#economic rent

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"SINGLE TAX MEN AND MOVEMENT," Winnipeg Tribune. December 9, 1913. Page 5. ---- W. W. Buchanan Delivers Interesting Address on Status in Old Land ---- "The Men and the Movement" was the title of the address delivered, uder the auspices of the Land Values Taxation league, in the Monarch theatre on Sunday evening by W. W. Buchanan, and it was a racy and entertaining description of the leaders of that movement in England, and their methods of work. Mr. Buchanan made his biographical sketches, veritable tables of the border, sparkling with romantic touches of incident and devotion. He contrasted Jos. Fels, the dogmatic doctrinaire who was putting his life and his fortune into teaching the truths of single tax, with Lloyd George the practical statesman who is working as much of the truth he can into the laws and administration of the land. Neither figure suffered by the comparison, but the speaker used these men of diverge talents to illustrate the varied characters necessary to carry on any great reform enterprise, and he followed it with an appeal which denounced exclusiveness and pleaded for breadth of vision and catholocity of spirit. He gave rapid pen pictures of a number of the members of the parliamentary group, devoted to the exploitation of single tax, including Neilson, Chancellor, Price. Oughtwaite, Higham, Jones, Wing and Wedgewood. He told how these men, not only fought the battles on the floor of parliament, but spent the recess in storming the country, abandoning the pleasures of home, that they might spread the doctrines of social justice.

Shrewdness of Leaders. Incidentally, Mr. Buchanan drew attention to the spirit and shrewdness of the leaders of the Liberal party in Great Britain, in the way they linked up the potency of these reform movements and brought to the party organization the enthusiasm and loyalty which characterizes the activities of these aggressive reformers who frequently criticized and prodded party leaders, as dangerous men to be read out of the ranks of the party, they are distinctly encouraged and not only kept within the party fold, but actually provided by the party machinery with constituencies which give them seats In parliament. Within a twelve month he pointed out that no less than four single tax leaders had received nominations from the Liberal party and won seats in by-elections. In two of these contests there were three cornered fights, but the fighting blood of the single taxer had helped him to snatch victory out of the face of apparent defeat. He further pointed out that the broad spirit of Liberalism in Great Britain did not make an excерtion in favor of taxers, for similar treatment was given the leaders of the temperance reform. Leif Jones, the president of the U.K. alliance, held a seat in the house. Roberts, the son-in-law of the Countess of Carlisle, at the head of the W. C. T. U. of the world, had a seat in the house, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson, son of the late baronet, was also in the house. It was evidently the policy of the Liberal party in the old land to encourage reform movements and to gather the strength of these various movements together to maintain itself in the ascendency and to keep reactionaries in opposition.

Propaganda Described. He also described the propaganda, the offices, the publications, and the methods of maintaining public agitation for the spread of single tax doctrines, and in that connection he canonized a little Scotchman named John Paul, who was the master mechanic of the organization and chief propagandist. He claims that although Henry George started this wonderful movement on this continent, the centre of activity had been transferred to the world's capital, old London, and he predicted that the victories which would be achieved there, and the enactments of the British parliament, would lead to a complete revolution in all the nations of the world with respect to taxation and would play a major part in establishing the reign of social Justice from the rivers unto the ends of the earth. He pointed out that while the philosophy of the single tax involved the removal of taxation from individual industry and enterprise and proposed only to take for the purposes of government those values which were created by society as a whole, it was at the same time a distinctly religious movement which sought to establish just relationship. Instead of regarding these between reformers who frequently men, upon the principles, and in the spirit, of Him who was the Saviour of society.

[odinsblog]

The rent is too damn high!

[goldenhour-s]

coming soon: britechester townhouse(s) for rent 🔑

[dailymarx]

…the landlord in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right, but, in view of the competition, also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can.  In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution…

Engels - The Housing Question 1872

[welcometogrouchland]

I like to think that when the batfamily inevitably runs out of money and jobless Bruce, Tim, and Dick* find themselves in financial need, Steph reveals that she's made thousands of dollars taking odd jobs around Gotham City that we just never saw bc Steph hasn't been in a comic for months. Nobody checked in on her and while they weren't looking she made 6 grand babysitting and playing piano at a local theatre. Bruce has to grovel for enough money to buff out a scratch on the batmobile and Steph is revelling in it. This is the closest she's ever going to get to being a supervillain

*(Cass and Jason don't need money to survive on account of being homeless as kids + Babs funds Cass' basic needs and Damian is on his mom's payroll, same w/ duke even if it's obvs not al ghul money)

[typhlonectes]

[upennmanuscripts]

Last week on #CoffeeWithACodex, we took a look at Ms. Codex 19, a 14th century list of rents due to one Ithier Bonea, seignor des Brousses, an area of France over which he was a landowner. Most of the listings of tenants are by parish, occasionally by town. In this compilation, Curator Dot Porter points out some of the notable aspects of the manuscript. Follow the link to watch the whole 30 minute video.

🔗:

[obii-wan-kenobiii]

PROPOSITION 33, BROKEN DOWN:

long post below the cut - scroll for tldr

let’s start from the beginning - what IS prop 33?

proposition 33, put simply, allows for city councils to set rent caps on housing in their cities. this would repeal a state law known as the costa hawkins rental housing act that prevents local governments from controlling rent on single-family homes, homes built after 1995 (or earlier in some cases), and when tenants move out. if it passes, local governments could create whatever measures they want to limit annual rent increases, and the state couldn’t intervene. (source) now, what this actually MEANS is that landlords can’t endlessly raise rent prices for their own gains. for the last 30 years, california has imposed limits on the amount a city can interfere with rent prices via the costa-hawkins act (source). proposition 33 allows cities to individually control rent on any type of housing.

now, why is this relevant?

according to the public policy institute of california, around 30% of california renters spend more than half their income on rent. to put this in perspective, 44% of the 39 million people living in california are renters. that means 17,160,000 people rent somewhere to live in california. now, 30% of those people is about 5,148,000 people. think about that. over five million people who pay over half their income to live. (source) (source) on top of this, a study by UCSF has shown that californians are homeless because of sky high rent costs pushing people out onto the streets.

let’s move onto common arguments against prop 33, and why they either are irrelevant in the face of the issue specifically or why the benefits of proposition 33 being passed outweigh the negative effects it may have! please note that the current state of housing in california will be referred to as the status quo.

funded by notorious slumlord

no guarantee that living conditions are good

could decrease property value, further contributing to the shortage of housing available

eliminates protection for seniors, veterans, and the disabled

weakens renter protections

overturns over 100 state affordable housing laws

prop 33 would repeal the strongest rent control law in the nation

and now, let’s break all of these down!

“prop 33 is funded by a notorious slumlord” proposition 33 is supported & receives funding from corporate ceo michael weinstein who runs the AHF (aids healthcare foundation), whom the LA times describes as a "slumlord" with a long record of health and safety violations and unfair evictions. this is true! it is also, however, supported mostly by labor unions and nonprofit organizations representing renters and other groups. these include the voter information guide include the california democratic party, the coalition for economic survival, the california nurses association, california alliance of retired americans, the alliance of californians for community empowerment and tenants together. the sheer amount of support prop 33 has from groups & organizations that work to counteract exactly what AHF has been penalized for shows disregarding it entirely because of the organization isn't a choice to be made. more can be found regarding the issues with the AHF here.

“no real guarantee that living conditions will be good” regarding living conditions, let’s first take a look at the status quo: according to the U.S. government accountability office, “An estimated 15 percent of rental units in 2017—more than 5 million—had substantial quality issues (such as cracked walls and the presence of rodents) or lacked essential components of a dwelling (such as heating equipment or hot and cold running water), according to GAO’s analysis of American Housing Survey data. The share of units with deficiencies was relatively stable from 2001 to 2017. Serious deficiencies more often affected households with extremely low incomes or rent burdens. In addition, lower-income households rented approximately two-thirds of the units with substantial quality issues and nearly 80 percent of units lacking essential components.” (source). this argument really only has one thing going for it, but proposition 33 is intended to deal with rent costs and nothing else. there is already an issue with living conditions. proposition 33 being voted either way will do nothing to change this issue. therefore, it’s an irrelevant argument and can thus be disregarded. this is something only further legislation can change.

"prop 33 could decrease property value, contributing to the shortage of housing available" the only source for this that i could find was from the chair of UC berkeley’s fisher center for real estate and urban economics, who appears in a no on 33 ad and has argued that costa hawkins needs to be preserved or construction will slow and landlords will pull rental units off the market. this echoes the view of many economists at California’s elite universities and elsewhere that rent control reduces rental supply, a view that’s backed by some empirical studies. however, other economics and policy researchers see rent control as part of the solution to housing insecurity. according to a report by the federal housing finance agency, “Rent regulations support those who need it most, including those who are not being adequately and safely served by the current set of regulations that provide landlords substantial market power in the housing market"

"proposition 33 eliminates protection for seniors, veterans, and the disabled" this claim is from a no on 33 video ad and is not true. prop 33 doesn’t contain any language regarding seniors and veterans, and the law it would repeal, costa hawkins, doesn’t either. (source)

"proposition 33 weakens renter protections" renter protections, in california specifically, are defined as the right of residential tenants to be protected from certain rent increases and possibly protected from certain types of evictions. (source) proposition 33 is a law regarding rent, not evictions, and thus eviction as part of the definition is irrelevant for this specific case. in looking at this definition, we can clearly see what it promises is in fact only an affect that is increased by prop 33 being put into affect.

"proposition 33 overturns over 100 state affordable housing laws" ken rosen, a UC berkeley business school professor, makes this claim in a no on 33 video ad. opponents of prop 33 argue that it would give cities who don’t want to build housing a way to undercut new development by mandating rents so low that developers couldn’t afford to build. they say that could make it hard to enforce recent state laws aimed at addressing the housing crisis, such as the “builder’s remedy” that relaxes zoning rules in cities whose housing plans haven’t been approved by the state.  a spokesperson in a no on 33 ad claims that “a city would be able to create the economic conditions to basically ignore those laws and requirements," but that’s not the same as repealing those laws. and California courts have held that rent control policies are unconstitutional if they don’t allow landlords to earn “a just and reasonable return on their property” — meaning any city that tries to force landlords to charge obviously unfeasible rents could face legal challenges.

"prop 33 would repeal the strongest rent control law in the nation" no on 33 campaign ads make this claim, saying the proposition would erase california’s “progress on housing” by getting rid of a law signed by governor gavin newsom. newsom signed a law in 2019 that caps rent increases in california at 5% plus the rate of inflation, or a maximum of 10%. prop 33 in fact doesn’t repeal this law, which is set to expire in 2030. it would, however, add this sentence to state law: “The state may not limit the right of any city, county, or city and county to maintain, enact, or expand residential rent control.”  proponents say cities need this flexibility to keep annual rent increases below 10%, a rate they say still puts a big burden on tenants. (source)

so, to summarize: proposition 33 is a law proposed that would repeal a law previously passed, which, if passed, will allow cities control over how high landlords can charge their rent. over 5 million californians spend more than half their income on rent alone. proposition 33 is a proposed legislation that deals specifically with rent prices being high. while there are many incredibly significant with things other than simply the rent when you look at the california housing situation, this law is incapable of dealing with them. what prop 33 does do is effectively provide a solution to the constant rent increases many tenants face regularly. the housing crisis in california is solvable, and proposition 33 is a step towards that.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

friendly reminder that landlords nor real estate companies aren't your friends and that shelter is a basic human right, for the longest time real estate as a form of commerce is riddled to the brim with corruption and speculation that ultimately renders nothing but suffering and despair as they will gladly throw human lives under the bus just for a slight increase in profits. Millions of people are homeless and poverty striken with no way up as the system extracts every penny from the people on the bottom. Nothing short of comprehensive regulations or the dissolution of real estate as a commodity will save us, cause in the end never forget there are more of us than them and if need be their trillion dollar mansions would house dozens easily.

[phantomsies]

my last time speaking on this bc I’m back to my smut and stupid shit afterwards (cause yk this is my safe space 🤪😜🫶🏾👍🏾) , but I’m genuinely scared, not just for this presidency but my local leadership too. Hence why I always make such an emphasis on it. I live in a small town and it’s very much class/racially divided. The sheriff (a white woman btw but a woman nonetheless) has been actively trying to harass and run everyone from my side of town. She pretty much wrote off this area as a bunch of drug addicts and says ‘she hopes we all just kill each other’. (My family has never done, sold or even been around drugs and yet her dumbass cops are convinced bc we’re black with nice vehicles, that we must sell). She’s also pushing for the gentrification of our area so all of her rich cohorts can come and tear down our houses and build a suburbia. Just the other day, a cop made me move my vehicle from in front of a store I park at all the time bc im disabled and even the closest parking spot is far on this leg and he did it just to be an asshole. I can’t even cry abt this presidency yet bc I’m now worried that my local leaders are going to make our lives hell. Not to mention, they voted no on abortions and gender affirming care as well. I hate it here so fucking bad.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting “Capitalists Hate Capitalism”

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

This week on my podcast, I read "Capitalists Hate Capitalism," my latest column for Locus Magazine:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

What do I mean by "capitalists hate capitalism?" It all comes down to the difference between "profits" and "rents." A capitalist takes capital (money, or the things you can buy with it) and combines it with employees' labor, and generates profits (the capitalist's share) and wages (the workers' share).

Rents, meanwhile, come from owning an asset that capitalists need to generate profits. For example, a landlord who rents a storefront to a coffee shop extracts rent from the capitalist who owns the coffee shop. Meanwhile, the capitalist who owns the cafe extracts profits from the baristas' labor.

Capitalists' founding philosophers like Adam Smith hated rents. Worse: rents were the most important source of income at the time of capitalism's founding. Feudal lords owned great swathes of land, and there were armies of serfs who were bound to that land – it was illegal for them to leave it. The serfs owed rent to lords, and so they worked the land in order grow crops and raise livestock that they handed over the to lord as rent for the land they weren't allowed to leave.

Capitalists, meanwhile, wanted to turn that land into grazing territory for sheep as a source of wool for the "dark, Satanic mills" of the industrial revolution. They wanted the serfs to be kicked off their land so that they would become "free labor" that could be hired to work in those factories.

For the founders of capitalism, a "free market" wasn't free from regulation, it was free from rents, and "free labor" came from workers who were free to leave the estates where they were born – but also free to starve unless they took a job with the capitalists.

For capitalism's philosophers, free markets and free labor weren't just a source of profits, they were also a source of virtue. Capitalists – unlike lords – had to worry about competition from one another. They had to make better goods at lower prices, lest their customers take their business elsewhere; and they had to offer higher pay and better conditions, lest their "free labor" take a job elsewhere.

This means that capitalists are haunted by the fear of losing everything, and that fear acts as a goad, driving them to find ways to make everything better for everyone: better, cheaper products that benefit shoppers; and better-paid, safer jobs that benefit workers. For Smith, capitalism is alchemy, a philosopher's stone that transforms the base metal of greed into the gold of public spiritedness.

By contrast, rentiers are insulated from competition. Their workers are bound to the land, and must toil to pay the rent no matter whether they are treated well or abused. The rent rolls in reliably, without the lord having to invest in new, better ways to bring in the harvest. It's a good life (for the lord).

Think of that coffee-shop again: if a better cafe opens across the street, the owner can lose it all, as their customers and workers switch allegiance. But for the landlord, the failure of his capitalist tenant is a feature, not a bug. Once the cafe goes bust, the landlord gets a newly vacant storefront on the same block as the hot new coffee shop that can be rented out at even higher rates to another capitalist who tries his luck.

The industrial revolution wasn't just the triumph of automation over craft processes, nor the triumph of factory owners over weavers. It was also the triumph of profits over rents. The transformation of hereditary estates worked by serfs into part of the supply chain for textile mills was attended by – and contributed to – the political ascendancy of capitalists over rentiers.

Now, obviously, capitalism didn't end rents – just as feudalism didn't require the total absence of profits. Under feudalism, capitalists still extracted profits from capital and labor; and under capitalism, rentiers still extracted rents from assets that capitalists and workers paid them to use.

The difference comes in the way that conflicts between profits and rents were resolved. Feudalism is a system where rents triumph over profits, and capitalism is a system where profits triumph over rents.

It's conflict that tells you what really matters. You love your family, but they drive you crazy. If you side with your family over your friends – even when your friends might be right and your family's probably wrong – then you value your family more than your friends. That doesn't mean you don't value your friends – it means that you value them less than your family.

Conflict is a reliable way to know whether or not you're a leftist. As Steven Brust says, the way to distinguish a leftist is to ask "What's more important, human rights, or property rights?" If you answer "Property rights are human right," you're not a leftist. Leftists don't necessarily oppose all property rights – they just think they're less important than human rights.

Think of conflicts between property rights and human rights: the grocer who deliberately renders leftover food inedible before putting it in the dumpster to ensure that hungry people can't eat it, or the landlord who keeps an apartment empty while a homeless person freezes to death on its doorstep. You don't have to say "No one can own food or a home" to say, "in these cases, property rights are interfering with human rights, so they should be overridden." For leftists property rights can be a means to human rights (like revolutionary land reformers who give peasants title to the lands they work), but where property rights interfere with human rights, they are set aside.

In his 2023 book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis claims that capitalism has given way to a new feudalism – that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and feudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Varoufakis's point isn't that capitalists have gone extinct. Rather, it's that today, conflicts between capital and assets – between rents and profits – reliably end with a victory of rent over profit.

Think of Amazon: the "everything store" appears to be a vast bazaar, a flea-market whose stalls are all operated by independent capitalists who decide what to sell, how to price it, and then compete to tempt shoppers. In reality, though, the whole system is owned by a single feudalist, who extracts 51% from every dollar those merchants take in, and decides who can sell, and what they can sell, and at what price, and whether anyone can even see it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Or consider the patent trolls of the Eastern District of Texas. These "companies" are invisible and produce nothing. They consist solely of a serviced mailbox in a dusty, uninhabited office-building, and an overbroad patent (say, a patent on "tapping on a screen with your finger") issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. These companies extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Apple, Google, Samsung for violating these patents. In other words, the government steps in and takes vast profits generated through productive activity by companies that make phones, and turns that money over as rent paid to unproductive companies whose sole "product" is lawsuits. It's the triumph of rent over profit.

Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who sell on Jeff Bezos's Amazon (or open a cafe in a landlord's storefront, or license a foolish smartphone patent) bear all the risk. The landlords – of Amazon, the storefront, or the patent – get paid whether or not that risk pays off.

This is why Google, Apple and Samsung also have vast digital estates that they rent out to capitalists – everything from app stores to patent portfolios. They would much rather be in the business of renting things out to capitalists than competing with capitalists.

Hence that famous Adam Smith quote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." This is literally what Google and Meta do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

And it's what Apple and Google do:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrust-trial-defaults-search-deal-26-3-billion

Why compete with one another when you can collude, like feudal lords with adjacent estates who trust one another to return any serf they catch trying to sneak away in the dead of night?

Because of course, it's not just "free markets" that have been captured by rents ("Competition is for losers" -P. Thiel) – it's also "free labor." For years, the largest tech and entertainment companies in America illegally colluded on a "no poach" agreement not to hire one-anothers' employees:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/03/apple-google-other-silicon-valley-tech-giants-ordered-to-pay-415m-in-no-poaching-suit/

These companies were bitter competitors – as were these sectors. Even as Big Content was lobbying for farcical copyright law expansions and vowing to capture Big Tech, all these companies on both sides were able to set aside their differences and collude to bind their free workers to their estates and end the "wasteful competition" to secure their labor.

Of course, this is even more pronounced at the bottom of the labor market, where noncompete "agreements" are the norm. The median American worker bound by a noncompete is a fast-food worker whose employer can wield the power of the state to prevent that worker from leaving behind the Wendy's cash-register to make $0.25/hour more at the McDonald's fry trap across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Employers defend this as necessary to secure their investment in training their workers and to ensure the integrity of their trade secrets. But why should their investments be protected? Capitalism is about risk, and the fear that accompanies risk – fear that drives capitalists to innovate, which creates the public benefit that is the moral justification for capitalism.

Capitalists hate capitalism. They don't want free labor – they want labor bound to the land. Capitalists benefit from free labor: if you have a better company, you can tempt away the best workers and cause your inferior rival to fail. But feudalists benefit from un-free labor, from tricks like "bondage fees" that force workers to pay in order to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Companies like Petsmart use "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) to keep low-waged workers from leaving for better employers. Petsmart says it costs $5,500 to train a pet-groomer, and if that worker is fired, laid off, or quits less than two years, they have to pay that amount to Petsmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Now, Petsmart is full of shit here. The "four-week training course" Petsmart claims is worth $5,500 actually only lasts for three weeks. What's more, the "training" consists of sweeping the floor and doing other low-level chores for three weeks, without pay.

But even if Petsmart were to give $5,500 worth of training to every pet-groomer, this would still be bullshit. Why should the worker bear the risk of Petsmart making a bad investment in their training? Under capitalism, risks justify rewards. Petsmart's argument for charging $50 to groom your dog and paying the groomer $15 for the job is that they took $35 worth of risk. But some of that risk is being borne by the worker – they're the ones footing the bill for the training.

For Petsmart – as for all feudalists – a worker (with all the attendant risks) can be turned into an asset, something that isn't subject to competition. Petsmart doesn't have to retain workers through superior pay and conditions – they can use the state's contract-enforcement mechanism instead.

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Sure, they dress this up by claiming that governmental de-risking spurs investment: "Who would pay to train a pet-groomer if that worker could walk out the next day and shave dogs for some competing shop?"

But this is obvious nonsense. Think of Silicon Valley: high tech is the most "IP-intensive" of all industries, the sector that has had to compete most fiercely for skilled labor. And yet, Silicon Valley is in California, where noncompetes are illegal. Every single successful Silicon Valley company has thrived in an environment in which their skilled workers can walk out the door at any time and take a job with a rival company.

There's no indication that the risk of free labor prevents investment. Think of AI, the biggest investment bubble in human history. All the major AI companies are in jurisdictions where noncompetes are illegal. Anthropic – OpenAI's most serious competitor – was founded by a sister/brother team who quit senior roles at OpenAI and founded a direct competitor. No one can claim with a straight face that OpenAI is now unable to raise capital on favorable terms.

What's more, when OpenAI founder Sam Altman was forced out by his board, Microsoft offered to hire him – and 700 other OpenAI personnel – to found an OpenAI competitor. When Altman returned to the company, Microsoft invested more money in OpenAI, despite their intimate understanding that anyone could hire away the company's founder and all of its top technical staff at any time.

The idea that the departure of the Burger King trade secrets locked up in its workers' heads constitute more of a risk to the ability to operate a hamburger restaurant than the departure of the entire technical staff of OpenAI is obvious nonsense. Noncompetes aren't a way to make it possible to run a business – they're a way to make it easy to run a business, by eliminating competition and pushing the risk onto employees.

Because capitalists hate capitalism. And who can blame them? Who wouldn't prefer a life with less risk to one where you have to constantly look over your shoulder for competitors who've found a way to make a superior offer to your customers and workers?

This is why businesses are so excited about securing "IP" – that is, a government-backed right to control your workers, customers, competitors or critics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The argument for every IP right expansion is the same: "Who would invest in creating something new without the assurance that some­one else wouldn’t copy and improve on it and put them out of business?"

That was the argument raised five years ago, during the (mercifully brief) mania for genre writers seeking trademarks on common tropes. There was the romance writer who got a trademark on the word "cocky" in book titles:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

And the fantasy writer who wanted a trademark on "dragon slayer" in fantasy novel titles:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

Who subsequently sought a trademark on any book cover featuring a person holding a weapon:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/07/19/trademark-troll-who-claims-to-own-dragon-slayer-now-wants-exclusive-rights-to-book-covers-where-someone-is-holding-a-weapon/

For these would-be rentiers, the logic was the same: "Why would I write a book about a dragon-slayer if I could lose readers to someone else who writes a book about dragon-slayers?"

In these cases, the USPTO denied or rescinded its trademarks. Profits triumphed over rents. But increasingly, rents are triumphing over profits, and rent-extraction is celebrated as "smart business," while profits are for suckers, only slightly preferable to "wages" (the worst way to get paid under both capitalism and feudalism).

That's what's behind all the talk about "passive income" – that's just a euphemism for "rent." It's what Douglas Rushkoff is referring to in Survival of the Richest when he talks about the wealthy wanting to "go meta":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don't drive a cab – go meta and buy a medallion. Don't buy a medallion, go meta and found Uber. Don't found Uber, go meta and invest in Uber. Don't invest in Uber, go meta and buy options on Uber stock. Don't buy Uber stock options, go meta and buy derivatives of options on Uber stock.

"Going meta" means distancing yourself from capitalism – from income derived from profits, from competition, from risk – and cozying up to feudalism.

Capitalists have always hated capitalism. The owners of the dark Satanic mills wanted peasants turned off the land and converted into "free labor" – but they also kidnapped Napoleonic war-orphans and indentured them to ten-year terms of service, which was all you could get out of a child's body before it was ruined for further work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

When Varoufakis says we've entered a new feudal age, he doesn't mean that we've abolished capitalism. He means that – for the first time in centuries – when rents go to war against profits – the rents almost always emerge victorious.

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465_-_Capitalists_Hate_Capitalism.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

[clownbasedbreakfast]

I live in a zoo...and am currently couch surfing cause the tourists have descended.

[danzigmcfly]

[connorthevgfan78]

Oh wow, the price increase between the PS5 and PS5 Pro is insane

Anyways, here's a graph that shows what PlayStations could cost if they keep this trend of price increases up:

[socialismforall]

US Homelessness Reaches Record Levels in 2023

Homelessness in the USA jumped 12% this year to an all-time high, according to a recent US government report. Most groups of color were disproportionately negatively impacted by the trend, families with children saw a 16% increase in homelessness, and certain states saw higher proportions of homelessness than others. The changes come amid a punishing housing market featuring surging rents and stubbornly overpriced for-sale houses.

While rents have begun to decline from recent peaks, and newly built houses have seen a drop in value of almost 20% in some markets, existing houses for resale have barely begun to budge, and wages haven’t kept pace with the increases. The median house price is now so high as effectively to lock out most buyers from the market, and higher interest rates are making mortgages more expensive than at any time in the last fifteen years.

Call it “Bidenomics”? The Democrats, for some reason, already are. (“Nothing will fundamentally change,” indeed.)

source: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/15/homelessness-increase-rent-crisis-2023 source: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/ source: https://vividmaps.com/homelessness-in-us/