>>472567>99% of people do not own land. Land is owned mostly by large corporations and petty bourgeoisie fag.Why do you think that is, moron?
They buy it up, it's profitable. They use it to extract rents. A few people own disproportionate amounts of land because everyone needs land and controlling the supply is profitable.
>It has nothing to do with the general economy and has nothing to do with inflation. It will cause the housing market specifically to inflate in value which we are seeing now.Oh, yeah, because the cost of rent and housing has no impact on the rest of the economy… right… think about this a little bit. Who are these people who don't need housing? Where are these businesses which do not rely on land and natural resources?
Rents are a bigger expense for most storefronts in major cities than wages are, and even if they
weren't, they would still represent a massive unnecessary expense paid just to banks and commercial landlords. How is this separate from the rest of the economy? It isn't. Almost all workers and even most capitalists pay an arm-and-a-leg to landlords, and the only reason that capitalists are mostly ok with it is because
smart capitalists will also become landlords and exploit this so they can secure longterm wealth with even less risk.>>472571>Most of the land ownership is now financialized via hedgefunds, and there's no real difference between land speculation and any other kind of speculation.There's a finite supply of land, and everyone needs land, and nobody produces it, and no one person singlehandedly produces location value. I'm using 'land' in the classical sense, to be clear - in this sense it covers natural resources in general, as well as real estate. Nobody is making more of that, you can work it, you can move it around a little bit, but you can't
create natural resources.
Compare that to, say, computer chips. First, to make computer chips, you must work land - you must locate land with the resources you need, you must mine that land, and then, from whatever is there, you can
create the chips through labor. Now tell me you can create the mountain with the necessary metals in it. Computer chips are a commodity which can be produced through labor, land supply is finite. There are people who don't need computer chips in their day-to-day life, but there is no human being on this planet who doesn't need land.
>I'm not really sure about theory in this case , as far as i understand it speculators are only supposed to cause specific price inflation for what ever commodity they speculated with. It doesn't work this way when they're speculating longterm in things which absolutely everybody uses.
>You're the first person to assert that speculation can cause general inflation.Speculation
in land can, because the supply cannot increase and demand is
always increasing.
Also! the value captured by charging rents in a city is generated by workers (who create the location value through labor) and also extracted from petit borgs (who invest in labor and commodities produced-through-labor in order to take the profits), and the price of goods and services is built around these rents even before wages are paid. If this was only the case in
some cities, that would be one thing, but it's
every city.
>However you are likely wrong about the role of money printing. The gazillions they printed to keep wall-street afloat in the last decade and a half. Well a bunch of that probably went into land speculation as well. Billionaires and big corporations have been busy buying up a lot of land recently not just for real-estate but also agricultural land.How exactly does this contradict what I've said?
A fundamental problem with a stimulus (and the Trump-Biden stimulus plans at least involved payments to the public at large - the stimulus after the 2008 recession iirc was much more limited wrt direct payments to the general public) is also a problem with wage raises: landlords can (and will!) take a big bite out of it. The stimulus itself really isn't the problem - the government could tax the shit out of land speculation if they wanted to, and they'd solve
both the problem of corporate land grabs
and the problem of surplus money supply… yet they choose not to, and I think we can agree that their choosing not to is a problem.
>The inflation in the US is among various reasons also caused by ballooning defense offense budgets. Basically the imperial business-model, of investing into means of war to extract loot as return on investment has probably turned a loss. The neocon's imperial project in Ukraine that's certainly a "failed investment".Bombs can be made and sold, land can be sold but not made. I'm not sure if the war machine is inflationary, but I agree that it is a waste of resources and whatever profits it generates are just lining war profiteers' pockets.
>But in general inflationary pressures are caused because capital invests into non productive stuff. Investments that reduce inflation are building newer factories with better machines that increase productivity, building new transportation infrastructure that's faster and more efficient and better social services that preserve the well being of the population. I think we're using different definitions of productive, but I agree in theory. My view is that shitty production is still production, because it necessarily uses labor to produce something - investment in land is the opposite of this because it captures value created by labor without investing in labor or production directly. So my idea of what constitutes productive activity is less strict, but outside of semantic differences I agree with everything in this paragraph.
>At least in principle capitalism should have immunity against leverage from a landed aristocracy. Capitalists don't have to use land, they could build industrial parks in deserts or on massive ocean-rigs. Like-wise cities could be expanded into the ocean or downwards via "earth-scrapers"We differ on the definitions here - I'm using 'land' in the classical sense to refer both to geographical land and to natural resources which have fixed supplies and haven't been created through labor. Everybody uses it, and creating large, fully-staffed industrial operations in the middle of the sea or on artificial landmasses is probably more difficult than just paying rents… and the capitalists who could conceivably have enough capital to do those kinds of massive projects are typically already in the land speculation game as well.