2) how it could be accomplished using any known economic means without, say, hyper-inflating everything first to the point we’d never get there.
Does it mean a free Harvard education to everyone? Or a free Twinkie? Does it mean a free house 5 minutes from downtown SF? Or free drugs to make everyone happy no matter where they are?
What it means practically is the basics like food, shelter, and healthcare. Beyond those basic needs, free education and basic financial security (no means testing or savings limit like for the example in the original post)
The argument against this is that people will say "well what about internet access, is internet access a human right since it's now ubiquitous? What about refrigerators and microwaves?" The answer is yes. As the standard of living rises for the average person through innovation, it should also rise for the lowest in society.
I would just like to point out that a recession is a prime example of why most of our current "scarcity" is artificial. In a recession workers are still present and physical capital is still present. The raw materials are still present and the mechanisms of government are still present. The problems lie with the financial system that facilitates exchange. A recession is not caused by "not enough resources" it's the aftermath of people taking too many risks with fake paper money. It's a non-sequitur to imply that a recession means that the government cant take care of its citizens.
Since expansion (often into areas that don’t work) and corresponding contractions (when that which doesn’t work is found and then stops as it becomes unsustainable) happens in every system humans have ever tried that I’m aware of, what do you think is the alternative?
I don't think there is an alternative to free markets, but I do believe that we can use the power of government to set price floors. For example let's say the government provides free housing for all citizens regardless of means testing. It doesn't have to be great housing, but it establishes a price floor that all landlords have to compete with by offering better housing or lowering their rents. No fear of homelessness, starvation, or death by uninsured illness also establishes a labor floor. People can take more time for a job search, or quit jobs that are exploitative/pay poorly. The government doesn't have to mandate a minimum wage, since jobs now must offer something more than a day-to-day subsistence. With advances in productivity we are more than capable of doing this but we allocate capital to other things in pursuit of profit. Think of how much capital was poured into web3 speculation that could have been used to actually establish a price floor for housing or a wage floor for labor.
Why would a landlord participate, or instead move to a more profitable outlet for their effort and capital? If even after that there isn’t enough housing (say it’s a desirable area so people want to move in), who is going to build it?
I’ve seen it work short term where there is existing stock built under a different scheme that can be ‘locked in’ to this. But then it quickly goes to a different kind of broken, where housing is ‘cheap’ but impossible to find unless you can get a friend to (usually illegally) sublet.
The issue for a long time has been the fed printing money with pretty much no interrupting since ‘01. When they tried to take a break around ‘05 things got bad by ‘08 and they turned it on even higher.
When money is cheap, people do steadily riskier and riskier things until it explodes. Then money has to get more expensive to help rein in the stupidity. So we’ll likely see housing get more affordable again for a bit. If we really wanted cheap housing, we need decently high interest rates.
When money is cheap, people try to make more money by buying and leveraging assets. Homeowners do the same thing, though they usually don’t realize it.
That pushes demand and prices up. After all, people will buy more when it’s ‘cheap’, and that is based off the monthly loan servicing costs - aka interest rate, in large part.
The free housing I am referring to is housing built and owned by the government. Landlords are participating in the market because they have to rent apartments to make money. Look at Vienna's housing model if you want to see a successful example of this.
I am aware that cheap Fed money keeps our markets propped up with speculative investing. My point is that food, housing, and medicine are not constrained by financial bottlenecks, it's a matter of political will. If we wanted to provide food, shelter, and medicine for all of our citizens for free we easily could. However that would reduce profit margins as labor costs would rise in an already relatively (compared to the developing world) labor market. Free housing could be provided but it would be detrimental to REITs and banks who provide mortgages, so we don't actually want to solve the problem.
Ah, but have you lived in a government housing project before?
I have friends who have, and it replaces a tense landlord relationship with a overbearing, bureaucratic dystopia where attempts to escape (say by saving money for a reserve fund or to afford to move to a better place) are actively criminalized. In any larger scale system, it inevitably results in severe restrictions on things normal people do regularly on pain of eviction (such as smoking weed, or having a boyfriend!), after already requiring they have minimal savings and income below some threshold (see above), which inevitably leads to abuse by whichever civil servant or subcontractor is actually running it.
It’s basically replacing a landlord who you could at least plausibly ‘fire’ at
the end of the lease with an appointed bureaucrat or lowest-bidder who you can’t.
Lack of political will is just a way of saying ‘when the rubber hits the road, no one is willing to pay for it or interested enough to make it happen’.
Which hey, maybe. But in my experience these are for reasons that require time and expertise to understand, and often boil down to ‘the people/society involved couldn’t make it work’.
If you can lead a successful effort to make something better work, be my guest!
But like kids caught in the middle of a nasty divorce, wishing they liked each other isn’t going to change it, and the folks most impacted by it are usually helpless to do anything but get the brunt of the terrible outcomes.
Those markets in Vienna yiu mention - by any chance are the current landlords the ones who were also there when they passed these rules, so were stuck? Or got into it via inheritance?
Or perhaps they have long standing ties to the community and are doing it because it may not make them
money, but helps them in other ways?
Does Vienna have a decent safety net and a coherent social identity so that folks (both giving and receiving) feel they’re helping out ‘one of theirs’, and people aren’t likely to abuse the system?
My mother lived in section 8 for a few years, although her housing was rural and fairly nice-- not so much in urban areas. Most of the things you listed I am against, I am against means testing and strict requirements for tenants. If someone wants to shoot up heroin in their section 8 I'd prefer them doing it there than out in the street. It has also been shown multiple times that housing the homeless actually saves taxpayers money:
To answer the specific questions about Vienna, I believe the public housing started in the 1910s and 1920s under the socialist government, and today over 60% of Viennese residents live in the public housing. Public housing does not have the same issues as rent control. Rent control does not work long-term as it disincentivizes construction and competition. Establishing a price floor through public housing still leaves landlords open to large profit margins in higher-class housing, or higher-density housing, and encourages development.
Our bloated bureaucracy is a symptom of American social programs needing to be means-tested because we are culturally opposed to welfare programs. We have to have a purity test for everyone receiving a handout-- meanwhile there is no means testing for subsidies and bailouts for corporations who are at risk of default every time we turn the money faucet off. It's an incredible double-standard where we scrutinize the most vulnerable in society while creating a massive moral hazard for our largest companies.
Glad it’s working for them - Singapore uses a similar model (MDB).
If the society is cohesive and coherent enough it sees it as a public good and not ‘hand outs to the others’, it can work. The larger the scale, and more geographically separated, the less likely though in my experience.
1) asking what that even means, practically, and
2) how it could be accomplished using any known economic means without, say, hyper-inflating everything first to the point we’d never get there.
Does it mean a free Harvard education to everyone? Or a free Twinkie? Does it mean a free house 5 minutes from downtown SF? Or free drugs to make everyone happy no matter where they are?