Anonymous landtrust 20h

Why are you complaining about taxes when you should be complaining about profit motive? Is it because you benefit from holding back the wages of workers?

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Anonymous #2 20h

I also don’t think it’s hypocritical to be a libertarian and want to abolish social security, but also take social security It’s stupid and libertarians are 🤡 but it’s not hypocritical

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Anonymous #2 20h

Profit motive is what keeps the economy functioning and I’m complaining about taxes because the government takes the money I make without my permission

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Anonymous OP 20h

Abolishing social security is a must. We’re never even going to receive it!

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Anonymous landtrust 19h

Honestly I'm with you on not trusting the government with my money. I just don't think a boss is any better. Your employer keeps way more of what you produce than the IRS does, also without asking. And SS isn't going to zero: even if the trust fund runs out in the 2030s, payroll taxes still cover ~75-80% of benefits. Until we build something better ourselves, scrapping it just leaves you alone when you're old.

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Anonymous landtrust 19h

You hate the government taking your money without permission, but landlords do it every month for land nobody made. That's not profit from work, it's a toll for existing on Earth. Fitting username though: actual land trusts exist to stop exactly that.

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Anonymous #2 16h

Landlords own the house bro I can’t afford to buy the house that’s not unfair and if HVAC breaks he repairs it not me

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Anonymous landtrust 16h

Ask yourself why you can't afford the house. Part of it is landlords and investors outbidding you for it. Then you pay his mortgage, he keeps the equity, and the HVAC fix gets called a favor. Repairs are a fair service. Owning the ground you need to live on and charging you for it isn't.

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Anonymous #2 16h

I can’t afford it cuz I’m in my 20s… in a decade I’ll be fine we just gotta be patient. You don’t get luxury right off the bat

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Anonymous landtrust 16h

Being patient worked for our grandparents. The median first-time homebuyer was 29 in 1981. Now it's 40, a record. Home prices have grown way faster than wages, so every year you wait, the house moves further away. That's not a timing problem, it's the profit motive you defended: homes are treated as investments first and shelter second. And a place to live isn't a luxury. It's the bare minimum.

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Anonymous #2 16h

Well I’m aiming to be above average not average. If you put in the effort you’ll get the results. Maybe our grandparents got handouts but I don’t think that’s a good idea, look at the world around us they gave us

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

"Above average" gives the game away. Not everyone can be above average, that's math. If your plan only works for people who beat the people around them, you're admitting the system needs most people to lose. And effort doesn't decide it as much as you think: a kid born in the bottom fifth has about a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth. Plenty of people working two jobs put in more effort than any landlord.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Our grandparents' "handouts" were the GI Bill, FHA-backed mortgages, cheap public college, and union jobs. That's how the middle class got built, with government help. And a lot of Black families were deliberately locked out of it through redlining, which is part of why the wealth gap is still huge. Calling it handouts when it's them and "effort" when it's you is just picking which help counts.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

And the world went sideways after we started cutting that stuff, not before. Since the 70s, productivity kept climbing while wages mostly flatlined, and housing got turned into an investment product. You're blaming the programs that built the middle class for what happened after we gutted them. Wanting to be above average in a rigged game isn't ambition, it's just hoping you're one of the few who make it.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Here's the world we were actually handed: federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 since 2009 while rent keeps climbing. Over $1.6 trillion in student debt for the degrees we were told were the ticket. The top 1% holding about 30% of the country's wealth while the bottom half shares around 2.5%. None of that is because our generation got lazy. It's because the gains went up instead of out.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Fun fact: "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" started out as a joke about something physically impossible. The phrase was mocking the idea before it became the idea. That's the myth you're running on: that the people at the top got there by effort alone, and everyone else just didn't try hard enough. It keeps people blaming themselves, and each other, instead of the people writing the rules.

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Anonymous #2 15h

Our generation has some of the laziest and most entitled people I’ve ever met. They expect so much for some reason but they don’t do the things required to deserve it.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

You skipped every figure I posted to tell me about people you've met. Anecdotes aren't data. Which fact was wrong?

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Anonymous #2 15h

I don’t buy what averages are. Because you’re not average

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Earlier you said you're aiming to be above average. You can't be above something you don't believe in. And calling our generation lazy is itself a claim about the average person, you just guessed instead of measuring. You don't reject averages, you reject the ones that don't flatter you. Statistics aren't a prediction about you personally, they're the odds. Betting against them isn't confidence, it's a gamble with your retirement on the line.

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Anonymous #2 15h

Yeah I look around at the average person and i aim to be better than that. Anecdotes are more valuable than data Becuase data’s whole purpose is to measure the anecdotes. They doesn’t make it good or accurate

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Anonymous #2 15h

You said you want a house but you don’t have the resources to get a house. Those resources don’t come from thin air, you have to work for them. This is what I mean when I say entitled

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

And btw plenty of people love renting and not having the responsibility that comes from owning a home.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

I never said I want a house. You did: "I can't afford to buy the house." Scroll up. And data isn't less valuable than anecdotes, it's thousands of anecdotes added up so one person's bias doesn't skew the picture. Your anecdotes are the people you happen to know. Data is everyone. Trusting your own small sample over the whole population isn't insight, it's trusting your gut over reality.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

And none of this answers the actual question. Renting can be great, but it doesn't need a landlord skimming profit off it: co-ops, social housing, and land trusts all offer rentals without anyone getting rich off the ground you sleep on. You still haven't explained why someone should profit from owning land nobody made, or why a boss keeping the value of your work is fine but taxes aren't. That's the whole argument.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Also never said anything comes from thin air. Housing takes real work: building, repairs, upkeep. I just think that work should be shared by the people who live there, not sold back to us by whoever holds the deed. I believe in usufruct: you have the right to use and care for a place because you live there, not because you bought a title to it. The labor is real. The landlord's claim to the land isn't.

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Anonymous #2 15h

No. Data TRIES to be everyone. That doesn’t make it accurate. You say you don’t trust the government, yet you trust their institutions that gave you the data?

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Anonymous #2 15h

I get it. Communists want the workers to control it all. But the workers don’t know how to or want the responsibility. If they did, they’d put in the effort to get the house or be the business owner. But that requires effort and risk

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Not trusting the government to rule me isn't the same as thinking every number it counts is fake. And not all of it came from them: the homebuyer age is from the National Association of Realtors, a landlord-friendly industry group. Data is just what got measured. Information is what you make of it, and that's where we actually disagree. Data admits a margin of error. Your gut doesn't even admit it can be wrong.

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Anonymous #2 15h

I never said I think every number is fake. I said you trust the institutions and the numbers they give. I said data isn’t always accurate and you said the data is the fact

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Workers already run everything. Who do you think cooks the food, fixes the HVAC, codes the app, and trains the new manager? Worker co-ops prove it scales: Mondragon in Spain employs tens of thousands and is largely owned by its workers. And risk? The worker who can lose their job, their health insurance, or their back on the job carries real risk. Owners got bailed out in 2008. Workers got foreclosed on.

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Anonymous #2 15h

Who manages it…

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

I never said data is the fact. There's a ladder here: data, information, knowledge, wisdom. Data is raw measurement. Information is data with context. Knowledge is seeing the patterns across it. Wisdom is knowing what to do about it. Sure, data can be flawed, that's why you check it against other data. But when your answer to imperfect data is "trust the people I've met," you didn't climb the ladder. You skipped it.

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Anonymous landtrust 15h

Managers. Management is a job, not ownership. In a co-op, workers elect a board that hires the managers, and those managers answer to the workers instead of the other way around. Mondragon even caps how much more the top earners can make than the lowest paid. Coordination doesn't need a boss who owns everything. It just needs someone accountable to the people doing the work.

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Anonymous #2 14h

Right so the people will democratically decide their boss. That’s how we got Trump

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Anonymous #2 14h

This is why the free market is more efficient. Becuase the democratic manager is just who people want, not who the company needs. The free market naturally removes the less efficient managers

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Anonymous landtrust 14h

You missed it. Corporations already elect their bosses: shareholders vote for the board, one share one vote. The only question is who gets a vote, the people who work there or the people who own stock. And co-ops compete in the same market. If a co-op picks bad managers, it loses customers like anyone else. The market doesn't care who owns the company. Manager ≠ owner. That's the whole point.

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Anonymous #2 14h

It’s an “election” except only the successful people get a say. Socialism wants 1 worker 1 vote regardless of how smart you are

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Anonymous landtrust 13h

So you agree it's an election, just one where money buys votes. Owning shares measures how much money you have, not how smart you are, and plenty of it is inherited. Huge blocks of corporate votes get cast by index funds like Vanguard and BlackRock. Meanwhile the workers who actually know how the business runs get zero votes. That's not meritocracy, it's plutocracy.

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Anonymous #2 1h

“Plenty” is too vague. You don’t get to the top by not knowing how to manage

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