Why do people honestly hate capitalism so much now?

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Condo prices are way higher here for anything that close to Vancouver.

The average rent for a one bedroom in Vancouver is now $2663/mo. Ludicrous. 2 bedroom ? More. 3 bedroom ? Bend over..

You and I have different definitions of fair. Agreed to, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fair compensation for the work.

Umm, if Billionaires didn’t hoard money it would never accumulate to such a sum. It would be flowing around the economy being used a the tool it is to provide all the needs and wants for people instead of sitting in accounts while people suffer. Billionaires bank accounts are massive bottlenecks in the economy, $ who’s value has been created by labour just sitting there doing sweet F all while those who laboured to create it go without food or medicine or small luxuries of time off to vacation etc.

Multiply by about 0.75 to get the US dollar equivalent.

By any standard, Vancouver is prohibitively expensive…

You did not say that. But there are people who do live in the expensive parts of the cities by choice, even if they cannot really afford to do so. Some people want to be in those areas because of the location alone. It is their desire to move there that ramp up the prices to others that already live there.

As for traveling to/from work, I used to walk half an hour each way to get to work. I got used to it. How many people would have gotten into their car to drive there instead? I chose to not bring a car there to save $. The exercise did not kill me. My medical doctor would attest to that statement.

Yes, exchange rates exist.. but we don't get paid in US dollars so our purchasing power = Canadian dollars we earn. So you can't just multiply by .75 and think "Oh, it's not so bad." It's exorbitantly expensive - among the Least Affordable in the Entire World -> top 4 along with Sydney, London, and Hong Kong.

People can’t just walk 10 miles to work. And if one must use an Interstate, they can’t bike, either.

30 minutes is about 1.5 miles.

If I lived 3 miles from work, I would walk to work.

Many people, these days, live more than 5 miles from their jobs.

The people who live in expensive apartments and have low-wage jobs should shop around for cheaper apartments a little farther away from the job. But more than 5 miles, sans public transportation, requires a car.

I have all of those here in the Welsh valleys. Not only all of it, but a lot cheaper too. Some brilliant restaurants in the valleys, amazing countryside, loads of shops, good transport links, hospitals, cool country pubs, plenty of sheep to shag, schools are reasonably good and loads of police to breathalyse you coming up to Christmas.

Last edited by Nades on 14 Jan 2023, 1:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You are aware that landlords don't rent out plots of land right? There is often a building involved which is man made, very expensive to construct and has to be paid for in some form or another along with being maintained.

I don't get the whole land argument. Why does the building suddenly not exist when it comes to landlords? Do tenants only want the plot of land or something?

Cities have become far too desirable and too many people are dependant on cities. A lot of people don't bother learning to drive because they opt to move into a city instead and become the perfect captive audience. In the olden days people were desperate to leave them.

If some millennial moved to London with a media degree and needed to live within a 15 min walk of everything, I would be ripping him/her off for everything.

This is completely divorced from reality.

The wealth divide is much lower than it was in the pre-capitalist era. There used to be millions of slaves toiling in the fields and living in squalor so the king could enjoy a life of total luxury. Now I have a standard of living that my grandparents could only have dreamed of at my age, and their grandparents probably couldn't even have dreamed of. In countries like yours or mine, we have universal education until the late teens, very high levels of university education, refrigerators in every home, electric ovens, more leisure time than at any point in history, cheap flights around the world... and we're some of the people who are experiencing the slowest improvement in our living standards. Globally, the wealth gap is shrinking dramatically. The bottom 5% or so are not experiencing much growth, and the middle and working classes in rich countries are not either, but everyone between those two groups (the vast majority of the population) is experiencing huge growth in their living standards.

Marxists have been crowing about "late stage capitalism" for over 100 years. Capitalism was about to collapse in the 1920s... and in the 1950s... and in the 1970s... and in the 1990s... the truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism. In fact late-stage capitalism was being declared in the very early days of communism, but capitalism has continued to survive and develop in the time it has taken for communism to collapse into almost total irrelevancy.


No, everything you have said there is the opposite of true.

If you hoard money then you lose money, particularly after 15 years of rock-bottom interest rates (they're higher now, but still well below inflation). The only way to make money is by investing it, and that causes it to flow around the economy.

Why has Elon Musk lost so much money this year? Did his bank burn down? No, most of his net worth is in stock and stock prices (particularly in Tesla) have crashed. And while Musk is both unusually stupid (by billionaire standards) and unusually overexposed to a few over-priced stocks, most billionaires have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in investments. Very little is hidden under the mattress.

And even money "sitting in bank accounts", while it's not a sensible thing to do with it, is not literally just sitting there. It has some velocity because banks invest it in order to pay the interest. Rich people generally aren't stupid enough to leave large sums in banks anyway, but if they did then it doesn't get taken to a big vault and locked up securely. That's not how banks work.

Value is not created by labour. We have known this for nearly 140 years, the same year we discovered the bacteria behind Diptheria. Value comes, if you'll forgive the simplification, from supply and demand. Doing work doesn't magically make something valuable.

Small towns here don't have all of the things I listed. Some have to travel 60+km to go grocery shopping at Costco. Some have to travel 100+km to the nearest hospital. Many small towns don't have a huge range of government services that some people are dependent on.

Other people just don't like small town isolated life and prefer to be around people and near their friends, coworkers, families etc. I know, social life is way down the list for most on the spectrum.. but social connections are a huge reason that people live in cities vs. in the middle of nowhere.

The marketer can set the price and the salesman can sell the thing, but if the labourer doesn't process the widget then no value is created. Can't make $ w/o the widget.

As I said, property management is valuable and people deserve to be able to make money from it. But essentially, being a landlord is about renting out a depreciating asset. It is the same as renting out cars. There are plenty of car hire companies, both short term and long term, and they aren't doing anything wrong (at least not inherently).

The issue is that landlords don't only make money by renting out a depreciating asset, they also make money from the increasing value of the land. When house prices go up, it isn't usually because all houses suddenly got magically nicer, it's because the rising population has driven up demand for land, and land values have gone up accordingly. The landlord has done nothing to earn this portion of their income.

In an ideal world, we would have a tax on land values rather than on property values. There are no major downsides to this tax. Unlike income tax or capital gains tax, it wouldn't negatively affect the economy. Then all landlords would be running "property management" businesses using the same business model as car hire. But right now they're profiting from something they had nothing to do with.

Imagine we have two factories producing identical goods. One is very capital-intensive, with the process being almost entirely automated. The other is very labour-intensive, with no tools or machines involved at all. The goods produced are identical: even experts cannot tell them apart. Are the hand-made ones more valuable because more labour has gone into them?

Now imagine that instead of making widgets, the factory workers decide to dig holes and fill them in again. They work as hard as ever. Do they produce the same amount of value?

To use a more direct analogy to yours, almost all businesses require capital. I cannot make a car tomorrow because I don't have the tools, machines, materials, or workspace. No matter how hard I work, I will not make a car. By your logic, this shows that all value comes from capital, not from labour.

In reality, labour and capital are usually both necessary to make a product, but the actual value comes from supply and demand.

The whole concept of renting is for someone else to make use of whatever is being let without having to pay for the capital. Instead the owner pays for the capital. Whether this item being rented goes up or down in value is just coincidental like the value of all tangible items that can be sold (and intangible ones). In of itself there is nothing wrong with profiting from rising house prices.

Selling houses is an awful way of making money from houses anyway and most landlords never do it.

This is why Canada has never appealed to me. The distances are so vast that there seems to be zero competition for keeping house prices in check. It's literally a City or the middle of nowhere. It's no wonder cities are so expensive.