Then don't rent an office? I really don't know what you think the alternative would be. I assume the value comes from not having to work by a flaming barrel down by the river.

Tax asset appreciation like regular income. The tax burden should fall on those most able to bear it, and should fall as equitably as possible. The current approach encourages people to accumulate assets and rent them out rather than producing things others want to consume.

Although astazangasta is complaining about rent, he doesn't actually want to buy land either. He thinks he is entitled to free land.

Native Americans iirc thrived without the concept of "privatized land" for thousands of years. Same for basically other self-sustaining native population in history.

Okay, you got the occasional clashes with other clans for land but hey, you could always move somewhere else. That's impossible now, given the massive numbers of humans on this planet.

Sorry, that is not correct.

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/aztec/aztec_property....

I doubt there's ever been an urban culture that didn't have some concept of property ownership, whether by individuals, "nobles", or the state.

Depends on the particular geographic area you're talking about. In the Northeast, for example, land rights were radically different from the Aztecs.

That said, it was never as simple as "everyone holds land in common and can do whatever they want with it individually."

Were there urban cultures in the Northeast? The largest I've heard of seem more like "towns" than "cities".

There were full-scale cities in the Midwest and South, of course, but I don't think we know enough about those cultures to say what their property rights were like. I'd bet money they were a lot closer to the Aztecs than to a typical hunter-gatherer band, though.

The Tlingit of the Northwest also had a complicated system of property rights, including something akin to what we call "intellectual property" (though there were significant differences to our system). They also kept large numbers of slaves.

Landlords deliver value by managing and providing a physical space to work in, but when the landlords have lobbies and use their political power to artificially restrict the supply of space and jack up the prices to no end, then it is evil.

The landlords are therefore parasitizing the economy.

Although this article is about commercial space, residential space is just as outrageously priced. I think there should be three things that should never be allowed to be artificially restricted just for the greed of a few: food, water and housing.

Here's a good Economist article on this: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21647622-land-centre-...

> we're not actually paying for value

The value you are receiving is location.

If you do not care for location, then rent office space in Tennessee where you can pay less than 1/4 of SF prices.

The location is hardly value created by the landlord, though. (The improvements to the land, like buildings, may well be.) Unlike people who earn income by producing something, people who extract ground rent are not adding value. What you're paying for then, is essentially bad luck: due to some complex set of historical reasons, this particular person owns that land and you don't, so you have to pay them a fee to use it. Why do they own it and you don't, when both of you did just as much work to create that land (i.e., none)? Usually you don't want to see how that particular sausage was made; the history of land distribution and acquisition in the U.S. is quite "dirty".

You could also build/buy your own office. Then there would be no landlord.

Probably not a good idea for startups whose long term success is unpredictable though.

Well, then, new landlord business if the startup fails.

i agree, but it does remove the landlord ;-)

Just start in a garage I'd say. It's cheap and the darkness, the damp and the oil fumes are a motivator to success.

You know, even though you're busy being a startup and all, it honestly does not take that long to clean up a garage.

But then how will you get motivated? Passion? That sounds like it takes time and effort to develop, when I need to be startup-ing!

You're paying for the location and services (well, with NNN leases, just location). What other value do you need?

Fine, run your startup in the middle of the street. There's no value in the office, correct?

Yes and no? They take on risk as well right?

They only get to be parasitic when the real estate market is dysfunctional and supply is constrained, possibly artificially. In some sense they are acting as gatekeepers to a limited resource and providing liquidity by setting prices high enough that only those with need are willing to pay.