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Businesses exist to make money for their owners, full stop. Any needs they fulfill are largely incidental.

That's how we end up with businesses like landlords, which fulfil negative needs and extract value without creating anything at all.

Making it possible to live in a house without having the money up front to buy one does provide value.

If they weren't owned by landlords, you'd have the money up front to buy one.

That does not follow at all. How would, for example, a college student with no assets be able to buy a house up front if landlording was illegal?

How do they buy anything else, like textbooks or coffee? They have a student loan - that's how.

You ever met a college student with an Xbox? If we stopped treating houses as an investment and started treating them as a commodity like Xboxes, you could afford one.

I very much doubt it because it takes many times as many resources to create a house than an Xbox. Making housing loans to people with no income or assets is a great way to cause a financial collapse, as we saw not too many years ago.

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