Reassessing views due to personal experience

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I could write a whole saga about this but my brain is fried from thinking about it so I'll give the short version that I gave not-particularly-close friends when I found out about it yesterday.

From 2007 to 2013 my family lived in a beautiful semi-detached Victorian row house in a small town in New Jersey. I was going to college here in Western Massachusetts for a lot of that period but I still have very good memories of that house, which my family still owns and has been renting out for the past six years because we haven't been able to find a seller for it. Now that the housing market favors sellers again my mom is finally trying to sell it off, but obviously needed to contact the tenant before doing so (and decided also to offer him right of first refusal on buying it). She's been trying to contact him to that end for months and has been unable to; she's also no longer getting his rent, which he had a habit of paying late to begin with.

Finally my mom sent over the property manager yesterday and it turned out the tenant had wrecked up the place to the tune of about 10k in damage and then abandoned it to mooch off his family in South Carolina.

The back door is physically broken, as are several stairs. The stove and washing machine are both broken. The back yard is overgrown and the stairs leading to the basement are covered with piping and wiring of unclear origin and purpose. And everything is strewn with his old dirty clothes and empty food and drink containers. The rugs, including the rug in what was my own bedroom for six and a half years of my life, have unidentifiable substances smeared into them, and the walls will have to be redone because they reek of cigarette smoke.

My reaction to this made me realize something. Tenants, like customers, are not always right. Sometimes a landlord really is trying to just get by in a hostile world the same as the tenant is, and sometimes a tenant really is an ungrateful viper who feels entitled to trash other people's property. I still believe that in most cases both public and private morals favor tenants, and I still believe in strong legal protections and rights for renters and in some situations even for squatters. But most cases are not all cases, and sometimes people abuse their rights.

It's going to take a while to work out how exactly to incorporate this experience into my broader leftist values, which, at their core, are unshakeable. But I pride myself on being willing to reassess my non-core values and beliefs on the basis of my experiences, and this experience does seem to put the lie to some of my specific views on power relationships as they relate to housing policy.

I'd like this to be a more general thread than just a whinefest on my part, so why don't we all discuss situations in our own lives that have caused us to reassess aspects of our political attitudes?

[John Dule]

It is well past time that leftists stopped reflexively demonizing landlords. From the way CraneHusband talks, you'd think that every landlord in this country looks like one of the pig-nosed, bow tie-wearing fat cats from Soviet propaganda cartoons. The truth is that the vast majority of landlords are just normal people who found themselves in possession of a relatively cheap piece of property (likely due to a relative's death), and they are trying to use that asset to modestly supplement their income.

Laws that "protect" tenants from very basic expectations-- for example, paying rent on time and not trashing the place-- are among the dumbest statutes ever passed in this country. Not only do they cause the assets to rapidly depreciate in value, but they also scare landlords away from renting out their properties. This is why in San Francisco, so many perfectly habitable buildings sit empty and unused-- the owners know that if they rent to an unscrupulous person, it will be years before they can successfully evict them.

I recall Sev and PSOL having a good laugh when I said that my family hasn't rented out my grandad's old house yet, even three years after his death. But ever since the moratorium on evictions and the rent cancellations due to the pandemic, I've been quite confident that we made the correct decision. If we'd rented the place earlier, we could now be stuck with some vagrant living in my dad's childhood home, refusing to pay any rent and smearing layers of grime across the floors and walls. We were lucky enough to not desperately need money at the time-- but the upshot is that this habitable, nice house in a very expensive city is currently empty, due in no small part to the fact that the government has failed in its obligation to protect our basic property rights.

In no other realm of the market is theft explicitly sanctioned by the government. But squatting and failure to pay rent are theft, on the same level as breaking into someone's house and stealing their things. The government's sanction of these activities has led to a total breakdown of trust in the rental market in California; landlords demand exorbitant security deposits that price people out of certain neighborhoods, and people with middling credit scores can't hope to rent anywhere close to where they work. Leftists broke the housing market in my state, and until they get their heads around how exactly their inane policies have failed, we will continue to be at the mercy of state-sponsored theft.

[If my soul was made of stone]

When I first began experiencing gender dysphoria, about six years ago now, at first I pushed back against it and became a lot more hostile and pedantic towards what little I knew of transness at the time, out of a desire to discharge the fear and discomfort and avoid showing vulnerability. At the same time, a lot of toxic TERF-adjacent opinions were beginning to percolate in a parallel strand of thought, informed by the developmental inequities between the sexes that are so evident at that age, a lack of positive masculine presences in my life, and what I would later realize was a very intense dysphoria around matters of fertility, so I was holding very dated and casually bigoted views around gender non-conformity from the twin angles of resenting my own dysphoria and intensely idolizing and fearing all of the feminine presences in my life, especially those to whom I developed romantic attachments. Eventually, a few bad experiences with female peers that reminded me that girls were people too and not all the inviolable incarnation of Isis, and contact with fellow trans people, such as my ex, helped me realize that I didn't have to view myself as inherently broken or inferior, but in some ways the biases still run deep and I'm still fighting them.

[PSOL]

I’ve become disillusioned before from how difficult it is to get major socialist figures and organizations to move away from idealizing, and incorrectly following, their interpretation of the past. The “past” infects everything and leads to friction where there should not be, and division into less effective organizing that just looks unappealing to many.

I’ve spoken against the idea of hiding or moderating ones views on here. I’ve spoken against the bad faith arguments of the “People’s Front” sectarianism meme. However, in good faith, there’s issues of blindly idealizing and following the past where conditions are now different. Forming an exclusive microsect uninterested in actual organization but holding the right ideology leads to little growth. Being larpers isn’t viable. Worse still is when the organization or individual created this authoritarian or cultish atmosphere around themselves, painting crackdowns on opposing views as enforcing party discipline.

What I mean by all this is based on real life microsects. The PSL defends their garbage organization model, decentralized to be ineffective in operating sustained campaigns yet unable to do much without the central committees approval, under historical circumstances. Firstly, they say since the Bolsheviks were tightly controlled as such that they’re only following a successful model, Nevermind the Bolsheviks becoming more open to the public coinsided with massive growth. Secondly, they say since Trotskyist party organization allowed for decentralized and “democratic” leadership in a branch, they adopt this dogma uncritically. What comes to follow is an organization based on following abusive personalities who don’t agree on much to be effective on things other then protesting and preventing reformers outside the ruling clique to have a say. They’re usage of dogma and “historical lessons” are both self-serving and ineffective to modern conditions. To something more broad, as a whole most socialists don’t know who the “working class” is and don’t do enough messaging on trying to attract pensioners and those reliant (or wanting to in old age) on them and social security. There’s more I could say but I’m going to leave it at there.

Recent musings have led me to back the frickin Green Party because they seem to be rectifying their past mistakes and are becoming more active, as much as I don’t like their line or their brand of politics. I’m backing them because they are working to function well in this environment. It’s a shame that we in the States don’t have something to the effect of the main socialist parties and general political culture—or even effective broad fronts—of Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Norway, or Nepal.

Nathan, I feel immensely for what your family has to deal with. If I can paraphrase Lenin, those who do not work (in good faith), do not eat escape punishments or reprobation for taking from others. Even with universal public housing, s••••y tenants won’t be free to f••• things up on the establishment or to other tenants.

In the meanwhile, private landlords dealing with s•••heads just there f•••ing up the place should get booted. I’m hoping your family takes the tenant to court and evict the tenant from your lives as soon as possible.

Some people get high off their own fumes and force themselves into new activist spaces when they run out of causes to pontificate about. Its so toxic and frustrating.

Forever Peter Pan activists are the worst and I honestly regret getting involved in politics, in activism, etc...

I've seen how it has absolutely corrupted intelligent human beings. Completely blinded by their ideological dogmas. Left or right? Who cares - its present in every major and minor party.

I often look at some of the things people advocate for and I just want to ask "how does it feel getting high off your own pretentiousness?"

What you are seeing here is something intertwined with two powerful points you’ve made in the past. Firstly, that a majority of culture warriors are out of touch with reality by not exemplifying those values. Secondly, of the privileged “bored people” being so over-represented in politics. They’re divorced from the normal people they believe to be fighting for.

Seeing these blowhards on the left make a fool of themselves over and over again is so depressing. On the example in the botched unionization attempt in Bessemer, they failed because the union leadership was so out of touch with reality and had done so little work that a few threats from Amazon was all it took to scare a significant amount of people. Years of work were not done due to the “organizers” believing so highly of their extremely online campaigning, attracting attention to themselves but not to the people they seek to represent. The online dirtbag left crowd of rich students in lala land who are so up their own @$$ that they fire on each other in acts of ultra-zealous pretention. The rich kids larping as urban guerrillas, simping for a murderous regime of wreckers who found it easier to work with elites than other leftists.

Normal people don’t have the resources, especially free time, to learn and organize for themselves compared to those from wealthier backgrounds. So you see the result, wealthy people who are self-segregated from those who have experienced reality take up most of political power and discussion.

[Never Made it to Graceland]

It is well past time that leftists stopped reflexively demonizing landlords. From the way CraneHusband talks, you'd think that every landlord in this country looks like one of the pig-nosed, bow tie-wearing fat cats from Soviet propaganda cartoons. The truth is that the vast majority of landlords are just normal people who found themselves in possession of a relatively cheap piece of property (likely due to a relative's death), and they are trying to use that asset to modestly supplement their income.

Laws that "protect" tenants from very basic expectations-- for example, paying rent on time and not trashing the place-- are among the dumbest statutes ever passed in this country. Not only do they cause the assets to rapidly depreciate in value, but they also scare landlords away from renting out their properties. This is why in San Francisco, so many perfectly habitable buildings sit empty and unused-- the owners know that if they rent to an unscrupulous person, it will be years before they can successfully evict them.

I recall Sev and PSOL having a good laugh when I said that my family hasn't rented out my grandad's old house yet, even three years after his death. But ever since the moratorium on evictions and the rent cancellations due to the pandemic, I've been quite confident that we made the correct decision. If we'd rented the place earlier, we could now be stuck with some vagrant living in my dad's childhood home, refusing to pay any rent and smearing layers of grime across the floors and walls. We were lucky enough to not desperately need money at the time-- but the upshot is that this habitable, nice house in a very expensive city is currently empty, due in no small part to the fact that the government has failed in its obligation to protect our basic property rights.

In no other realm of the market is theft explicitly sanctioned by the government. But squatting and failure to pay rent are theft, on the same level as breaking into someone's house and stealing their things. The government's sanction of these activities has led to a total breakdown of trust in the rental market in California; landlords demand exorbitant security deposits that price people out of certain neighborhoods, and people with middling credit scores can't hope to rent anywhere close to where they work. Leftists broke the housing market in my state, and until they get their heads around how exactly their inane policies have failed, we will continue to be at the mercy of state-sponsored theft.

Not all landlords are evil. But the majority of housing in America is owned by ruthlessly exploitative large development companies. If they weren't, then the average rent wouldn't be far outstripping any increase in average wages. They spike them because they know they can. If you look at any list of the worst landlords in NYC, many of them own thousands of units. These are not mom and pop companies renting out the family homestead.
The other problem is Airbnb.

But as for situations like Nathan's family's, yes that's absolutely atrocious and it's bad when small landlords deal with awful tenants. In NYC the eviction moratorium has some people thinking they can do whatever they want - like the asshole in ny building who keeps a large pitbull in his tiny room.

[John Dule]

It is well past time that leftists stopped reflexively demonizing landlords. From the way CraneHusband talks, you'd think that every landlord in this country looks like one of the pig-nosed, bow tie-wearing fat cats from Soviet propaganda cartoons. The truth is that the vast majority of landlords are just normal people who found themselves in possession of a relatively cheap piece of property (likely due to a relative's death), and they are trying to use that asset to modestly supplement their income.

Laws that "protect" tenants from very basic expectations-- for example, paying rent on time and not trashing the place-- are among the dumbest statutes ever passed in this country. Not only do they cause the assets to rapidly depreciate in value, but they also scare landlords away from renting out their properties. This is why in San Francisco, so many perfectly habitable buildings sit empty and unused-- the owners know that if they rent to an unscrupulous person, it will be years before they can successfully evict them.

I recall Sev and PSOL having a good laugh when I said that my family hasn't rented out my grandad's old house yet, even three years after his death. But ever since the moratorium on evictions and the rent cancellations due to the pandemic, I've been quite confident that we made the correct decision. If we'd rented the place earlier, we could now be stuck with some vagrant living in my dad's childhood home, refusing to pay any rent and smearing layers of grime across the floors and walls. We were lucky enough to not desperately need money at the time-- but the upshot is that this habitable, nice house in a very expensive city is currently empty, due in no small part to the fact that the government has failed in its obligation to protect our basic property rights.

In no other realm of the market is theft explicitly sanctioned by the government. But squatting and failure to pay rent are theft, on the same level as breaking into someone's house and stealing their things. The government's sanction of these activities has led to a total breakdown of trust in the rental market in California; landlords demand exorbitant security deposits that price people out of certain neighborhoods, and people with middling credit scores can't hope to rent anywhere close to where they work. Leftists broke the housing market in my state, and until they get their heads around how exactly their inane policies have failed, we will continue to be at the mercy of state-sponsored theft.

Not all landlords are evil. But the majority of housing in America is owned by ruthlessly exploitative large development companies. If they weren't, then the average rent wouldn't be far outstripping any increase in average wages.

Rents are high because housing is scarce. Housing is scarce because construction is costly. Construction is costly because the industry is overregulated. The industry is overregulated because cities elect leftists.

[Never Made it to Graceland]

It is well past time that leftists stopped reflexively demonizing landlords. From the way CraneHusband talks, you'd think that every landlord in this country looks like one of the pig-nosed, bow tie-wearing fat cats from Soviet propaganda cartoons. The truth is that the vast majority of landlords are just normal people who found themselves in possession of a relatively cheap piece of property (likely due to a relative's death), and they are trying to use that asset to modestly supplement their income.

Laws that "protect" tenants from very basic expectations-- for example, paying rent on time and not trashing the place-- are among the dumbest statutes ever passed in this country. Not only do they cause the assets to rapidly depreciate in value, but they also scare landlords away from renting out their properties. This is why in San Francisco, so many perfectly habitable buildings sit empty and unused-- the owners know that if they rent to an unscrupulous person, it will be years before they can successfully evict them.

I recall Sev and PSOL having a good laugh when I said that my family hasn't rented out my grandad's old house yet, even three years after his death. But ever since the moratorium on evictions and the rent cancellations due to the pandemic, I've been quite confident that we made the correct decision. If we'd rented the place earlier, we could now be stuck with some vagrant living in my dad's childhood home, refusing to pay any rent and smearing layers of grime across the floors and walls. We were lucky enough to not desperately need money at the time-- but the upshot is that this habitable, nice house in a very expensive city is currently empty, due in no small part to the fact that the government has failed in its obligation to protect our basic property rights.

In no other realm of the market is theft explicitly sanctioned by the government. But squatting and failure to pay rent are theft, on the same level as breaking into someone's house and stealing their things. The government's sanction of these activities has led to a total breakdown of trust in the rental market in California; landlords demand exorbitant security deposits that price people out of certain neighborhoods, and people with middling credit scores can't hope to rent anywhere close to where they work. Leftists broke the housing market in my state, and until they get their heads around how exactly their inane policies have failed, we will continue to be at the mercy of state-sponsored theft.

Not all landlords are evil. But the majority of housing in America is owned by ruthlessly exploitative large development companies. If they weren't, then the average rent wouldn't be far outstripping any increase in average wages.

Rents are high because housing is scarce. Housing is scarce because construction is costly. Construction is costly because the industry is overregulated. The industry is overregulated because cities elect leftists.

That's a simplistic and not very accurate way of looking at it.

[Geoffrey Howe]

It is well past time that leftists stopped reflexively demonizing landlords. From the way CraneHusband talks, you'd think that every landlord in this country looks like one of the pig-nosed, bow tie-wearing fat cats from Soviet propaganda cartoons. The truth is that the vast majority of landlords are just normal people who found themselves in possession of a relatively cheap piece of property (likely due to a relative's death), and they are trying to use that asset to modestly supplement their income.

Laws that "protect" tenants from very basic expectations-- for example, paying rent on time and not trashing the place-- are among the dumbest statutes ever passed in this country. Not only do they cause the assets to rapidly depreciate in value, but they also scare landlords away from renting out their properties. This is why in San Francisco, so many perfectly habitable buildings sit empty and unused-- the owners know that if they rent to an unscrupulous person, it will be years before they can successfully evict them.

I recall Sev and PSOL having a good laugh when I said that my family hasn't rented out my grandad's old house yet, even three years after his death. But ever since the moratorium on evictions and the rent cancellations due to the pandemic, I've been quite confident that we made the correct decision. If we'd rented the place earlier, we could now be stuck with some vagrant living in my dad's childhood home, refusing to pay any rent and smearing layers of grime across the floors and walls. We were lucky enough to not desperately need money at the time-- but the upshot is that this habitable, nice house in a very expensive city is currently empty, due in no small part to the fact that the government has failed in its obligation to protect our basic property rights.

In no other realm of the market is theft explicitly sanctioned by the government. But squatting and failure to pay rent are theft, on the same level as breaking into someone's house and stealing their things. The government's sanction of these activities has led to a total breakdown of trust in the rental market in California; landlords demand exorbitant security deposits that price people out of certain neighborhoods, and people with middling credit scores can't hope to rent anywhere close to where they work. Leftists broke the housing market in my state, and until they get their heads around how exactly their inane policies have failed, we will continue to be at the mercy of state-sponsored theft.

France often seems to have that problem, but also a somewhat related problem of banning supermarkets in town/city centres. From what I gather that has meant you only have very expensive small shops in the centre but a proliferation of shopping complexes on the edge of town which not only look horrible but make it very difficult for people on lower incomes to live without a car. I also hear that pedestrianisation in the UK has caused town centres to become moribund as people struggle to get there; again, leading to a proliferation of shopping centres on the outskirts - and not actually preserving the character of the high street.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I try not to let this happen to me anymore. When it comes to politics, the inherently limited nature of personal experience should cause you to ask questions, not just find new answers.

[vitoNova]

I had the same exact views at 13, 23, and 33.  

And will have the same identical views at 43, 53, and 83. 

[afleitch]

I think nearly every view I've ever held that has switched is due to either personal experience or empathy with others who have had different experiences. I'd be frightened for myself if they hadn't.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

I would not say that anything like that has ever befallen me, although as bore correctly pointed out to me yesterday it is hard to call a religious conversion anything other than "reassessing views due to personal experience". However I assume that's not the kind of personal experience (or even the kind of views, but that is something which would require its own post) that OP had in mind.

[John Dule]

That's a simplistic and not very accurate way of looking at it.

Well, I'm often forced to simplify things in order to communicate with Atlas leftists.

[beesley]

As I have said before on this forum, I was brought up in a right-wing echo chamber, but have moved to the left, particularly on economic issues, since I became an adult, going to university, seeing the economic situation of my generation, finding property, and the pandemic. I have also become more ideological. However, it is personal experience that has meant I have retained many of the right-wing views from my echo-chamber days, as well as continued Eurosceptic and pro-life stances.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

I became more sympathetic to small business owners- and more broadly the vocational experiences of non-white, non-college people- during college, than would be expected for someone with my upbringing and life experiences.

Conversation I had with a Lyft driver near the end of college, after 45’s inauguration. Post is from Sept 2019:

Off topic, but I once had a Lyft driver in college who looked ethnically ambiguous- couldn’t tell if he was a super tan Italian American or mixed Italian + Puerto Rican or something- but in any case he definitely did not look stereotypically “white”. He made sure he was out of earshot from the upper-class white frat boy/finance types who I shared the ride with before going, “it might not be politically correct to say, but if you were in NYC in the 80s there were some places it just wasn’t safe to be if you weren’t black or brown.” I don’t remember how we got to the topic, but it was a pretty thought-provoking Lyft ride.

[Kingpoleon]

Rent control and zoning laws are huge drivers of inequality. The fairy tale of NIMBYism depends not on real grounding, but on grounding itself in self-sustaining power.

[Person Man]

[/shadow]]

Rent control and zoning laws are huge drivers of inequality. The fairy tale of NIMBYism depends not on real grounding, but on grounding itself in self-sustaining power.

NIMBYism is definitely a huge part of entitlement culture that is a problem amongst voters and officials on both sides of the aisle. Some of the HOAs in HCOL can basically evict people from their homes or work in concert with the local government to condemn houses they don't like without eminent domain. "Nobody wants your $60k 3 bed room house that was built in the 50s. They want the $600k quarter acre parcel of land your house sits on. Bulldozing your house is doing you a favor and that's why you now owe $12,000".

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Working in tax accounting and seeing how incredibly irresponsible and often downright wasteful the wealthy can be, while seeing how little many small business owners and independent contractors (e.g. drivers for Uber) make, pushed me much further to the left on progressive taxation.


Having to go through the immigration process twice, and seeing how the system is designed to make your life as difficult as possible, along with having the immigration axe above your head at all times, has also pushed me much further to the left on the topic than I already was. I have absolutely zero respect for people who trash talk immigrants or make opposing immigration a personality trait.


Working in accounting, along with getting a specialized degree in valuation, pushed me far more to the left as well when it comes to paying employees, strengthening unions, and implementing stronger employment protection laws. Once you see the sometimes borderline impossible demands for profits that some owners have, while slashing payroll and working employees harder and harder, when the company is already swimming in cash, gets you pretty angry and the sheer greed that some people have. Didn't help that the CFO of my most recent job was the CFO of one of those food delivery companies when they were caught stealing workers' wages. Nothing wrong with making a profit, but if you have to make a profit by abusing workers, then you don't deserve to be in business.

[Person Man]

Working in tax accounting and seeing how incredibly irresponsible and often downright wasteful the wealthy can be, while seeing how little many small business owners and independent contractors (e.g. drivers for Uber) make, pushed me much further to the left on progressive taxation.


Having to go through the immigration process twice, and seeing how the system is designed to make your life as difficult as possible, along with having the immigration axe above your head at all times, has also pushed me much further to the left on the topic than I already was. I have absolutely zero respect for people who trash talk immigrants or make opposing immigration a personality trait.


Working in accounting, along with getting a specialized degree in valuation, pushed me far more to the left as well when it comes to paying employees, strengthening unions, and implementing stronger employment protection laws. Once you see the sometimes borderline impossible demands for profits that some owners have, while slashing payroll and working employees harder and harder, when the company is already swimming in cash, gets you pretty angry and the sheer greed that some people have. Didn't help that the CFO of my most recent job was the CFO of one of those food delivery companies when they were caught stealing workers' wages. Nothing wrong with making a profit, but if you have to make a profit by abusing workers, then you don't deserve to be in business.

It feels more like an antitrust issue the more and more I think about how companies treat their workers. I first thought of that when I asked HR how wages were assessed and they said "we analyze the "local market" to decide where to place wages". In a small college town with maybe half a dozen large employers, it doesn't seem a lot like a market.

[John Dule]

That's a simplistic and not very accurate way of looking at it.

Well, I'm often forced to simplify things in order to communicate with Atlas leftists.

I noticed you never addressed the topic of this thread. Have you ever realized you were wrong about something and reassessed your views because of that personal experience?

When I change my views, it's not usually because of personal experience, but rather just because I looked at the issue from a different angle.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I agree with CraneHusband that this issue looks very different from the point of view of a renter because the kinds of "big" property owners who can afford to develop seriously predatory practices, well, own more property than people like my mother do. So the question of "what most landlords are like" has an entirely different answer depending on whether you're looking at it from a supply-side or a demand-side perspective, which is why this experience hasn't turned me and isn't going to turn me into a full Dulean on housing policy.

However,

That's a simplistic and not very accurate way of looking at it.

Well, I'm often forced to simplify things in order to communicate with Atlas leftists.

CraneHusband walked right into this one.

[Del Tachi]

On the question of landlords, I had the experience in grad school of being slapped with more than $1,000 in cleaning fees after living in the same place for 2+ years and being a pretty much perfect tenant (no missed/late rent, minimal maintenance requests, etc.)  I later found out that this particular rental company was notorious for doing such. 

Thankfully because I have sixth-grade education and know how to use Google, I was able to look up the Georgia tenant law and see I was allowed to contest the charges and force the landlord to go to small claims court.  The $1,000 was worth a lot more to me than it was to them, so they ending up dropping everything.  If I hadn't known about the letter, the landlord would have had the right to transfer my account to a collections agency in as few as thirty days.

[parochial boy]

One thing that does always strike me from coming here is that, judging purely from what even left wing posters on here say, housing policy seems to be an area where Americans are significantly to the right of almost all of Europe on.

Like, these days, even on the centre right there is an increasing consenses that the experiment of a liberalised housing market has been a disaster and that it is time to turn back towards the one policy that was in practice the most succesful one we have ever had - social housing. And lots of it.

And yet, when I come here, even left wingers seem to have this view that something as complex and intricate as housing policy can be treated as simply as if it is one supply and demand curve and you just build and that is all there is to it - as if all the other economic and social and demographic factors just get subsumed into that. Social housing seems to be even beyong the wildest imaginations, even though it has proved its use in the past.

Certain US cities seem to be having a particularly intense housing crisis, beyond even what similar European cities are going through. So you wonder if there is a link somewhere.

And on another note

Snip.

Three years at a big 4 accountancy firm in England at the time of Brexit had almost exactly the same impact on my politics. Crazy coincidence, huh?

[Cassius]

Anyone who serves time in the Big 4/the upper echelons of the financial services sector more generally (I was in banking but I know a few Big 4 people and I’m probably the only person in history to have read ICAEW teaching materials out of personal interest) and doesn’t come away feeling incredibly jaded and cynical about the private sector and liberal economics is either congenitally stupid or like the android from Alien. Those latter two categories of course are where the Big 4/the banks recruit most of their partners from.

[walleye26]

One of the biggest things I can say I really didn’t understand until a few years ago is just how much being poor f***s you over. Literally everything about being poor causes your life to suck. Did you guys know you have to pay for filing bankruptcy? That makes sense. You know, you’re out of money, so you have to pay money so you don’t owe any money. Then, you have to eat complete sh***y food because you live in a food desert and the only thing you can afford is Chef Boyardee and Ramen noodles for 8 nights in a row. I’m not even bringing up how bail can screw you over, or how one simple accident can destroy everything in your life if you’re poor.

Like, growing up relatively middle class, I never realized just how dangerous life is for poor people in our country. You can’t afford to take a sick day, because if you don’t have paid sick time you literally can’t afford to. Covid exposed that so much for so many. I learned to be much more empathetic to people in poverty.