saying "owner simply has less money" can have many implications on their life. If they choose to put money in a company rather than have a bigger apartment/TV/car/whatever, I find it fair for that to be rewarded a bit.

I think it is disingenuous to think "basic needs" is simple to define, considering that there is no cheap and free energy source (and other resources). For someone living in a warm climate, the basic need for heating in north of Europe will look like a waste.

My opinion is that tax systems are completely outdated and they should use more "asymptotic/exponential/complex formulas". Sure a tax of x % on profit worked 100 years ago when most people were "closer" but with today's growth (of many things), you get too much concentration. But of course that would imply that people understand both tax and math, so most will not demand it.

Companies go bankrupt all the time.

> Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit.

An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times. It fails to deliver.

> An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times.

Have there been any attempts since the rise of the smartphone and the Internet? I'm only aware of attempts that predate them and those two things have changed capitalistic societies dramatically, for better or worse.

I don't think they've changed the way free markets work. If anything, it makes them more productive because of the efficiency of having better information.

Summarizing the past twenty-thirty years as "slightly more productive markets due to efficiency thanks to better information" might be oversimplifying things a bit, don't you think?

I can be much more productive these days because I have the information resources on the internet. In the early days, for example, I'd mail order books and wait weeks for them to arrive, and hope they had what I needed in them.

I also collaborate with people all over the world. That simply wasn't possible in the 1980s. I'd mail floppy disks internationally, and would use the fax machine for communication (at a dollar a page!).

There is risk to capital. The government does not bail out every business that fails. That's ludicrous. Investors like VCs can and do lose their investments all the time with no government intervention whatsoever. An owner is also risking in terms of opportunity cost - time lost to starting a business and failing is inherently riskier than working with similar talents and investing in safer assets like index funds for the potential upside of higher returns if the business succeeds.

Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.

> If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker.

The fact that you consider "losing everything you've saved up for your entire life, plus what you've borrowed, and destroyed your ability to borrow more" as "simply" is... mind boggling to me. I would rather work for someone else than risk losing everything by starting my own business (plus I prefer to develop software rather than run a business); that risk is _way_ beyond what I'm comfortable with.

The nuance in this argument is that everybody shares risk.

Workers take risk not only of the financial kind (choosing to take a job at company A instead of B is a bet), as well as physical risk most times.

If we believe shareholder of a oil company is taking more risk than the worker in a platform, we value capital more than labour.

Not to mention, non-owner workers still bear some risk by virtue of the fact that they can be terminated at any time without cause. This in itself is a financial risk, as being without employment or income for an extended period of time can be financially devastating.

If we want to play the "risk grants ownership" game, then we have to be honest: at some point, the risk of the initial investment is paid off, and the risk the employees take on collectively matches or exceeds the risk of the investors. If we're being logically consistent, ownership would transfer as these risk pools shift. But we're not consistent, and our system doesn't value risk, it values capital.