• lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up

    Sigh. People make this braindead argument every single time this subject comes up. No they can’t. Markets do not work that way. It’s literally just a repackaged argument against minimum wage and it has been thoroughly debunked in that context.

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Unless you live in a city with rent stabilization, yes landlords will do that. Groceries will likely not have that problem, because of other market conditions. The first to increase their rents will be luxury apartments. Once the Internet is done laughing their asses off about $5000 rent, other landlords will use realpage to guage the market and increase in tandem. Landlords literally do not care if their property is occupied, because the money is in the land and we’ve commoditized housing.

    • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Have you seen how housing prices rose when interest rates were low? Markets work that way because consumers outcompete each other, at least in the housing market. You need a surplus of supply, like the corn market, to keep costs low.

      Like @espi wrote, you need fierce competition in all markets.

    • Johanno@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      So you want to tell me that companies aren’t buying out competition and with a monopoly they then rise prises as they want?

      Explain to me how markets work if the only company selling or renting houses is not lowering their price when demand lowers? Or when they intentionally are not renting flats in order to keep demand high?

    • Peaty@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      We literally just witnessed this with COVID shutdown. Im not sure why you think people getting handed money will not increase pricing as that is usually how things work.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Not to poopoo your point too much but inflation only happened after covid because a recent war gave justification for greedflation. You can’t really argue money is losing value when CEOs are raking in record profits during an economic downturn.

        • Peaty@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          It happened because a large number of people had a pool of unspent money, some/much of which was the stimulus packages, who were competing for similar goods such as housing.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It becomes more and more meaningless when you start to talk about any form of regulation or extension of basic rights. Plenty of countries are coming around to the idea that housing is a basic right. It’s hard to raise prices when your competition is literally free. UBI + market regulations + basic human rights are all required. No solution exists in a vacuum and anyone who considers it as such is missing the point

    • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      We should do away with using money for necessities. You want a pool, pay for it. A safe and sanitary living space? Free. Stop making people rely on something with no inherent value.

      • Atonable0659@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How do you determine what is a necessity and how much of that necessity is free?

        Is electricity a necessity? Should it be free for everyone? Should the person who owns the massive mansion get it all paid for? If we say its only for a certain amount of electricity, does the person who doesn’t use all of their allocated amount get compensation somehow?

        What about food then? I don’t think anyone would think lobster and caviar should be free. So let’s just do food basics like cheese. Artisan cheese is expensive. So we need paid for artisan cheese and basic government funded cheese product. So now we have a two tier food system where poor people live off gruel and soylent green, while the rich can afford real food.

        The only way to solve these issues is to find agreed method of representing value that people can use on what they want.

        No one can complain that someone else is getting something for free, because they also get the exact same thing. No one can defraud the system because everyone gets the exact same cheque. Well, unless you bump off grandma and collect hers too.

      • reinar@distress.digital
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        1 year ago

        safe and sanitary space in Manhattan can cost the same as mansion with a pool somewhere else.

        With current global world simply existing in attractive locations could be luxury.