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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

Replace housing with a good QoL, and this is exactly how I think. There is no reward for hard work. stability (housing, family, career, healthcare, transport) is just not achievable with money, in the US at least. I can get a MUCH higher quality of life in SE Asia or Mexico than I ever could in America.

So why would I care about working too hard at my current job? What does working hard and sticking around buy me?

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It used to be common knowledge that home ownership was the bedrock of American civil society. There's nothing like a 30 year mortgage and a couple of kids to keep a person locked in.

My editorial opinion is that rich people got greedy and stopped caring about the middle class and upward mobility. They saw houses as an investment opportunity they could sell as securitized tranches to overseas buyers. So it's grab as much cash as you can and write opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal about how this new generation is lazy and doesn't want to work.

I see it as being connected to the dynamics of empire, more generally. Property ownership - and its enforcement by the state - extends vassalage to the masses, tying them up in the system in a way that rent alone can't: too invested to skip town, too small to have a voice in the legal framework.

If you "drop out" and live modestly, there's much less coercion to be had. That means that as the empire tightens up control over its assets, it foments moments of generational revolution through exclusion. And we have a picture now of that throughout the US, but also globally: no way onto the property ladder, crumbling faith in the enforcers, an older generation exiting and leaving behind institutions in need of a retrofit. It's a good time to quit given that it's not clear what the rat race gets you now.

The cheerleaders of empire, on the other hand, are necessarily going to be the biggest and best-funded media establishments, and because they operate within imperial reality they can only use logic from within the Overton Window, ideas that do not question the system and instead provides a scapegoat for its failings. Hence we are all a bunch of avocado toast quitters now, influenced by "extremists", "radicals" and "fake news".

Well said. I want to add that owning a house and having a stake in the system naturally turns people towards conservatism. People want to conserve and preserve what they have. When I owned a house and had money I became a Reagan Republican. I lost it all through divorce and other problems, so one day I was watching "Grapes of Wrath" and thought to myself "Why the f am I a Republican?" I became a Democrat.

Republicans know this and have a remedy, which they need because millions of young people are toying with ideas like Solar Punk, Socialism, Fully Automated Luxury Communism and even (gasp!) full old school Communism.

The only way Wall Street Republicans can have it all these days is to make sure elections don't count so young people no longer have a vote or say in the system. I'm a little stunned at the lengths they are willing to go and be so brazen about it. They want to create a two tiered apartheid system of the haves and the have nots. They might succeed in the short term, but unless they give people a stake in the system, those millions of people will tear it down. It won't be pretty when that happens.

There's a problem though. They might be able to convince people they have a stake in the system when they actually don't. You want real estate? How about this plot of "land' in the Metaverse. You want to own things? How about all these NFT's you can buy and feel proud to own.

The ugly reality is that this new generation gets bullied by very rich tyrants who own homes. Wall Street is a mafia of warmongering tyrants who don't care about human rights and people's well-being. It's been economically proven that America has been having decreasing social mobility. America's middle class is not shrinking for no reason. Very rich tyrants have been causing this decreasing social mobility, so they can hoard money into their private banks while many people suffer and die of starvation from increasing wealth inequality. It's what causes American cilivization to collapse. Some countries' rulers are not allies to America anymore because of this. American society has become dystopian against future generations' well-being. There are many ways to prove America is no longer a great country for everyone. It's corporate oligarchy that influences mainstream media to gaslight working class Americans about how great America is. Sad to see America become a dystopian dumpster fire where working class Americans are treated like dehumanized serfs who don't have enough money to own homes.

Not just overseas buyers, there are many people with a lot of houses who aren’t foreigners.

For sure, like Adam Neumann, who is backed by Marc Andreessen of a16z. Marc was recently in the news for not wanting the poors in his neighborhood. They don't even try to hide it anymore.

Adam Neumann, Vibes Landlord

https://www.curbed.com/2022/08/adam-neumann-residential-real...

VC Billionaire Marc Andreessen and Ultra-Wealthy Neighbors Thwart Housing in California Town

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/vc-marc-a...

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