I was reading one of the many articles about the real estate crisis in Australia, where the increase in prices has been stopping people from entering into ownership. It get blamed on many things, from increased immigration, to not enough tradespeople to build housing, to pensioners who just won't move out of their house and into a retirement home for the elderly and of course, investors. Most likely it is combination of these factors, but now the message is that in a decade or so from now, due to affordability, the majority of Australians will be renters, like in London or New York, where literal rent-seeker investors own a large percentage of housing buildings.
You'll own nothing and be happy
I don't think so.
Yet, there are many who seem to believe that ownership is the problem and therefore, we should get rid of as much as possible to the point that we are living like cavepeople in the forests. It just isn't viable on any level of society and if it did happen, it would be bloody violent.
But the biggest problem with the statement above that the WEF mentioned, is that owning nothing doesn't mean nothing is needed. That means that owning nothing and needing something, imposes the conditions of reliance for provision. And the cost of need in a system that is all about making profit, will keep going up, because there is no mechanism to stop it.
And one of the reasons for this is that ownership of land brings in some level of responsibility and accountability to the landholder, meaning there is a cost to ownership. But once that cost is removed, it also means that there is no cost to ruining the conditions for others either. In the past for instance in around 1789, "Generally, states limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying White males (about 6% of the population)." were allowed to vote. Over time, this was expanded. But the reason for this other than sexism and racism, was that it does make sense to have people who have stake in the country, make decisions for the country.
What happens when people own nothing?
Not only do they not have stake, but there is very little cost for bad decisions making. More than that, the decision making which essentially is made to create the best conditions for the decision maker, means that those without stake will want more handouts from those with stake. The interesting thing though is, that we are pretty much already at that point, because of the wealth gap, where the richest handful of people are worth more than the bottom half of the 8 billion on earth. With that wealth, they are making the decisions for themselves anyway.
Owning nothing is never going to make the majority of people who need something happy, because being reliant is always going to be a stress position with increasingly hard terms and conditions in order to get the next handout. This is because the it is still a "profit is the incentive driver" system, so anyone who does own something, will still look to own more.
As more people own less, fewer people own more.
We have seen an extreme ramping up of this over the last couple decades where wealth at the top has gone hyperbolic, and relative poorness has therefore decreased relatively in response. And if you have a look at the state of the world and society, it isn't getting better. To actually improve society, it is going to take more ownership, not less. Because more ownership means people are more interested in taking responsibility,, engaging, maintaining and developing what they own, where they own, and into the people of the area. The more people invest into their community, the healthier the community becomes.
Money is not enough.
It takes more than money to invest into a community, but money can facilitate a lot of the projects that help a community improve. But in a place where there are only renters, there is zero incentive to invest into the community, because everyone is pretty much always in transition, never settled, even if they have been there for years. The owners of the housing don't invest more than they have to keep renters, because they don't live there.
Ownership matters.
When people feel they have something to protect, they will protect it. And I think a lot of the identity movements and the people who support them so strongly, are driven by those who don't have a strong sense of material ownership, so they look to protect ideological ownership, as well as the way they think and feel, because it is theirs.
Ownership makes people protect, save, be conservative.
And the most conservative of people are those who are unable to even entertain the thoughts of others, or see any criticism of their own thoughts as an attack that must be defended against. We've seen a lot of this in the world over the last decade or two with cancel culture activities. People who call anyone who disagrees with them a fascist, and have them cancelled, removing and burning their books and words.
In other words, acting like fascists.
But it is a response to disenfranchisement, isn't it? Just like the Nazis were a response to people economically struggling, we are back there today, forcing the struggle again through economic monopolisation mechanisms, that puts a lot in the hands of the few, and tells the many to bow down and beg for a handout.
It is not the fault of the wealth, or the poor.
It is everyone's fault for supporting a system that forces us to act in pretty predictable ways. The economic functions are a mould that shapes the outcome of it. It is a bit like how the Japanese grow watermelons in boxes to make them square. It isn't the watermelon's nature, is it? But it is our nature to support what is familiar, do what is easy and convenient, and fight to stay the same because that is what we know. The economy as we know it gets supported because that is what we know and it has conditioned us to keep it ticking along. We could change our fundamental outlook on what is important and valuable for humanity and act accordingly, but we don't.
The less we own, the less we know about responsibility and accountability, and therefore the less ability we have to build a healthy community. We become burdens on the world of resources, rather than agents who use resources to improve the conditions. And when we are burdens in a world that is driven be creating material efficiencies to improve wealth maximisation, the outcome is pretty inevitable.
You really want to own nothing in a world where you need something?
The cost of not owning are incredibly high, and it isn't just a financial impact on the renter. It affects all of humanity. Yet, we haven't worked this out yet, because rather than experimenting and finding ways to improve the distribution of ownership to find an equilibrium point that generates the healthiest society, we keep reducing ownership of the many, and putting it into the hands of the few, and by the very nature of economics, this is always going to end up imbalanced and abusive.
The goal isn't to be part of the system to own a house, it is to be part of changing the system so ownership of what it takes to improve humanity, is valued and rewarded, so that distribution spreads, and everyone has stake. Handouts are not the answer, because unless the system changes, it will end up back in the same small group of hands anyway. The entire approach to how we organise ourselves needs to change.
But who owns that?
Taraz
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