We need a 'right to repair' for software -- anyone release commercial software should be forced to release the source code and allow users to build, modify and distribute it for free.
Yeah because anti semitism has long and violent history. White people have not been on the receiving end of systemic violence because of their whiteness -- they have perpetrated in and benefited from it.
Yours is a bizarre liberal conception of racism that totally ignores historical and material context, where you can just replace words in a sentence to prove it's racist. If you replace the word white in that sentence with another race, it has a totally different meaning, because the context is totally different.
White men DO have disproportionate access to money and power in the US, are you disputing that?
Criticizing wealthy white tech people for exploiting their power and privilege to exclude others is not at all comparable for disparaging black fathers.
>Housing is a resource. If you have a magic wand to make resources exempt from economic forces, please wave it over food prices for the rest of us.
That magic wand is called public policy. There are similar things you could say about food -- i.e. how unregulated markets lead to developing countries being forced to export cash crops instead of growing food that people in that country need to actually eat.
>That is a huge claim. If people could use their land as they like there probably wouldn't be a housing shortage. Developers make large fortunes out of install dense blocks of apartments; and doing that isn't going to make housing more expensive.
4.8 million households in the U.S. depend on Section 8 to afford rent. These are direct subsidies to landlords to house these people. In an unregulated market, landlords would not rent to these people, and they would be homeless, or they would live in actual slums, which don't really exist in the U.S., but would have to in a fully unregulated market.
That's correct -- there is no contradiction here. A totally unregulated housing market would be an unmitigated disaster. And some regulations are certainly counter-productive (e.g. exclusionary zoning). The problem isn't "more regulation" or "less regulation" -- it's making affordable housing a priority and crafting policy that is consistent with that goal. The problem isn't that the people in charge are stupid and bad at economics, it's that landlords and developers (and to some extent, homeowners) have a tremendous amount of power and resist the political changes that need to occur in order for housing to become affordable.
I agree -- but we need public housing. The market does not build affordable housing.
Libertarians have this idea that the housing market is restricted by government regulation and just needs to be freed in order to flourish. In actuality, the only reason there is any affordable or low-income housing in the U.S. is because of government money (Section 8, LIHTC, public housing, etc). Homelessness is a totally solvable problem, and any place that has solved it knows the solution: build enough homes for people to live in, through state-funded programs!
Housing should not be a commodity. Rent control is a solution to a specific problem of housing being a commodity -- landlords spiking tenants' rents, forcing them to relocate. It isn't a solution to the housing shortage. The solution to the housing shortage, which, for example Bernie Sanders proposes in his plan and this article fails to mention, is dramatically expanding affordable public housing. There is simply no other solution to the housing crisis than to decommodify housing, considering it a public good and a right. The unregulated market has never and will never provide affordable housing to all on its own.
Economists love to criticize rent control because in some abstract economic sense it is "bad", but most people don't care about the market efficiency (Which mostly means maximizing profit to landlords and developers) of the housing market. They care that their communities are not destroyed by gentrification and that they are able to stay in their homes without being dislocated, both goals that rent control is successful at achieving.
Exactly. Crime is a social and economic problem that prisons and police do little to solve, with great harm to society. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere.
