So if the upper middle and lower upper classes are being hollowed out...
Well... what's that leave? Just the super rich, and the rest...
And considering the way the super rich are acting, I suppose they're just fine with that. The morally bankrupt sacks of shit that most of them seem to be, or become...
And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).
Impossible. Communism is a work of science fiction, much like Star Trek which is a more modern adaptation of the same idea. Like Star Trek, the concept is dependent on post-scarcity, which we've never seen, and isn't likely to ever happen. Perhaps you mean you grew up under rule of the Communist Party?
> it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could
The defining features of communism are no class, no state, and no money. It imagines these will no longer be relevant in a post-scarcity world.
Though the insinuation of such is routinely used to justify the ongoing stratification of wealth, and corruption of government.
Nobody is justifying anything here btw, I don't get why people hyperfocus on imperfections and claim whole thing is useless without understanding underlying reasons and thus options for fixes. Or providing long term working & proven alternatives.
Hard to say. The prevailing assumption, and basis for the Communist Party (on paper, at least), is that capitalists will try to block reaching a state of post-scarcity — the necessary precondition for communism. This is why they are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other.
They don't have to be. And thus far they don't seem to be. Capitalism, and especially American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example. We're almost there in that particular area.
But we're not there yet and things can quickly turn. It is apparent in that agriculture progress that the capitalists remain deathly afraid of losing control (see the tales of Monsanto, John Deere, etc.), which is exactly the foundation on which the assumption is built.
Uh, the American food industry, like nearly every first world food industry, is super state run. We stopped letting capitalism run farms because regular famine was awful.
Have you seen how much we pay per bushel of corn? Our beef is not cheaper because of capitalism. It's cheaper from enormous state subsidies that are designed to ensure we grow shitloads of certain crops regardless of economic or market factors.
But it stopped all the crazy boom-bust cycles of farming that kept ruining farms, harming farmland, and starving Americans.
Even food stamps is largely about giving farmers more state money for growing things that aren't strictly profitable.
The topic is capitalism. It only speaks to ownership. If you want to talk about who is running the show, you'd need to change the subject to command/market economies. But there is absolutely no reason to change the subject. So, getting us back on track: What agriculture-related capital do you think these first-world states own, exactly? The Canadian government used to own some grain elevators, but even that was sold off to private interests many years ago.
> Have you seen how much we pay per bushel of corn?
How could I not? What a curious question.
> It's cheaper from enormous state subsidies that are designed to ensure we grow shitloads of certain crops regardless of economic or market factors.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Post-scarcity, by very definition, is approached through technical innovation. There is a case to be made that subsidies have helped compel people to develop that technology, I guess, but subsidies and capitalism are in no way at odds with each other anyway. This seems to have absolutely no applicability to the conversation at hand.
We can do better than play out the same conversations also happening in middle school cafeterias. It helps everyone and could even reinforce your opposing views on the matter. You do your entire ideological position a disservice just doing this old hat!
In the most capitalist places (rich areas without rent control), you can rent a place for years trying to save money to buy in the area and see the rent grow fast enough that you can't buy and even have to leave as a renter.
Capitalism seems to work well for transportable things though, including cars. A house isn't transportable and it also tends to be something quite unique, which makes it incompatible with production in series. Even if you are somehow authorized and able to buy a cheap home, you still have the issue of the terrain, which can be more expensive than the home.
That being said I'm sure that there are people living on cheap (per square meter) terrain and happy about it, but that requires the ability to make the best of it, work on it or find work close to it.