- cross-posted to:
- canadapolitics
- cross-posted to:
- canadapolitics
A year ago, the federal government instituted a foreign buyer ban after passing the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act in 2022. The two-year ban, which came into effect on Jan. 1, barred non-citizens, non-permanent residents and foreign controlled companies from buying up Canadian property as an investment.
But Wallace says that ban didn’t do much for her family.
“There’s all of these very luxurious buildings going in all around us that are outrageously priced,” said Wallace, after attending an open house at a promising $1.1-million condo. “The foreign buyers tax … I don’t think that’s making an iota of difference.”
Critics say the foreign buyers ban, which was aimed at making housing affordable for Canadians, had many exemptions and was more of a political manoeuvre. They say it’s clear housing remains out of reach for too many in Canada, and that the country should look to other places in the world to find strategies to foster home ownership.
You’re right, if course, but even if we stop short of “Ending capitalism”, there’s a more immediate problem (a direct corollary of your statement), which is that we’ve allowed housing to become an investment.
And as long as housing is an investment, there must be a housing crisis. Not “will”, must. For the value of those investments to increase, demand must outstrip supply. Solving the housing crisis means ending housing as an investment, and until someone can square that circle nothing will ever change.
why stop short? It’s literally the only way to end this inequality, that’s my point
No, “we” haven’t done anything, commodification of necessities is one of the cornerstones of capitalism and is enforced by and benefits capitalists, so you’re basically repeating what I’ve said - this is a feature of the system, and the system must be abolished to resolve the problem.
No housing reform will stop housing from being a commodity. They are never going to legislate anything that harms their bottom line. Building more houses will just continue to feed the rich (also, enough housing already exists in many countries). Stopping “outside” rich from buying just leaves “inside” rich to continue to do whatever the fuck they like (including making money from being middle person to “outside” rich).
So sure, you can put a band aid on a brain tumour, but don’t expect it to heal.
I get that it can be uncomfortable to confront this reality, but the time has come (and gone, tbf) to abolish the whole fucking thing.
You’re preaching to the converted.
I didn’t advocate for capitalism. I said “even if” we stop short of ending it.
Upending the entire structure of modern society is no small task. If the only way you know how to think about solving problems is in absolutes, you’ll rarely fix anything. If every medical professional insisted on having a fully stocked operating room before they so much as touched a patient, a lot of people would die in ambulances.
You have to learn to think in terms of both big and small solutions. You have to be capable of advocating for total systemic reform and incremental improvements at the same time, not least because every incremental improvement that eases the boot of capitalism off of people’s necks a tiny bit allows more people the time and financial freedom to actually become involved in the greater cause of total systemic reform.
We would stop short of ending capitalism because it is extremely entrenched and it is easier to fix it than replace it. Also because making a massive change like ‘ending capitalism’ (however that looks) opens society up to exploitation by external parties applying a kind of “shock doctrine” to ensure that whatever replaces it is to their benefit.
The primary merit of capitalism is that it theoretically does not require central planning but self-organizes into a functional system.
However, fundamentalists like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan believe (or at least espoused the idea) that, without central planning, these systems self-organize into some kind of optimal state. That’s the Ayn Randian wet dream, but we can clearly see that it is far from the truth, at least from the standpoint of societal and environmental well-being. (E. Ron Muskard and Jeff Bozo might disagree.)
One of the things communism and laissez-faire capitalism have in common is that neither properly account for human greed.
Adam Smith believed that people know what they need better than any central planner, and I agree with that. The role of the central planner is to ensure that excessive greed, short sighted and anticompetitive behaviour does not hinder the self-organizing aspects of capitalism. However the various central planners (read: governments) in any globalist, neoliberal country, pay lip service to this role, at best. Because of that reform will be difficult to achieve since government considers corporations to be constituents and are thus beholden to them.
I don’t know if it’s possible to ‘end inequality’ but we do need to set limits on how unequal things can get. Nobody should be so poor that they are miserable and nobody should be so wealthy that they can leverage their wealth to generate more wealth without providing a sustainable, long-term net benefit to society. A key point is that the market would no longer decide what is a benefit to society, since it clearly isn’t equipped to do that. Another key point is that unnecessary power hierarchies do more harm than good and governments shouldn’t be shy about dismantling them, including within their own structures.
I think an anarcho-syndicalist society with minimal power structures to maintain rule of order would be just fine, but I don’t see a clear path to get there without a major change of public perception. Sadly time is not on our side.
Anyway, those are my somewhat disjointed thoughts on the subject. You may not agree on all points but I think we can agree that the economic theories that have shaped our society will be our downfall if left unchallenged.