: : SDF: The above assumption is not necessary. Landlords do not have to collude intentionally (they might assume that high rents are their birthrights, according to some popular folkloric notion) nor does there have to be one owner of all land (although in places such as Hawaii this is a realistic notion). Nor will collusion between landlords risk any kind of bankruptcy at all. This is why anarcho-capitalism is a fantasy -- it depends upon assumptions that aren't necessarily so.: Started out full of the promise that each of those above "nor will..." assertions would be explained, why werent they?
SDF: Actually, the ball's in your court. It was you who first assumed that if
": : SDF: In the real world, tenants have two choices: they may pay rent, or they can be homeless."
that necessarily:
": Assuming there is one owner of every possible piece of land, or they all collude with the aim, presumably, of becoming bankrupt."
I still don't understand why we have to assume such assumptions under capitalo-fantasism or whatever you call it, and I still believe that none of your assumptions is necessary for renters to be compelled either to pay rent or to be homeless. There are all sorts of reasons compelling renters to pay rent, to live in the same places for extended periods of time over moving whenever "the market" might justify looking for a place with cheaper rent. Earning a living wage or running a stable business usually means having a stable residence. Not having a stable residence usually means having to establish the credit necessary to setting up connections to one's residence for water, power, and indoor heating, time and time again, not to mention having to set up new relationships with new, unfamiliar, and possibly fraudulent or otherwise predatory landlords time and time again.
Why should I establish why your presumptions about tenancy AREN'T necessary when you haven't established why they ARE necessary yourself?
: : The reason for this should be obvious -- no tenant, competing individually in a capitalist system, would risk the destitution and disruption to his or her life that homelessness entails. So he or she will continue to pay rent, no matter how unfair such rent might happen to be.
: Why would a competing building owner not think "aha, Mr Bad-Business-Brain overcharges his tenants so If I undercut him I'll get his tenants and the money too!"?
SDF: Because it's difficult to move, and because it's more profitable just to charge high rents and compel the tenants to pay them. Also, if tenancy is at or above capacity, there are (by "market rules") more than one tenant competing to pay rent for one space, so presumably in such conditions landlords could "auction off" the right to live in any particular space for any particular period of time, and evict people willy-nilly for the sake of profit. And either such people voluntarily accept homelessness, disruption of their lives etc., or they resist, as they do today.
: : Landlords are able, in fact, to charge high rents in places (such as for instance Santa Cruz, California, here in the US) where tenancy is at or above "capacity," and the upper boundary of such rents is the wage-earning capacity of the tenants. Even in places where rental is below capacity, the landlords can risk leaving lots of buildings empty in order to extract the desired money from renters.
: Shame supply is restricted by govt housing welfare programmes and new building is restricted by zoning then.
SDF: How do you know that it's not ecologically-conscious Santa Cruz landowners that aren't restricting the supply of housing in Santa Cruz? When was the last time you visited Santa Cruz?
: : and my point was that 1) people have to use the road, and 2) the road owner will not necessarily need money to survive. Thus, I argued, Gee is making assumptions about the world that aren't necessarily so, and thus Gee's assumption that we can have capitalism without government will fall apart because it is based arbitrary assumptions about property situations.
: And your argument appears to be based upon the possibility that the road owner is someone who wishes to lose potential wealth in favour of arbitrary pleasure gained from making life difficult for what would have been willing customers. The one offs.
SDF: Look, at the beginnning of the 19th century, the Golden Age you've proclaimed elsewhere in this Debating Room, the working classes in England were cursed with extremely low wages, extremely long hours, and extremely short lifespans. And these "dark Satanic mills" that William Blake wrote about were created not merely for "arbitrary pleasure gained from making life difficult for what would have been willing customers," but rather for the profits of a rich few. And this "making life difficult" is going on today, for the sake of profit. Please read Aihwa Ong's SPIRITS OF RESISTANCE AND CAPITALIST DISCIPLINE: FACTORY WOMEN IN MALAYSIA or Jeremy Seabrook's VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT or (I could cite another dozen titles)...
: : SDF: And what if they IN FACT do? Doesn't then your anarcho-capitalist fantasy become another monopoly situation?
: You mean that the road owner also owns a farm and then presides over an usused heavily policed road at massive cost, sustaining himself on his farming produce? For what possible purpose except either sadism or masochism?
SDF: Profit, or have you forgotten the purpose of capital accumulation?
: : In fact, the invention of capitalism itself required that millions of peasants be stripped of their access to the commons and be forced into cities
: Forced by whom? If by armies then why is this liberty based capitalism as opposed to statism-nationalism
SDF: I didn't say it was. (Maybe if you actually read E.P. Thompson's THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS you'd find out about the statist historical origins of capitalism.) I don't think one has to have any philosophical objection to "liberty based capitalism" to understand its impracticality in the present day. To summarize -- to make people behave like capitalists, capitalism has had to be IMPOSED through STATIST MECHANISMS upon the various peoples of the world, starting in the late 18th century in Britain, and spreading elsewhere through imperialism.
Merely removing the state does not abolish the repressive context of capitalism, the context created by statist capitalism -- and, as I have already explained time and time again, those with a business interest in the state will re-invent the state if, supposing some feat of magic with the power to abolish Earth's enormous nuclear stockpiles, the state is abolished without removing its capitalist context.
If you really want to abolish the state, you'll have to radically re-distribute power, wealth, and resources in favor of the working classes of the world, by organizing a popular revolution against the state. And, given such a popular revolution, neither I nor anyone else can guarantee that the resulting power-formation will be capitalist, communist, ecologist, antiecologist, statist, antistatist, or anything else. (Frankly I would prefer that the world change over to some sort of voluntary collectivist environmental and social consciousness, but it's not my choice either.) Given the revolution, all bets are off.
: The point with which I wont argue (see, im not really beligerant) is that someone without anything to trade is without resource. Except that I doubt I would be as inclusive about who actually has nothing to trade at all.
SDF: And I've already explained how millions of people are shut out by today's global markets and by the impoverishment of their (usually urban) environmental situations. I can't recommend Jeremy Seabrook's VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT enough, as a physical description of who these people are. Maybe if you read such a book you would understand why the growing urbanization of the world constitutes a threat to anarcho-capitalist fantasies (among other things).
