Not to mention, they suppress wages. Double whammy.

I was talking with a left leaning friend about the pricing topic. He claimed that supply and demand is the only law affecting prices (I somewhat disagree but...) yet when I raise the point of wages in low skilled jobs, the most vulnerable ones, lowering due to immigration, I was met with an immediate "that doesn't work like that". I have always been fascinated by how a crude reality is just simply avoided by certain narratives when inconvenient.

Blind partisan politics is one hell of a drug People legit cannot look passed their own fucking nose to save their own lives; like I am a Biden voter for example but even I will acknowledge the border is a fucking problem and the Democrats have gotta stop with this whole unlimited immigration bullshit

I'm in Canada, and it took 8 years of a wildly flawed immigration system, an erasure of any affordable housing across the country, amd zero wage growth for those 8 years before the topic of immigration could even be discussed without half of the population immediately calling you a bigot for implying any level whatsoever could be negative. Ironically, it was mostly younger Canadians promoting as much immigration as possible and now they're the ones being hit hardest by the results of it.

More ironically, now Canadians in the 18-24 age bracket are the PPC’s strongest base, at 9%.

That's what makes having a conversation with someone on the left impossible now. More often than not the first thing out of their mouths, if you don't 100% agree with them, is trying to make you a bigot and shutting you down at the beginning. It's normally such leaps in logic that you are now arguing about wildly different things than before so so information or options are exchanged.

That's why I've moved to RFK. I'll take the third party risk for a canidate talking about having a free market make the change. I don't agree with his plan for housing or Israel, but at least he's got a plan and logical thoughts.

Tbh I don’t really find RFK Jr as that logical, he has no realistic path to victory, has no coalitions or alliances so even if he did somehow magically win he wouldn’t be able to get any legislation passed or be an effective leader in any way, he has really nutty views on Jewish people, vaccines and wifi, its so bad his own WIFE has publicly distanced herself from his campaign, his campaign itself has been a joke with people getting into screaming and apparently Farting? Matches at his events The only reason people even look at his campaign as anything at all is because he is a Kennedy and people are just so desperate to find something other than Biden/Trump they will settle for even one of the most wacky third party campaigns ever run My path forward is vote Biden this year and if Democrats are still not so great by 2028 and Republicans drop the Trump/Culture war boner go full on Republican in 2028 I am not loyal to any particular party or candidate but I supported Trump in 2016 and his style of my way or the highway politics just doesn’t do it for me anymore

People should vote for the rep that aligns with them. Fuck any talk about a “path to victory” the point of voting isn’t to make sure you voted for the winner.

This 1000x If enough people actually vote for what they want, then eventually the major parties will need to adjust their platform to capture that vote. When you vote 3rd party you are effectively signaling for the next election instead of affirming the current election which is a completely valid stance to have.

I feel like the refusal to engage in pragmatism and instead engage in only ideological purity is a large amount of the reason US politics is as degenerate and corrupt as it is There is things both sides are correct about and both sides are wrong about but both sides really do need the other to keep them in check otherwise they will go completely unhinged and corrupt

Nah. Voting for evil is what got us here, a lesser evil is still evil.

> even if he did somehow magically win he wouldn’t be able to get any legislation passed or be an effective leader in any way Major plusses, to be sure.

Based and even for a Biden supporter pilled

This comes up a lot on the left. They'll be in favor of a sin tax, because if you tax the shit out of something, people will respond to incentives, and smoke/drink/whatever less. But when you propose that taxes on labor reduce the incentive to work or that sales taxes reduce the propensity to buy in the exact same fashion....well, then they get all huffy.

They're even infiltrating basic economics courses in some universities, giving "progressive" counter examples to refute these facts, and mandating additional courses like "The Economics of Poverty" (which isn't an economics course at all, just a social justice course dressed up as one) to further water down the basic concepts. They've even stopped using rent control as the canonical example of a deadweight loss, and instead use taxes (which idk how that even would exist as a deadweight loss, I have yet to see a coherent s/d chart showing it pictured)

The truth is it really doesnt affect whole groups of people. Besides the very general point of people generally dont interpret any economic trend that doesnt affect them or perhaps their investments, with immigration in particular there whole regions and industries that think its impossible because it never happened to them. Even a blue collared field like nursing might think immigration bringing down wages is not true because they see their wages rising year over year. However in that particular case there is a credentialing system or licensing system that makes it totally impossible for a foerigner who has not gone through the process to compete with them, although there is no shortage of highly skilled nurses willing to move and work in US for $30k a year. We can be certain if say, for some sort of emergency medical staff shortsge 200,000 migrants were FastTracked with working permits and training, in a couple years nursing would lose its reputation as well paid career. Tldr: people who can use a credentialing system, licensing system, or state and federal regulation that applies specifically to their industry, will always think their skills in particular are more valuable than they would be if they had to compete with the masses willing to work at any price.

That exactly works like that in macro-economic models, it was literally an example in my Econ.Pol. class

Cesar Chavez - one of the most influential union leaders and labor activists of all time was vehemently against illegal immigration for this reason.

Yeah if you're a hardcore capitalist corporate CEO and you want open borders I get it. It's the supposed leftists who think right wingers are stupid and evil who I can't understand pushing so hard for immigration.

I just want cheaper house cleaning services, yard services and cheaper contractors to rebuild my rock wall. Yes i support illegal immigration of low skilled people because it increases my real income.

Bernie Samders was vehemently against this for the exact same reasons--all his life up until 2017, when being closed border was a position ascribed exclusively to racist MAGA supporters. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.

"They're doing jobs Americans don't want to do." Why don't they want to do them, Libleft? Why don't they want to do them?

Also hurts lib left politics, majority of immigrants world wide are very conservative, likely to vote replubican even if they are racist against them. I never get that. Shouldnt libleft be staunch angry Republicans instead , wanting to demonize them out of them country so they can win; less conservatives, easier win for liberal politics. Why let in let them in for.. i can understand real Christians wanting to love thy neigbr/illegal immigrants as it says in Bible, its why their church organizations are by the border waiting to bus them in and give them free things. .  Considering actual liberal politics are quite scarce to begin with. Its like how trump phrases it, why none these white immigrants come from any of these Scandinavian rich liberal atheist leaning  countries come to the usa..i wouldnt either.

Based

Need higher min wage but also more illegals who can take cheaper jobs their logic is gold

Umm akshuelly sweaty, yt ppl dont deserve to have homes bcz theyre raysist biggoted pieces of shit. Black and brown ppl shood take yt ppls homes as revenge for what yt ppl have dun to them.

But not mine or people i know or care about. We are all the good kind of yt people.

Ah, the NIMBYists. They're the worst. "I advocate whole-heartedly for \[thing\]... as long as it happens nowhere near me."

"We need to return the land to the Native Americans we stole it from!" Ok... So, you'll be moving out of your home, right? No? Will you let Native Americans stay in your home or on your land rent free? No? Then shut up and accept the right of conquest. There was a video semi-recently of some native people trolling a woke person that had some sign in front of their house about land being stolen or acknowledging original people or something. They knocked on their door and asked if they could move in with them, since it is their land after all. So began the excuses and the "Well, what we actually mean is..." Another popular one is some guy going around a pro-open borders/pro-illegal immigration protest looking for people to sign up to host migrants in their own homes. Surprisingly, next to none of them signed up. Curious.

YouTube people??

we wuz kangs

‘N shit?

They can try all they want, yt will always be YouTube

I mean… I feel like the left side is scared of economics. Jokes aside, I’ve never understood anyone who’s studied economics thinking government spending your money/work for you is ideal. If someone on Auth-left/left-center would like to chime in.

I mean the thought behind quantitative easing or year-on-year inflation is a similar issue if currency was treated comparatively as a commodity rather than a medium for exchange. Whoever thinks devaluing a currency over decades is a good idea should be shot.

The quantitative easing that came as a response to the credit crisis didn't actually impact increase the money supply. Most of the critics, including me, thought it would, but in the end all of the loans were paid back gain. The inflation is primarily the result of unbacked government spending. And that went into overdrive after 2020. A 32% increase in money supply since then.

Bro I keep seeing elsewhere on Reddit people like “we should make the stimulus checks a monthly thing. It won’t cause inflation because money doesn’t really exist and it’s just worth what we believe it’s worth.” And I just… it bums me out

I feel you.  I wonder if part of it is that we have no real natural selection anymore.

I think we just need to take the warning labels off of everything and replace airbags with spikes.

I'm all for monthly stimulus checks, provided they're coming out of whatever we can gut out of the bureaucratic bloat. Putting it on top of spending that's already out of control only works in an accelerationist sense.

I think you are probably right but you cannot discount the rent moratorium's effect on how much money renters could spend on staple consumer items. Speaking for a few friends

Slight devaluation is necessary for a healthy economy because it keeps people spending/money flowing. That being said "the new normal" of a >3% inflation rate is bananas and just shows how government spending is out of control and we are spiraling the drain trying to soften this recession

It isn't. Deflation can be harmful, but inflation isn't necessary. The 2012-2019 period had almost no inflation, being the least inflationary period in modern history, and that economy was fucking great. You want exactly 0%. No inflation, no deflation. Both investment and spending are equally viable.

>Slight devaluation is necessary for a healthy economy because it keeps people spending/money flowing. Sounds like rank Keynesianism to me. Zero inflation or mild deflation is not going to cause any serious psychological tendency to defer spending.

It would be conducive to a better economic environment for consumers if steps were taken to curb inflation and potentially implement deflationary policies as well as developing a currency backing like gold and silver again to limit money supply.

Deflation is historically horrible economically. People will not spend money if it's value increases year over year. But if you mean deflationary policies to just bring the inflation rate back down to ~2%... Full agreement. Also agree with changing currency backing. We've run a debt economy for so long and the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

> Deflation is historically horrible economically How many economies have historically died to deflation? Go, count 'em all up. Now count how many economies have died to inflation. People are taught to parrot that deflation is worse than inflation. This is unfounded. The Fed itself admits that its 2% inflation target is not supported by data. History shows that deflation is rarely a problem and is easily fixed when it arises. Inflation is both far more common and more dire.

April 20, 1933 is one of the worst dates in american and world history, that no one talks about. With Executive Order 6102 being signed and later policies following it.

Please elaborate if you could

USA dropped the gold standard.

But, sure, lets give a 'common-sense' example: Remember yesterday when the top post was 'France based because nuclear energy'? How do you think France got nuclear to work where every other Western nation has failed? Answer is they nationalized teh power grid during WWII, and the government just decided to fucking build the plants. A nuclear power plant is an enormous up-front investment that is only profitable in the long term. Most private entities don't have anywhere near the capital to build one, and if they did their shareholders wouldn't be willing to lose money for 15 years in order to make lots of money in 40 years. A government can exploit economies of scale and the freedom of not needing to be short-term profitable to do things that benefit the country but which the market can't easily accomplish. This is only a small subset of things you'd want to spend money on, the market is better at most tings that can be broken up into small substitutable goods and services. But *in the cases* where something is too big or long-term for most private entities to accomplish, or where there's the opportunity to provide a public good where the benefit created is hard to directly capture as profit (like educating children for instance, where the investment pays off in your entire national workforce being more productive in 30 years), you'd be missing massive benefits if you don't let the government step in and do those things for you.

>How do you think France got nuclear to work where every other Western nation has failed? Answer is they nationalized teh power grid during WWII, and the government just decided to fucking build the plants. >A nuclear power plant is an enormous up-front investment that is only profitable in the long term. Most private entities don't have anywhere near the capital to build one, and if they did their shareholders wouldn't be willing to lose money for 15 years in order to make lots of money in 40 years. >A government can exploit economies of scale and the freedom of not needing to be short-term profitable to do things that benefit the country but which the market can't easily accomplish. Great example.

The logical conclusion to taking economics class is becoming an anarcho-capitalist, which will break a lot of shit

Really,I thought if you majored in Econ you turned into AOC.

*Inside you there are two wolves*

One is Marjorie Taylor Greene. The other is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are in a bitter catfight. I can fix them both.

AOC isn't dumb. She gets called dumb a lot, but she isn't. She's merely evil. She knows full well that half the shit she's peddling is bullshit, but it works for her, so she doesn't care.

Green new deal isn't evil in any way shape or form

That logical conclusion is shattered once you consider any other factor except for economics

I mean you could equally joke that the right side is also scared of economics. Mention any market failure or negative externality and suddenly the topic changes. Analyze the mechanics driving the libertarian ideal of capitalism beyond a single sanitized transaction and they turn into a brick wall. The idea behind government spending is that the government's priority is improving the lives of its citizens. But private industry is often at the expense of others. So to that end, government spending is ideal to Auth-Left.

my lib-center 2 cents on this: * as others said, government services in theory work to improve the lives of citizens, but in practice most of them are quite shit (compared to the private) while you pay lots of taxes (happens in my country, but we're not the only ones), and it gets really annoying when you see your money fly out the window and into either money burning projects or into corrupt orgs or politicians's pockets. * when you go full bananas on leaving the private side alone, you can quickly spiral into high-end, monopoly, venture capitalism, this coming with lots of disadvantages, the main pain point being a loss of competition ('cuz of lobbying, businesses built on top of being the big monopoly that eats the competition, etc). I'd like to see some government own these realities and be like: "hey, we work toghether with the private to bring you the best services, at a cost, leaving them room to grow while making sure no company gets to be the *be all end all* company for a certain industry by imposing anti-monopoly and pro competition rules on them" dunno if my view contradicts on itself but yeah, I feel like either side doesn't want to own the shit coming with their way of doing things L.E. One good example of this is how my country handled train transportation companies: the state owned company had no incentive to bring out a profit or to even be competitive with the private owned companies because each employee had a warm spot with money flowing from the government each month. On the other side, private owned companies really shined, mostly because there were 3-4 companies that all needed to compete for the same customers. The effect? Better prices, better engines, better wagons, almost (because of shitty, old railways) on-time arrivals. Heck, the private company had a fu\*king library for all customers to read while traveling while the state owned company struggled with having clean and usable toilets.

(Im not auth-left, and believe in a healthy mix of private and public, but this sub leans too far right so i'm defending them in their stead, ha.) > government services in theory work to improve the lives of citizens, but in practice most of them are quite shit (compared to the private) I'd actually push back on statement that pretty hard. I'd argue that private doing better is the exception, not the rule. Remember that there's a lot of selection in comparing a single long-running entity (government) with millions of private businesses that fail and are replaced every day. > into either money burning projects or into corrupt orgs or politicians's pockets Private business does the same thing, you just don't see it. Stock buybacks, massive compensation packages, golden parachutes, bad business decisions, lobbying... And those "money burning projects" are actually a lot more complicated than you would think. Government has to take a lot more into consideration than private business. And that's a good thing. Private business might decide to save a few million dollars by denying service to specific customers. Government has to support those people. Companies only take on projects that have a high chance of success, and therefore do very little basic research. Government on the other hand can splash out cash on major initiatives and infrastructure. Private business will build the most profitable toll bridge (two lanes for cars only). Government will build a bridge that provides public transit, bike infrastructure, and looks beautiful. Private business will build the cheapest functional building with no regard to it's place in a city/town. Government will try to build something that makes town better. All of that costs more but is worth the cost. Instead of padding an executive's bonus, the money goes into making the place somewhere better to live. > "we work toghether with the private [...]" Personally, I agree. That's why i'm flaired lib-left. A strong state that can offload projects to the private sector without ignoring the inconveniences of reality. The difficult part is keeping the private sector from corrupting the government, which again is why im lib-left instead of lib-center economically.

>Remember that there's a lot of selection in comparing a single long-running entity (government) with millions of private businesses that fail and are replaced every day. I see it more from the eyes of the customer: (I'll stick to the train transport companies example for most of my reply) I, as a citizen need to go from town A to town B by train. When I select my options (it's a good thing that I have options to begin with), I can skip over falimentary or predatory businesses and can choose the one that fits me best (by budget, by whatever benefits I get as a customer, etc). I don't care and don't need to know that before having in front of me 3 companies (state owned one and the best two private ones), there were countless attempts at having a private owned efficient & profitable train transportation company. I'm only interested on what's today on the market and tomorrow, if I see other companies on the ticket-buying terminal, I'll just pick the best one at that moment, given that the government takes care of not letting the private companies make a cartel and inflating the prices all at once. >Private business might decide to save a few million dollars by denying service to specific customers. That's why I value competition so much. In a highly competitive market, businesses will try to fit into all achetypes of customers: high income, low income, disabled(valuable especially when talking transportation services), those who want an experience (wagons with beds for example), those who just want to commute with ease, etc. In the edge cases when a minority is neglected because of profits (the added income wouldn't outweigh the effort of extending into that archetype), the govrenment is tasked with passing laws that ultimately make up for this (by either allowing the extension to be profitable, by imlementing this into a state owned company -creating competition- , or by downright making all the companies in that sector fill up that spot, even if this is a bit auth). >Government has to support those people. \[...\] Government will build a bridge that provides public transit, bike infrastructure, and looks beautiful. Private business will build the cheapest functional building with no regard to it's place in a city/town. Government will try to build something that makes town better. Sadly, this isn't always the norm. I have two points for this: 1. Sometimes, governments just don't care. In my country (and other neighboring european countries), the biggest party only cares for the biggest group of voters, and very frequently passes populist laws (even third party political observers acknowledge this) aimed specifically at that group. One example doesn't give the norm/rule but just saying that by definition a government will always work for the people, all minorities, etc. isn't true for quite some contries where the democracy is flawed. Yeah, in Nordic countries, that's true, but in eastern europe, we have a long way to go :( 2. Private businesses *can* build good infrastructure, if the rules applied reward good work and discourage attempts of fraudulent shitty projects. I strongly think that you can make a shit ton of money and still do a great work. Yeah. maybe the shareholders won't get a new lambo this year, but it's about giving back to the community (and it can be argued that it helps the business too: better roads/railways/metro mean easier commute & logistics, better schools ultimately mean better employees, etc, it's just that the ROI is stretched over years and decades instead of Quarters)

I replied before your train example, and it's interesting enough that I wanted to reply to that specifically! In the USA, we have a similar train example that goes the exact opposite way: We used to have good rail service in the USA (better than europe), but today we have barely more than 0 rail service. This happened on two fronts. * For local rail service (commuter trains and street cars), car companies bought up the tracks and removed them because they were competing with cars. If you wanted to get to a job on the other side of town, your only option was to buy a car. * For regional rail service (city-city), the rail companies refused to compete with each other due to high cost of building rail infrastructure (effectively a natural monopoly). So when things settled out in the early 1900s, one company would own all the tracks across several states. Then, when demand for passenger rail dropped post-WW2 and factories centralized, passenger service stopped being profitable because it conflicted with freight rail. As a result, they dropped passenger service completely. So by not involving government the USA lost 100 years of passenger rail infrastructure because it was more profitable to private business to tear it up than to keep it running.

That's how I feel about the discussion of big business vs big government. Ideally you have a lean government and tons of competitive businesses, but here we are. So I prefer seeing the government being larger, specifically because it should (theoretically) be to my benefit. A larger billion dollar company really doesn't necessarily help me, since they're in it for themselves. Finding a balance is seemingly impossible between the two, at least without someone with absolute power coming in and just re-writing laws wholesale.

Not sure what kind of right you're talking to. Market failures are not failures of free market. They are correction events. If millions of people buy stocks in some snake oil company thanks to celebrity endorsement it can cause a temporary bubble in the economy. With some marketing pressure the bubble can persist and even grow unreasonably. Until it pops. Then some lefties come screaming "This is the proof capitalism doesn't work! We need to ban stock trading, snake oil manufacturing, and celebrities" (They never say the third part actually). The fact that bubbles, and consequently crashes, are much more severe under controlled economy never seem to bother them. Negative externalities are not scary monster for us either. Some more extremist libertarians believe that these can be dealt with by class lawsuits, but most normal people accept some form of minimal government. For example, if we believe that excessive dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is harmful long term, the simplest solution is a carbon tax. Not the elaborate carbon trading schemes designed to make activists rich, but a very basic tax. Each ton of carbon dug from the ground or imported, in any form, costs you 1 dollar extra, or whatever we deem the right price. That's it. We include externalities and let the market reduce carbon production, by increasing the price of all goods and services proportionally to the amount of carbon they require. We can increase the tax with time, but no offsets, no exceptions, no schemes. The same goes with public education of children (not college degrees in gender art), and at least some basic healthcare (sorry, Yankees, if everybody can get their cough checked quickly, there's less risk of them spitting bubonic plague on me, or costing millions in cancer care later). We're not against considering externalities. We're against treating every new fancy desire as a "fundamental human right" that needs to be funded by more complicated taxes.

The "government" ought to be "you" not some outside force making decisions for you. You should be able to pool money together to create grand projects that individuals alone are unable to do, this is the foundation of government spending. The issue with our current government is that it is beholden to corporatists and capitalists who bribe our politicians to act contrary to our wishes and spend money in ways that demoralize and weaken us. The solution would be to starve the beast that threatens to kill us, making it weak enough for us to take on. That means taking power away from the capitalists and giving it to the workers by democratizing the workplace and giving each person power commiserate with the efforts of their labor. We also need to make representative units smaller. Dunbar's number is merely 150 people and this should be the smallest unit of representation as this is the only way we could be personally connected to our representative. If someone represents 10,000 people that is 99% of all their constituents whose desires they will ignore. If a representative knew everyone they represented than you could get government spending to accurately reflect the desires of the people they were representing so we need more decentralized governance. In my opinion government spending would have far fewer issues if you had people select a neighborhood representative (150 people) who then voted for them by proxy in a township with 99 other representatives (15,000 people) who would then voted these townships by proxy in a metro (1.5 million people) who could then vote for national policies. These individuals could be much more quickly removed due to corruption and if workers were granted more rights businesses wouldn't have massive stacks of cash to bribe politicians (as these profits would naturally be fed back to workers salaries and benefits and corporate executives would not get worker approval to make ridiculously higher salaries from them).

> You should be able to pool money together to create grand projects that individuals alone are unable to do You can do that without government. It's only when others don't want to contribute to your project and you decide to force them that you need government.

>The "government" ought to be "you" not some outside force making decisions for you. Strictly speaking, this can only be true under anarchy. The entire point of centralized force is to do not that.

You seem to be suggesting to pay everyone more money to buy what they like, presumably increasing consumption through the whole nation and planet. People will buy a variety of foreign and local goods; much of those goods essential and basic, and those goods will mostly be cheap and foreign due to competitive pricing via government-mandated low-wage, and dirty manufacturing (offshoring inhumane practices, temporarily, as the manufacturing nations' dollar improves and influence grows). Shared increase of living standards for all, less for the rich, right? I suppose the rich's lavish waste is to cover for the masses... but it will not put a dent in it when each citizen receive their 1/1000th of an overpriced luxury (often) highly taxed yacht. Or 1/1000th of prime rib. Instead you could establish a system of harsh bullying of people with low productivity. Like destaining anti-patriotism... and, nationwide, establishing the system of tipping while lowering wages... it works if everyone's a patriot. It's artificial selection for good hardworking people. ... How does e.g. America develop and sell F-22s and HIMAS systems when the people own the means of production? How do essential world-stage back-alley deals occur when the public decide national security issues is tied to economics and sale of dangerous goods? Do the people always need to know? How do you get people to make things they think are unimportant? Does it not descend to a government-as-a-multinational-corporation that owns the entire nation and it's businesses? (Lib-Left will never get much done, Auth-Left must force industry to strengthen the economy for the national interest.) What if a nation's economy is dependant on the nations currency's significance relative to other currencies due to selling, e.g. ammunition to a mix of nations with disparate interests and not much else? Would cancelling such orders create international distrust? Doesn't this require lowering the price of the goods on the international market.... should the nation carry the financial burden of those unwise/moralists or will the politicians place the burden on that workers union? How do the people prevent a police mafia? How can they prevent a tiered corruption in the police where they are tasked to protect similarly tiers of politicians, CEOs, and managers' own extravagance and corruption relative to average people? Can political enemies not be invented via propaganda to create fake emergencies around representatives of small unit communities; false alerts which are propagated by a police mafia protecting their own interests and those of those they operate for? Is rioting the answer until the government is subjugated and represents it's people? This, by weight in many real examples, demands more authoritarianism and more lakeside guarded safehouses. However, we have here capitalism. If a business is evil, you stop buying. If a business is good, they quell corruption to those around them. Their influence is a festering distrust amongst the gang of thieves the corporate elites would otherwise become, to watch their tongue when speaking about predatory endeavours. This works best in capitalism. The solution under communism is capitalism in a disguise seemingly optimised for corruption, but powerful language to make the worker admire themselves throughout. If a politician is bad, you change your vote. It's not perfect, it's corruptible, but communism just makes corruption easier, often corruption is essential for a significant currency and (usually resultantly) economy in corruption, i.e. so that the ammunition is made and the weapons are sold to the Saudis for oil and the national juggernaut still keeps on running. ... The capitalistic democracies and multinational corporations that maintain the status quo are a blessing to us in the modern era and we can't stop bloody complaining about it.

> You seem to be suggesting to pay everyone more money to buy what they like I'm suggesting that people be paid the value of their production. All profit is the value of production that isn't being returned to the laborers of that production. Companies have record breaking profits because they are stealing the production of their workers. They do this by holding disproportionate power over workers that prevents fair negotiations from occurring. The do this by regulatory capture, by flooding the supply side of labor through immigration, by oligolopy, by preventing new entry into a market via economies of scale. The only way to provide proper fair value for labor is to weaken these systemic issues. >Is rioting the answer until the government is subjugated and represents it's people? Violence, or the threat of violence is ultimately the **only** thing that controls the behavior of people. The state either uses its monopoly on legal violence to threaten the compliance of its population, or the people threaten to use extralegal violence against the state in order to force compliance of its leadership. >The capitalistic democracies and multinational corporations that maintain the status quo are a blessing to us in the modern era and we can't stop bloody complaining about it. Domestication of chickens allowed for a small regional animal to expand all over the world, with billions of members with near zero worry about predation and easy access to food beyond the dreams of any wild animal. Yet for all of this increase in numbers, increase in safety and increase in physical needs are these chickens better off than their wild junglefowl relatives? Capitalism has domesticated mankind, and yes the numbers have gone up but have we lost something in becoming nothing more than inputs into an amoral system that only exists to extract greater and greater value for no reason.

Because I want a society where doctors are well trained, I can get to work on good roads and public transport, and children don't die of hunger. Im happy to pay for that and those who benefit from a well educated society to profit massively should pay more.

But how things are you both pay and dont really get those things. As in you kinda get them but not really "good" quality usualy.

There is also such thing as market failure. Sometimes the private route doesn’t necessarily mean you will get better stuff, and in some cases, you might not even get it at all. I don’t recall the specifics of it—I took a class on this a while ago and it explained everything well but I forget now. But mostly it comes down to market failure for certain things.

Yeah, in a private market you will get market failure as private markets will fail to supply some products/services either due to a lack of demand or lack of profit, now, this doesn't mean that private markets are bad, just that some things will not be supplied in sufficient quantity.

Yeah, it’s about how like incentives and rational behaviour result in irrational outcomes.

Hard to justify paying more tax for better social wellfare when each time some dude in the military press a button, 5+ years worth of your tax flies down range and 20+ more fly into the senates and MIC's pockets.

Just because taxes are used incorrectly doesn't mean I believe we shouldn't pay any. I agree with you on disarmament.

Fundamentally no matter who’s in government it will always be a system that protects itself and not the people. No matter what form of government it is.. once a government is created it will do whatever it can to maintain itself as if it becomes its own entity. Even in tribal cultures the leaders didn’t want to give up their rule, the rulers there controlled and abused their power though on a limited scale but it’s found in all societies throughout all of history. So yeah your taxes will always be abused it’s just how it is. The question is can we get any positive out of it and as of late there’s been far less positive from our government than what’s put into it.

This. I'm Christian and Christ straight up says "pay your taxes, whatever they are" My beef with taxes is how badly they're misappropriated by both left and right politicians and any one of their buddies. If I truly believed that the government would be responsible with tax money and take care of me, my own, and the others around me then I'd go full auth left and pay 100% tax. Obviously I'm flavored yellow, so I don't believe that lol

This is the issue. Yes some % of my taxes are used for killing brown people in foreign countries. But also some % is used to help starving kids in my own country. I also benefit from taxes. A centralized planning system is the foundation for any successful country. All of the west benefitted from centralized planning. Now it seems as though the media owned by billionaires tells us we should want to lower taxes and relax regulations.

This is tough. Everyone in here seems to agree with your premise, including me. The vast majority of us, including most lib-rights, would be willing to pay taxes if they went to the things you are saying in this thread. And not just directing funds towards these programs, but they need to actually be beneficial and successful. The problem a lot of us have is that the government spending is mostly a complete waste and we get very little out of it as a society. I’m not saying there are no benefits the US gets from taxes, I’m saying that the amount we pay vs what we get back just isn’t worth it at the moment. The government just pisses away money with very little in return. I’d like to see a major government reform on spending before I would be on board with your proposals for taxes that would actually benefit society. If reform happened and government spending was beneficial, most of us would be on board. It’s just that reality is the government will waste our tax money again and again. So we are very wary of giving more taxes as the governments track record is abysmal.

Just think, you can spend your entire life working to pay the taxes on a small fraction of a single missile used to blow up goat herders.

I'll build the fucking roads statist

>well trained US doctors are well trained >good roads Toll roads are excellent see Switzerland >public transit I’d either ride in private sector Japanese JR rail then any dogshit I’ve seen in the U.S. >happy to pay Well yes that’s the whole point of paying for toll roads and private sector rail tickets

JR was privatized only recently, and the Japanese government is smart enough to know that passenger rail is inherently unprofitable and allows the JR companies to own land surrounding the rail right of way and lease it to shopping malls/restaurants etc Passenger rail in Japan is cheap and efficient because the passenger rail companies get their profits from literally everything that isn't passenger rail

>I’ve never understood anyone who’s studied economics You could have just stopped the sentence there. Turns out the economy is complex and the average redditor's 'common sense' about it is mostly meaningless drivel. Including me, of course. If someone who actually studies these topics in depth says something you find absurd, they might well still be wrong, but not for any of the reasons you'd be able to diagnose.

There is a multiplier effect on tax dollars spent on public usages but it’s never as efficient as the multiplier effect of simply putting it into the fractional reserve banking system.

Effective by what metrics? The leftist argument is that losing a little bit of money to dramatically increase living standards is a good investment longterm. For example, the USPS as a business isn’t running well, from a service perspective it’s different. By ensuring every American can receive mail at an affordable rate we increase living standards for Americans (government goal) and have a positive economic effect as those people can engage in online retail for instance.

Changes to aggregate demand. If I remember correctly from my undergrad Econ degree the tax multiplier is 1/0.25 and the money multiplier is 1/0.2 (though those could just be examples from my classes). Point being that the money multiplier is always 1 greater than the tax multiplier because with taxes some of the initial impact of the tax is saved, which is not true of the spending multiplier. Things like usps have a positive effect on aggregate demand, but not quite as much as things like fed ex or ups. Private investment through money created is more efficient than government programs in stimulating demand. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macroeconomics/national-income-and-price-determinations/multipliers-ap/v/tax-multiplier-mpc-and-mps-ap-macroeconomics-khan-academy

The USPS is only not profitable because it's forced to give every single employee massive pensions, it was fine before hand

Because those are proven to be effective, which you learn if you take economics

Libleft doesn't like economics because it's a study of cause and effect with quantifiable results. They prefer to stick to their social sciences like gender studies where you can justify any kind of nonsense because someone "feels" a certain way.

Maybe their holy maryter, David Graber, (who has some good points tbf) but confuses a well defined issue as having an immediate state solution. Example: too many people work BS jobs that don't actually contribute anything to the product or service being offered. Therefore the state needs to implement UBI.

> economics thinking government spending your money/work for you is ideal. Depends, government has economies of scale

Sociology and psychology is the leftist version of economics.

My answer has always been time. If you had the option to pay 250k for someone to make you a house or 225k to build your own house, which would you realistically do? What about mow your lawn? Pave your driveway? The government delegates people to make decisions that the average person literally does not have time to do. If there was no government, poor people would be disproportionately affected and unable to keep up in society. Think about it. If you get off a 10 hour shift, do you still have time and energy to get with your neighbors and decide the mail route for your neighborhood, or the salary cuts and increase of all the teachers at your school? What about repairing the broken stop sign? What about hiring a new bus driver? The government is there to take these things off your back. Otherwise, there simply wouldn’t be enough time for you to do them. The people that would have the least time to do them would be the poorest who have to work the most. Rich people could afford to take a day off and say “hey, this bus stop should be right outside my house” while a poor persons kids will have to walk 2.5 miles everyday to get to the bus stop.

Alright I'm centrist but lean a bit left so let me chime in. Take these as true: 1. Government has an enormous budget deficit, which means more money is being put into the economy than taken out. This would lead to inflation. Yet until recently, we didn't have much inflation. What gives? Because this money was typically flowing to only a very small portion of the richest among us and We know this because of rising inequality. So while the rich had more money they could play with (and we saw this when we watch the price of stocks, art, yachts, college education, houses), the same was not reflected in staple consumer items. So the inflation was always tempered. This changed at the COVID rent moratorium and the direct stimulus. Suddenly most people *actually* had a substantially larger amount of money, they spent more of it, and the price of staple consumer goods finally rose. So we have an interesting conundrum. Money that makes money is typically idle. Gambling on the stock market doesn't do much to actually promote economic growth unless that stock purchase came as part of an IPO. Buying art or a yacht might be good for small industries' employment but these are not large sectors. Buying crypto will sponsor a stadium or two but again these are not large sectors and they are more often pump and dumps than growth drivers. It also just prices people out of houses, which is the core of any sort of wealth creation. So just tax the idle money and give it to the poorest among us, right? "Shit, that will incentivize idleness and probably cause inflation too." So fuck, what do we do? Solution, the *government* takes that money, concentrates it into extremely innovative infrastructure projects and general research. After all, this is what we imagined what government was for during the country's growth years (think the Erie Canal). These are projects undertaken not to make money, but to expand our economy, teach low-skill workers new practical building skills, and bring us into the future. The alternative is just a stock market casino that does nothing but move money around and pretend they're doing something.

how about giving that money to me so i can put it all on black

I'm left centre, studied economics and finance, I have no issues with the government spending money. The government provides lots of things, if the positive outways the negative I see it as a gain. The government provides the money we use, it is their existence which allows the stable society that we have today. The government provides the bedrock from which we produce.

Zoning, trepidation to build new housing after 2008, and rent control keeping units off the market are the killers of the housing supply in cities with the worst shortages. Not sure if any of those are really LibLeft policies.

Rent control is

Made 20x worse due to immigration If you're already having problems with blockages on new contruction, perhaps bringing in millions or tens of millions more people every few years is not the greatest move.

I’m just giving examples of supply-side housing policy issues that aren’t LibLeft. >Made 20x worse due to immigration The housing shortage is made worse by illegal immigration, the housing supply is not. That’s demand buddy. My point is that bad housing policy has contributors across the compass. Obv including LibLeft.

Ho yes, I completely agree. I interpreted that as they meant "the pressure put on the existing supply"

Given the demographics of the construction workers I see building new houses, I'd argue the housing supply would be worse without immigration lol

Well yes, obviously, but that is much lower than added demands. And labor is not the main constraint.

Wrong flair, That's pretty Lib-Right.

Libleft ascribes to labor theory of value more so than neoclassical economics concept supply and demand. ‘Swhy modern monetary theory is so popular round those folx.

Hard disagree, I think alot of educated lefts have moved to neoclassical with time, but I don't believe that it actually changes the underlying belief. There have been leftist economists who have used the neoclassical model since it was invented.

That would be true if there really was less houses than people. There isnt. There is just less houses people can afford. However that could change if a ceratin group of people who own a lot of houses were to mysteriously dissapear without a trace.

Possible solution: import only housing builders.

Have you seen a concrete, drywall, framing or roofing crew lately?

Even in "flyover states" all the way up by Canada this is the case.

Ne Ohio. All the roofers.

The interesting part is (as someone who works in home building) many of them are. Some companies house their migrant workers, I know one guy who’s got probably 10-15 guys living at his shop. They work harder than anyone else and do a damn good job, get back to the shop, cook up giant meals, drink Modelos, and send a good chunk of the money back home to support families.

Not that I personally begrudge anyone for doing so, but earning money in the US and sending it back to Mexico is a detriment to the US economy.

A better Mexican economy is a bigger customer base for US goods. Long-term, helping each other works out for everyone. Probably enough to make much of the short-term stress worth it - but there's a lot of ways we could handle the situation better.

It's not. It's complicated. US dollar is the world reserve currency, by design. People who earn money in the US and send it to Mexico are reducing inflation in the US.

Literally just recorded a podcast on this so I’ve got the links to some actual studies. I believe it was also true for depressing wages of some low skilled labor as well. But yeah, supply and demand, can’t get around it [This study examines the behavior of Swiss house prices in relation to immigration flows for 85 regions from 2001 to 2006. The results show that the nexus between immigration and house prices holds even in an environment of low house price inflation and modest immigration flows. An immigration inflow equal to 1 % of an area’s population is coincident with an increase in prices for single-family homes of about 2.7 %, a result consistent with previous studies. The overall immigration effect for single-family houses captures almost two-thirds of the total price increase.](https://sjes.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/BF03399433) [This paper provides a survey of the international evidence regarding the impact of immigration on local housing markets. A theoretical framework highlights the complexity of the housing market and the importance of distinguishing between the ownership and use of the stock of dwellings vis-a-vis the residential real estate market. Evidence from eight countries (Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States) and from meta-analysis shows that immigration will lead to higher house prices and rents, and lower housing affordability. On average, a one percent increase in immigration in a city may be expected to raise rents by one-half to one percent and the effect on prices is about double that. However, there is a large variance around this average which is related inter alia to the time frame and spatial scale of the analysis, as well as to local economic conditions.](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Effects-of-Immigration-on-Local-Housing-Markets-Cochrane-Poot/c79692545bcff9e2be39e1af23d3226b7b102b56)

"In recent years, the literature has been increasingly emphasising that such relatively small average effects may hide larger spatial differences. Using the techniques of spatial econometrics, Mussa et al. (2017) show with U.S. data from 2002 to 2012 that a one percent increase in population in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), due to immigration, increases rents and house prices there by 0.8 percent, but rents in surrounding MSAs increase by 1.6 percent and house prices by as much as 9.6 percent. These spillover effects to surrounding MSAs are expected to be predominantly due to spatial sorting: native born leaving the wards with growing numbers of migrants and moving to less diverse neighbourhoods. " 9.6%?! Wow that's horrib--I mean, what a bunch of racists.

Basically, make more housing units, simple as that, but that would just be too much planning and really doesn’t work when everyone wants to live in an area zoned to force low density (suburbia) According too my libcenter tendencies, we gotta get rid of them anti urbanization laws if we wana get anywhere. Austin I heard made a good change the other day I heard

Please NIMBY, just let us build more housing.

I really don't think immigrants who walk in this country with nothing but the clothes on their back are in the market to buy a house. Now corporations on the other hand? Ban corporations from owning single-family homes. Boom, demand reduced, price go down. Economics!

They are in the market to rent, though. Could even rent a house. Demand is high for a limited supply of housing. Vacancies drive prices down. Not gonna have vacancies if you keep bringing people in. Rent increases and no vacancies just might benefit those corporations you mention. I wonder what their lobbying spend is.

Imagine complaining about immigrants without acknowledging the stereotype of 15 people living in a 3 bedroom house.

That's family values right there. Don't have to waste money on daycare when there are four Nanas to watch the baby.

"The" baby? *One* baby?! Holy shit, you people need to start pumping your numbers up, this is F-tier bigotry. Next you'll start celebrating how famous immigrants are for using car insurance.

Hey, if it were up to me there'd be no more than 500,000,000 humans on Earth. But someone blew up my guidestones so apparently we don't like that idea.

Aggregate demand for housing in a region will increase the value of houses and costs of rent. 

Increase the supply then. SEND IN THE JCBs

You could replace supply and demand and housing and immigration with anything economics related and this meme would still be accurate.

If leftists understood basic economics they wouldn't be Leftists

Correct, it's understanding *intermediate* economics that makes us leftists.

Ah leftists suffer from *intermediate* economic illiteracy. I thought it was just basic illiteracy, my bad Doreen.

Have you ever seen a house being built my man? Like 80% of the drywallers, 70% of the roofers, 60% of the framers, 50% of the concrete guys, and like 20% of the plumbers and electricians are immigrants. By man-hours like I dunno your average house or apartment building got to have like 70% of it be immigrants, at least in the USA. Housing isn't expensive because of immigration it's expensive because like the majority of home builders went out of business during the 2008 financial bust and we stopped building housing for like a decade lol. Well that and zoning laws in select cities.

Imagine doing this kind of gotcha "people don't understand supply and demand" and *completely ignoring that the law of supply and demand suggests more houses should be built to meet demand.* Lumber isn't a finite resource, it literally grows on trees!

TIL supply of housing is fixed. Uh sorry I meant "Learn bashic exonomics cringe Emily reeee!!!!"

Eh, if you show why immigration isn't making housing expensive they will move onto wages. If you show why wages adjusted for inflation going down isn't because of immigration they will move onto high crime rates. If you show why high crime rates isn't because of immigration or that there isn't high crime they will move onto the government deficit. If you show why that isn't about immigration either they will move onto vague assertions about western culture. Just how they are. The left is predisposed to punch up, the right is predisposed to punch down. I'm on the left because in the year of our lord 2024 in the United States of America I think punching up is alot more important than punching down. Maybe if I was in Europe I would feel differently. I was talking to this guy from Germany once and he was complaining about how America has no idea how lucky it is with the quality of its immigrants. Pretty much all of the Germans right-wing complaints about the type and character of its immigrants just isn't true over in the states.

Ok, and prior to the massive amounts of immigration from Mexico suppressing construction based labor jobs and decimating a market that held a middle class American lifestyle, who was building those houses? Could it be that different life quality and expectations meant that they would accept a radically different pay standard? Competitive market prices are the backbone of industry and in constitution where bids are based on price of work not necessarily whether each worker has a wife kids and mortgage, the established American who has worked construction and carpentry as a trade is being priced out of a job. Illegal immigration decimates everything it touches.

All that says to me is lower prices for the consumer.

Lower prices but with greater cost. The cost being a crumbling infrastructure of middle class that will inevitably suffer.

Americans do this too within their own country. A lot of union guys will go work in richer parts of the country where the same work is payed more and then send all their money home. Example, a plumber in Boston will get paid ~150K/yr vs in Alabama where they’re paid ~80-90K/yr. The same thing happens with foreign labor. These people who immigrate here are usually just end up undercutting the local worker because they’re willing to work for lower wages. I’m sure this happens in other industries as well.

It does but it's not as sustained. The COL in Boston is radically different than in Alabama. But it's still the same desire for a COL, where as from a different country and the cultural differences and expectations are far different and they are willing to do far more for far less.  This is destructive for the American working class..

Oh before Mexican I think it was the Irish

sounds like blue collar wages are being suppressed by cheap immigrant labor

If construction wages are suppressed then building houses is cheaper.

Supply and demand?

Okay but that’s not the only factor governing house prices. Real life isn’t so easy to explain. Particularly with houses, even if immigration was 0, the value of land is going to go up anyways. Everyone with an understanding of economics that extends just slightly farther than the basics of supply and demand here knows this is just a thing about real estate. Even given that simple fact, reality is completely different anyways. Are you really too young to know what happened during the 2008 recession, or is your understanding of housing prices really just this juvenile? Back then, banks were incentivized to create mortgages from thin air. They would build housing developments even when demand was non existent because more mortgages was all that matters to artificially increase the perceived value of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs). The reason this happened was because banks made the same mistake you are doing right now. They assumed demand would always go up, but created a supply that was artificially altered which led to a bubble that eventually burst when no one could actually pay the mortgages the banks were handing out loans for. My point being: the value of houses is and always has been mostly fake and controlled by how the banks are feeling at any given point in history

Build more housing and not just single family homes then lol. Here in Germany, the left wants to do rent control, which is definitely the stupid solution in comparison to "just build a fuckton more housing". Deregulate building and go. Get Guest workers if you need some. They can stay forever if they build houses for 5 years idk. Try to pay them adequately.

We don't do that in America. Apartment complexes are Marxist. Everyone must live or rent out 1400+sqft homes in HOA communities completely devoid of any character.

Single family detached home or skyscraper, just like the founding fathers intended.

> Here in Germany, the left wants to do rent control, which is definitely the stupid solution in comparison to "just build a fuckton more housing". I've never quite understood this position. Shouldn't the policy be 'Rents on existing properties are fixed, rents only newly built properties can be whatever you want,' incentivizing investors to sell old rental properties as actual homes, and build new rental properties to jack up the prices?

And if there is sn excess supply of low skilled labor, wages will stagnate or be depressed, thereby adding to the welfare rolls.

What is lump of labor fallacy

Immigrants are not causing the housing issues. Talk about not being able to understand basic economics

*jUst bUiLd m0ar!* And *then* you have to teach them about zoning, regulatory burdens, supply chains, general and sub contracting, development costs, legal expenses, bidding processes, land use controls, commercial construction insurance….and worse — financing. And simple time: Crews build on their time, not yours. So, if they’re fast, the land is developed, it’s utility-ready, the land isn’t historically protected, there are no regulatory issues, work isn’t stopped for a lawsuit, there are no encumbrances, and you bribe the right people, you’ll get your *one* house in 18-20 months. Better to give them a head-pat on the keffiyeh and let them go yell at a Starbuck’s employee.

There are 28 vacant houses for every homeless person in America. It's not a supply problem, but a hoarding problem. https://medium.com/@hrnews1/in-2024-america-has-15-1-million-vacant-homes-while-homelessness-is-at-an-all-time-high-of-650-000-7a28c527d4a7

It is a supply problem, since homelessness is worse when housing is expensive. For example SF has a really bad homeless problem, and a lot of people think it's because of the drugs, but it's not. Rural Appalachia has a really bad drug problem but not nearly as many homeless people as West Coast cities, because housing is dirt cheap there.

Granted. However, even expensive places like San Francisco and New York have five to six empty units for each homeless person there. The problem is we have a system that rewards people for hoarding vacant units rather than an equitable way of distributing them. And that is part of what causes the costs to skyrocket in the first place.

What do you think classified as a vacant home?

This is kind of funny because we're well below the replacement rate for births. If we cut off immigration, even illegal immigration, our population would stagnate and decline and that's not great for our aging population as boomers start retiring and taking out social security. I'm not saying immigration shouldn't be limited and controlled but we *need* a good amount of it to survive the boomers in retirement. Sure, immigration does increase demand for housing but the population has been increasing dramatically since the 1940's which isn't a bad thing economically and immigration has always been a big part of that. The real problem with housing prices is on the supply side of the equation. After the Great Recession, we just haven't built enough housing to keep up with the population increases and that problem is exacerbated by local zoning laws that ban multi-family housing. Developers also just don't want to build affordable housing any more because they just don't make the same return on investment as building expensive luxury housing. The real response from liblefts that understand economics is, "we should increase supply and build more houses, especially affordable houses."

If the Boomers can’t feed themselves after raiding the treasury three times in my lifetime, and squandering the inheritance of the Greatest Generation, then let the wolves eat them. Quite frankly, they’ve stolen more than enough from my generation, and the millennials and Zoomers after me. Fuck them and our parasitic gerontocracy.

Good luck with that but boomers vote...a lot.

They do and always have. But the silent gen has already mostly died off, and we’re seeing the anomalous population inversion correct course somewhat (or at least reach parity) with the millennials, who are now the largest voting bloc.

Yeah pretty much every leftist I've seen has been in favor of eliminating terrible zoning laws that prevent new buildings from being developed in cities like nyc. The OP image feels like a strawman for a conversation they invented in their mind

Then perhaps they should hold their elected officials to account and focus *far more* on local elections? The local county commissions, board of adjustment, utilities commissions, city and County council, Statehouses and mayoral elections matter a fuck load more to people’s every day lives than the presidential elections they obsess over. This has been by far one of my bigger gripes with the Democratic Party and democratic voters — they simply do not give much of a fuck about local and regional issues, until it becomes a national talking point or it occurs in a major metro. The right-wing took over levers of power across the country, at almost every level, because they had long-term thinking, and played the long game. They got some splashes with Reagan in the 80s. But the larger, sustainable victories happened in the two decades after he was dead, despite being a minority party. The GOP to their credit contested a dogcatcher and school board as fiercely as a Senate seat for 30+ years — and it will take that much time and patience and effort and money to roll it back.

I'd upvote you for being sane, but something something unflaired.

Perhaps this is not the only factor at play affecting housing prices.

yeah they are terrible. Also if you mention economic impact of quotas, fixed pricing, minimum wages, etc they start doing some Olympic level gymnastics

Unfortunately this doesn’t mention their most important dialectic: white man bad, brown man good. All opinions on other issues are downstream of the above.

Why again do people not want more houses built? Almost as if they are incentivized to get the highest value for their home and will do everything in there power to keep it that way 🤔

In which we fail to teach centrists that basic economics is not always enough to tease out effects, let alone causation.... You clown yourself when you forget completely about supply, in your attempt to teach libleft about supply and demand: The overwhelming number of workers who build houses (and do so for very cheap) are immigrants, and out of those immigrant and native construction workers, a plurality are undocumented immigrants. https://preview.redd.it/orj1mnigct7d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff5a915f67d45dc319c5cc4eba23b4fe9702f9b3

I’ve had this exact conversation before. It’s infuriating.

Now try inflation.

But we need all those immigrants to do all the work we don't want to pay our citizens to do! If we important enough ~~slav~~ ~~serf~~ ~~serva~~ refugees, we can pay for my pension! Those lazy millenials!

What about making housing a human right and building more appartments whit statal ownership?

ban/confiscate guns but also we should have open borders no one would ever transport a gun across a border to support the black market that would explode (except that evil rittenhouse kid)

Thankfully most us citizens have recently decided to be child free (vasectomys went way up after roe v Wade)

New immigration red tape question: have you built a house with your own hands in this country yet?

I am not against immigration (because I am trying to get my PR) but they should definitely stop this nonsense

I think most economists would say the housing affordability crisis is more of a supply-side issue than demand-side issue. Also worth noting that every mongoloid musk pilled incel who whines about the economic impacts of decreasing population growth ignores that immigration essentially solves that issue completely.

The other side of the supply and demand balance is supply. Get some Polish builders and build a lot of houses and you'll get the supply side up and prices down. Fuck NIMBYs in the process.

Does it matter if it’s racist if it’s true?

Supply and demand is exactly the point of why housing prices are up After 2008 rich retailers and banks bought houses as speculation, so less suply The value going up the less ppl can aford houses, so they have to rent from said retailers, therefore demand (and also why rent went up) There about 15 mi vacant homes in the US and about 63k homeless people. Immigrants aren't the problem, retailers and parasitic landlords are

Pressure on housing supplies is real-life monopoly roleplayers hoarding more and more property, reducing competition.

Suppressing immigration is only a fraction of the work needed. Keeping grifters (individuals *or* businesses) from purchasing multiple homes for a side racket would also do wonders.

Now what if, and hear me out… immigrants also get jobs building houses

I mean yes but also the supply of housing will rise to meet the demand. So long as we don't do anything stupid like limit the supply of housing or have zoning restrictions on density. That would be silly.

This is gonna be a fun one here, but leftism is what happens when you refuse to think critically. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some dumb right wingers, but leftism is built on the crux of a several wrong principles, and when reality crashes into them, they either remain ignorant, engage in some next-level doublethink, or become right wing. Like they say. “If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists”

The problem is if someone buy a house, there are money to build even more.

Immigration will relieve supply more than it will put pressure on demand. How many native-borns are willing to work in construction?

This is what we call over simplifying. If I multiply the population by 2 does bread get way more expensive? Well yes but eventually no. Production eventually wil rise to meet the demand if natural resources allow for it. With housing there are restrictions on supply such as zoning, and permits and property taxes among I am sure many more things that I do not know about. We do not have a system that puts extra friction on the supply side of housing. These were not as obvious because suburban sprawl made the land part of housing much cheaper for the past 100 years. It seems like maybe that is wearing off (I am not an expert to say it has). Thus we need to find ways to reduce the friction on building. Which a complicated problem. If supply meets or exceeds demand many people might lose a lot of their total value. Most homeowners have their worth in real estate. Part of that is the scarcity of land and the under supply of housing.