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Comment by jdnenej | Hacker News Reader

So you are saying that people may only own land if they work or live on the land? This is not desirable for most businesses where renting property makes much more sense since it gives them the flexability to expand or downsize. It is also not desirable for people who are living somewhere temporarily.

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Renting is desirable because land is expensive to buy. And that's because its value is inflated because you can use it as the source of passive income (rent).

If you could buy land from somebody moving out at the price similar to todays renting you wouldn't want to rent. And the company that's moving out would have incentive to sell it to you at low price because ofter it stops operating there it will loose the ownership and get nothing.

Renting itself is fine. Property ownership is actually a huge, annoying pain in the ass which, putting aside financial security reasons, and the fact that renters are often treated like scum, nobody would want to go through.

What is at issue here is landlording for private gain. As I pointed out, these rents are entirely unearned because nobody made land, and so should flow to the general public, not private owners.

Under that logic wouldn't a farmer farming for private gain have unearned money? They didn't make the land.

Not that there is never unjust rent-seeking activity but there are real investment of capital and work involved and merely "dependence on land" isn't a sufficient arguement.

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