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Comment by hyuuu | Hacker News Reader

how would you direct private capital to maintain/build living spaces then? Unless you are thinking to have government to be responsible to do that, building more to keep up with the demand + maintenance of the existing ones. It does work in places like Singapore, but I am not sure I would trust the US Gov's execution.

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By separating the productive activities of construction and administration from the parasitic activity of rent seeking.

Some people want to rent and some other people supply it, there is nothing parasitic about it, it is like any other trade.

Rent seeking isn’t parasitic. It provides liquidity to the housing market where it wouldn’t otherwise exist. You want to move to a different city, renting doesn’t exist, then what? How does that work for anyone who can’t make a downpayment, or anyone who is in a hurry, or at all really? Nationalized housing in the US tends is even more dystopian than the private sector.

If you want a vibrant, sane, and fair rental market, we’d need an actual free and fair market in the first place.

rent-seeking is the economic concept of income being captured from simply owning an asset rather than from productivity. its literally anti-capitalistic, as it's always a market distortion that creates the coercive force necessary to inefficiently funnel income this way. fair markets would compete away rent-seeking in short order.

that's different from providing rental housing, whereby owners earn rent by constantly working to provide safe and desirable housing. capitalism is premised on the idea of using markets to drive down prices to the marginal cost of production plus a small industry-/market-specific risk premium. rent-seeking is entirely counter to that.

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