>>149895>You're not growing more than 4lbs of carrots in your back garden. Buddy.I don't have a back garden, so it's a moot point. If I did, it wouldn't actually take much space to grow that many carrots.
>Such sloppy thinking. No it's not. I brought up communal labor - why wouldn't I think of farming in those terms? It's more efficient than growing carrots "in my back garden."
>Multiple the number of people in your commune by the minimum wage rate and then divide that by the price of carrots in the supermarket.That would be about 45 lbs of carrots. With about 300 sq feet you could grow twice that. Subsidize that carrot harvest, increase the amount of land, and you're swimming in carrots, and you can sell your carrot surplus decently cheap with that farm aid coming in and you don't have to worry about anybody else taking a cut of the profits.
>Nothing, I said you are free to do it. The implication that you will gain more resources from being part of a commune >>149881 is objectively false though.Even if you didn't gain more resources (which it seems you would, actually),
>>149881 was referring simply to access to the fruits of one's own labor. If you haven't had that, you won't understand what I mean; I'm not kidding. In most of society, labor is middle-managed, people are shut out, they're subjected to hierarchies based mostly around little despots rather than the ability or need to produce necessary things. Achievement of a goal, completion of a task, because reduced to an abstract measure of how a specific individual will determine that task's value subjectively. To grow a carrot crop and harvest it and reap the benefit directly in the form of carrots is something fundamentally enlightening. There is a veil over much of labor, and in this sort of task that veil is removed. This is what I was referring to, although it is also interesting to know that this process is also more rewarding in terms of pure yield, too.
>>149898>I'm sure you are smart enough to realize that even if you were alone on a desert island with no evil capitalism you would still need to do some kind of work to keep yourself alive.I said that in the next paragraph, yes. ;P
>And yet people don't starve on the street. This is an incredibly naive statement.
Firstly…
yeah, they do. Secondly, a lot of food insecurity isn't even on the street level - homelessness in a major city tends to go better food-wise than destitution in (often less urban) homes does, because keeping a roof over your head costs money. If you don't have access to cheap food or charity and you have to pay rent, tightening your belt means
tightening your belt. Even if the urban homeless tend to have access to pantries, the consequences of being homeless are severe. It's strange that shelter, a resource which humans have evolved around seeking for thousands of years, is so undervalued in your mind.
>You need to elaborate here.Land speculation is an investment against labor, and against commerce. By buying up land as a speculative asset, the overall supply of land, a fixed resource, is reduced. Since land supply is constantly going down even
before speculation, and speculative buying/holding of land
accelerates the speed at which available supply is reduced, land speculation is a popular way to secure capital over time without actually producing anything or doing any kind of productive labor or investment. Because idle, speculative landholding increases scarcity, it makes the cost of housing go up faster over time.
This applies across all sectors. Landlords not only profit from the ownership of others' homes, but also from the ownership of others' businesses. The cut they take from commerce is a major blow, and the only reason capitalists go along with it is the assurance that those capitalists can reinvest their own capital in land once they've made enough profits on actual businesses which offer goods and services created through labor.
Mortgages, being often incredibly high under these conditions, are functionally not so unlike rent collection. The inflated price of land enables banks to offer these massive long-term loans, because there would be little other option for most workers. The homeowner can live for decades in the home they own, paying both the state whose laws protect their right to the land, and the bank for whom the state protects the right to extract the land from out under the homeowners' feet should they miss a few mortgage payments. Don't you think that's a little bit funny?
Now, it's funnier still when these conditions all align just perfectly to absolutely wreck the economy because living without incurring these insane debts simply isn't viable for so many people. We have so many empty buildings, but at the same time we have around half a million homeless (might be an optimistic estimate, though they do die a lot so maybe not), we have around 11 million unemployed. We have all these resources, and yet things are aligned so that having all of these resources drags us down. I'm not saying it couldn't be worse, but it could absolutely be better. Maybe landlords ought to work for a living like everybody else.