Speaker 1: Hi, this is Mia. So before we get to today's episode,
Speaker 1: last Friday, the rank and file of the Burgerville Workers Union,
Speaker 1: which is the country's first successful fast food union, went
Speaker 1: on strike against a campaign of disciplinings and firings of
Speaker 1: primarily trans and POC workers by the bosses who are
Speaker 1: once again trying to crush the union. The strike has
Speaker 1: worked so far, but they need support from the community
Speaker 1: to help pay workers and help these people feed their
Speaker 1: families so they can continue fighting the boss's capitalism and
Speaker 1: building democracy in the workplace. You can go to Bitley's
Speaker 1: Slash Burger Defense to do it. To their funds, we
Speaker 1: will have links to that description. And yeah, thank you
Speaker 1: all so much, and now on to the show. It's
Speaker 1: it's a solo meda episode if it could happen here
Speaker 1: the podcast where things fall apart and sometimes we've put
Speaker 1: them back together. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about why the rent is
Speaker 1: so high? Now, Okay, there's there's a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of ways that you could in theory approach this question,
Speaker 1: and I decided that I think one of the most
Speaker 1: useful approaches to it is you take a sort of
Speaker 1: a more a more sort of historical and theoretical approach.
Speaker 1: And I think the start of any kind of sort
Speaker 1: of theoretical approach to rent is by asking what rent
Speaker 1: actually is. And the answer to this, and this is
Speaker 1: something that is that is relatively consistent across most of
Speaker 1: sort of classical political economy, and and you see this
Speaker 1: in some of sort of geoclassical economics, is that the
Speaker 1: thing that's special about rent is that rent, unlike you know,
Speaker 1: anything else, is money that you get because you own something,
Speaker 1: not because you you know, have produced anything. And this
Speaker 1: means that you know, the landlord does not produce anything
Speaker 1: of value at all. All they do is extract value
Speaker 1: from other sectors of the economy. Now, this has a wide,
Speaker 1: wide variety of sort of political and social effects. Mark
Speaker 1: saw the landowning class as an obstacle to the development
Speaker 1: of capitalism. And this is an idea. The idea of
Speaker 1: that again, landowners specifically as a class that is different
Speaker 1: from the sort of capitalist class or the working class,
Speaker 1: hinders the growth of capitalism is an idea that a
Speaker 1: lot of different people across the basically the entirety of
Speaker 1: the political spectrum have shared at various times and this
Speaker 1: causes some very very strange alliances. Particularly in places like
Speaker 1: Latin America, you still have economies that are you know,
Speaker 1: not entirely based, but economies that have enormous landowners who
Speaker 1: drive sort of vast portions of both the economy and
Speaker 1: of the sort of political process. And in Latin America,
Speaker 1: and this is true in a lot of other places,
Speaker 1: it was not uncommon for you to get what's known
Speaker 1: as developmentalism, which is an ideology based on using essentially
Speaker 1: protectionist measures, things like terroriffs, sometimes capital controls, restrictions on
Speaker 1: kinds of investment that foreign companies can do. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: mean just straight up the nationalization of natural resources in
Speaker 1: order to develop an industrial economy. Now, developmentalism, as our
Speaker 1: most sort of alliances against the land and elite, are
Speaker 1: politically messy. It draws on a range of ideologies from
Speaker 1: you know, like pretty right wing nationalists, some very very
Speaker 1: very scary people technically developmentalists, to liberal and also centrisfactions
Speaker 1: whose sort of productive and social base is in a
Speaker 1: specific kind of sort of domestic capitalists who's interested in
Speaker 1: sort of producing stuff locally, and also to people like
Speaker 1: Bolivia's Evo Morales, who is you know, broadly considered a socialist,
Speaker 1: although I think his commitment to anything like socialist politics
Speaker 1: is tenuous at best. But all of these sort of
Speaker 1: political groups can and do, and have various times work together.
Speaker 1: So this is actually one of the bases of Morales
Speaker 1: as well. I guess it's not really Moralysis Party anymore.
Speaker 1: But even Morales's MS, which was a very sort of
Speaker 1: explicit alliance between sort of left wing social movements and
Speaker 1: then more sort of moderate centrist factions who were effectively developmentalist.
Speaker 1: This is a sort of a representation of a very
Speaker 1: common like kind of developmentalist politics, which is again this
Speaker 1: alliance between sort of left and capitalist factions who ally
Speaker 1: gets like large landowners on the basis that feudalism, which
Speaker 1: is which is usually the way that like the sort
Speaker 1: of the power of large landowners is conceived, is an
Speaker 1: enemy to both of them. Now, this isn't how sort
Speaker 1: of develop like states that use developmentalist strategies have to work. Germany,
Speaker 1: for example, uses a lot of developmentalist techniques to industrialize
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds. But you know, the old
Speaker 1: landowning class, the old sort of like like German aristocracy,
Speaker 1: is allied with the capitalists in Germany and the to
Speaker 1: you know, the two classes, the sort of German aristocracy
Speaker 1: and the capital's class effectively birge. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: landowning classes are often implacably hostile to industrialization, and countries
Speaker 1: that essentially annihilated the landowning classes by carrying out land
Speaker 1: reform tend to perform better economically than their counterparts who
Speaker 1: left a landowning class intact, which contributed to the enormous
Speaker 1: success of the economies of countries like China and Japan,
Speaker 1: Taiwan and Vietnam, who, despite their enormous sort of ideological
Speaker 1: and political differences, all carried out land reform in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century were rewarded with eventually by very very powerful
Speaker 1: and large scale industrial economies. But you know, you might
Speaker 1: be saying, ya, you've kind of put the cart in
Speaker 1: front of the horse here. You've talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: you've gone into some of the sort of political effects
Speaker 1: of rent first, but you haven't actually, you know, explained
Speaker 1: how rent actually works. And so that is what I'm
Speaker 1: going to do next. And to explain how rent works,
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn to an unusual source, the work
Speaker 1: of the Great Venezuela and anthropologist Fernando Corneal. Corneal' is
Speaker 1: a fascinating character. He studied anthropology at my alma mater,
Speaker 1: the University of Chicago under Terrence Turner, a guy who
Speaker 1: I think ninety nine percent people have never heard of before,
Speaker 1: but is probably most famous now for being also you know,
Speaker 1: also teaching David Graeber and being a sort of major
Speaker 1: influence on his work now. Unlike David Graber. While Corneal
Speaker 1: was at the University of Chicago, he tried to get
Speaker 1: permission from the Cuban government to go do field work
Speaker 1: in Cuba, and you know, so he gets to Cuba
Speaker 1: and he's like negotiating with the government and the government
Speaker 1: tells him to fuck off. So okay, he tries to
Speaker 1: go back to the US. But Immigration and Nationalization Services,
Speaker 1: the i INS, which is basically the predecessor of like
Speaker 1: Immigration Services ICE in the Border Patrol i INS was
Speaker 1: sort of dissolved in two thousand and three when the
Speaker 1: sort of like I don't know exactly what the technical
Speaker 1: term for it is, but with the consolidation of of
Speaker 1: the Department of Homeland Security, which is really truly a
Speaker 1: thing that I think we tend to think it was
Speaker 1: only present, but is actually about twenty years old, and
Speaker 1: I am older than it was. Also, you know, this
Speaker 1: sort of outside the episode is like an enormously fascist
Speaker 1: institution that centralized an enormous amount of sort of political
Speaker 1: power in these like terrifying surveillance and police bureaucracies. But
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so they're back back back back to
Speaker 1: the Fernandic coordineal story. So he guys to go back
Speaker 1: to the US, but Ans, which is the predecessory for
Speaker 1: all this stuff, like arrest him immediately and they deport
Speaker 1: him and ban him from the US on the grounds
Speaker 1: that he was that they suspected him of being a
Speaker 1: quote subversive agent. Now, and again I cannot emphasize this enough.
Speaker 1: The sequence of events here is that he tries to
Speaker 1: go to Cuba and the Cuban government tells him to
Speaker 1: fuck off, and so he goes back to the US
Speaker 1: and the US government is like, oh, yeah, no, this
Speaker 1: guy through the Cuban government just refused to let to
Speaker 1: do field work. This this this guy is definitely a
Speaker 1: Cuban agent. So his entire sort of like life gets
Speaker 1: derailed by this. He wants up I think back in
Speaker 1: Venezuela for a while. I think it takes like twenty
Speaker 1: almost like twenty years for him to be able to
Speaker 1: get back to the US and finish his PhD. But
Speaker 1: you know, when he does and sort of be in
Speaker 1: the process of this, he becomes a very very famous,
Speaker 1: as well respected anthropologist. Now when now was it you Chicago,
Speaker 1: like all of the people who sort of trained Corneal
Speaker 1: that that whole generation and really like the whole sort
Speaker 1: of school of anthropology that he came from, which is
Speaker 1: a very very interesting school that if if you want
Speaker 1: to like read about this kind of stuff, I read
Speaker 1: David Graeber's Towards an Anthopological Theory of Value. I might
Speaker 1: do an episode on it at some point later, but
Speaker 1: all of that stuff is gone. But but I ran
Speaker 1: into a professor who knew him back in the day,
Speaker 1: and he told us that Corneil was. You know, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, very is back to the academic like
Speaker 1: very sort of like upstanding, like member of the academic
Speaker 1: communitee also incredibly popular as like a partier who just
Speaker 1: get absolutely wasted and start dancing on tables. This guy
Speaker 1: absolutely rips, you know, and I think a very few
Speaker 1: people outside of anthropology you've ever heard of him. But
Speaker 1: in anthropology, Corneil is important enough to like, if you're
Speaker 1: right about the state, you at least have to like
Speaker 1: mention him. And you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that,
Speaker 1: like most of the people who say the words that
Speaker 1: the Magical State, which is the name of his sort
Speaker 1: of famous book, actually have read it. But I did
Speaker 1: read this book. I've read this book multiple times and
Speaker 1: it's really really interesting. Now. The Magical State, Nature, Money,
Speaker 1: and Majority in Venezuela is probably most famous as a
Speaker 1: history of the Venezuelan state, but that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: it's sort of exclusively about that history, and in fact,
Speaker 1: you know it, it really can't be. In order to
Speaker 1: think about the Venezuelan state, you have to think about oil.
Speaker 1: But you also can't think about oil in the way
Speaker 1: that most histories of oil think about it, which is
Speaker 1: a story about sort of like high geopolitics. Right. If
Speaker 1: you look at the history of oil, right, it's about
Speaker 1: like high geopolitics and like prospecting and like trekking oil
Speaker 1: prices over time, and you know, the sort of most
Speaker 1: famous book in this genre is Daniel Jurgen's The Prize,
Speaker 1: which is a fine book, but it shares in this
Speaker 1: sort of tendency to you know, kind of you know,
Speaker 1: unless they're writing about like a guy going prospecting, right,
Speaker 1: there's this tendency to sort of ignore the sort of
Speaker 1: material characteristics of oil and the sort of political effects
Speaker 1: of the extraction process, and a lot of other aspects
Speaker 1: of oil that are very very important. And what Corineal
Speaker 1: realizes is that oil is intricately tied to sort of
Speaker 1: the political conception of nature, to systems of landownership, and
Speaker 1: also to Venezuelan state craft. Now this may seem a
Speaker 1: bit far afield, but in order to understand oil, you
Speaker 1: have to think about rent and rent extraction. And that's
Speaker 1: what Corneal does in ways that are both sort of
Speaker 1: profoundly interesting and I think, in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: profoundly ahead of his time. So Corneal, like us, asked
Speaker 1: the question what actually is rent? Now? For you know,
Speaker 1: Corneal goes through rent and a lot you know, and
Speaker 1: it like goes through what you could, I guess called
Speaker 1: economic history of concessions of rent, right, starting with the
Speaker 1: classical economists. Uh, we're not that interested in the classical
Speaker 1: economists because quite frankly, if you're if I don't know,
Speaker 1: if you're running into a neo Ricardian analysis of what
Speaker 1: rent is like I don't know, you're you're already a specialist,
Speaker 1: like stuff is stuff, stuff is happening for you, thus
Speaker 1: quite interesting, quite odd, but where we're mostly going to
Speaker 1: ignore them because the original classical economists' work has it's
Speaker 1: it's largely not the way people think about this now,
Speaker 1: and to the extent that people sort of claim to
Speaker 1: be derivatives of like these people that people claiming the
Speaker 1: lineage of Adam Smith, like, eh, that's kind of sketchy.
Speaker 1: Is that we're going to turn to Corneal's analysis of
Speaker 1: the way that neoclassical economics thinks about rent. Now. Corneal
Speaker 1: someone who has spent a lot of time in the
Speaker 1: sort of literature of like oil pricing and sort of
Speaker 1: theories the sort of price formation and the state of
Speaker 1: the market or the effect of political actors on it,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and he argues that
Speaker 1: there's basically two ways of thinking about rent. In terms
Speaker 1: of a commodity like oil. There is a macroeconomics view
Speaker 1: in which the rent someone who owns oil extracts when
Speaker 1: people have to buy it from them, you know. Okay,
Speaker 1: so like like if if if you're a landowner, right,
Speaker 1: you get rent because you own the thing, and then
Speaker 1: people have to like take it like people need it.
Speaker 1: You have it, so you get to extract rent from
Speaker 1: it just by virtue sort of having it in the
Speaker 1: in the microeconomics view, when someone like pays the rent, right,
Speaker 1: what that is is they're paying for what's called natural
Speaker 1: capital or capital that's you know, provided by nature that
Speaker 1: someone now owns through like the miracle of private property.
Speaker 1: And so for these people, rent isn't something that's extracted
Speaker 1: at all. Right, it's just someone getting paid for their capital.
Speaker 1: Because the way that they think about, you know, about
Speaker 1: something like oil, is that they think oil is just
Speaker 1: sort of natural capital. Now, okay, it's like this is
Speaker 1: this is in some sense, you know, I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: who cares about this? This is kind of like this this
Speaker 1: seems very obvious. But there's also a macroeconomics perspective which
Speaker 1: is very different. And the macroeconomics perspective holds that you know,
Speaker 1: rent isn't a payment for capital at all. It's something
Speaker 1: paid to landowners by capitalists, and the rent that these
Speaker 1: landowners get is basically the difference between you know, what
Speaker 1: it costs you to get the oil out of the
Speaker 1: you use sort of the landowner to get the oil
Speaker 1: out of the ground, and what it costs the person
Speaker 1: who has the highest price of production to get the
Speaker 1: oil out of the ground. Now, okay, for reasons that
Speaker 1: are very complicated that I can't get into here, basically,
Speaker 1: the person who is like the worst at getting oil
Speaker 1: out of the ground is the person who sets what
Speaker 1: the price of oil is. So you know, the sort
Speaker 1: of like highest possible extraction price tends to be the price.
Speaker 1: And then you know, the micro the sort of macroeconomic
Speaker 1: analysis of what rent is, right is that it's a
Speaker 1: thing that capitalists pay to landowners who own natural resources,
Speaker 1: and the amount of money they get is based on
Speaker 1: how much cheaper it is for like that you know,
Speaker 1: that landlord to get their oil out of the ground
Speaker 1: than it is for like the landlord who's like the
Speaker 1: worst at this. And this is a real question, right.
Speaker 1: The question is is someone who's getting rent paid to them,
Speaker 1: is that rent payment for capital that they own, or
Speaker 1: is it money from capitalists that capitalists have to pay
Speaker 1: to a non capitalist class. And Corneal's answer is like, well,
Speaker 1: obviously rent is distracted from cirplus value because because landowners
Speaker 1: don't produce value. But there's two different sort of places
Speaker 1: that they can get this value from. And this is
Speaker 1: where we have to get into something that's kind of weird,
Speaker 1: and that is the two different kinds of rents. But okay,
Speaker 1: before we get into the two kinds of different rents,
Speaker 1: do you know what else? There's two different kinds of Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. It is the products and services that support
Speaker 1: this show. And we're back. I hope you have enjoyed
Speaker 1: both of the different kinds of products and services that
Speaker 1: support the show. And okay, I promise you two kinds
Speaker 1: of rents, and I'm now going to give you two
Speaker 1: kinds of rent. So the two kinds of rent, there
Speaker 1: is something called differential rent, and differential rent is kind
Speaker 1: of close to the sort of macrocive we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: So differential rent is rent that's set by the price
Speaker 1: of production on the market right now, as we sort
Speaker 1: of mentioned, prices tend towards the highest price of production.
Speaker 1: It's set by the people who are worse of producing it.
Speaker 1: And differential rent is the rent that the rest of
Speaker 1: the market gets by costing it by you know, by
Speaker 1: it costing less for them to extract oil than it does,
Speaker 1: you know for someone who's like the worst at extracting oil.
Speaker 1: Corneil explains this in terms of it. For a long time,
Speaker 1: the US was sort of the price leader of oil,
Speaker 1: and it was the price leader of oil because the
Speaker 1: American like property right system is so absolutely bonkers that
Speaker 1: it makes it really really hard. You have to like
Speaker 1: you have to like individually negotiate with like every person
Speaker 1: who owns a cow pasture a Nebraska in order to
Speaker 1: sort of like extract oil from them. And this makes
Speaker 1: the production process like very expensive. And so everyone else
Speaker 1: in the world is getting this differential rent because they
Speaker 1: have like a less completely like just wild system of property.
Speaker 1: So the product of this is that everyone else is
Speaker 1: getting differential rent because it's way cheaper for them to
Speaker 1: produce oil than it is for the US to produce oil.
Speaker 1: So differential rent is a product of your efficiency, right.
Speaker 1: It's how it's an amount of money that's based on
Speaker 1: sort of the price of oil, and it's based on
Speaker 1: how much better, you know, because you're st selling the
Speaker 1: oil at like the same price, right, But the amount
Speaker 1: that you get, you know, the amount of rent that
Speaker 1: you get, is the difference between how much it costs
Speaker 1: you to get this oil out of the ground and
Speaker 1: how much it costs like some sort of American dip
Speaker 1: shit you as to spend all this time negotiating with
Speaker 1: like thirty thousand individual landowners in the US to do it.
Speaker 1: So that that's differential rents. But there's also something called
Speaker 1: absolute rent. Now, absolute rent is very, very very different
Speaker 1: from from differential rent because absolute rent is not really
Speaker 1: determined by sort of production prices or like the market
Speaker 1: or supply and demand at all. Absolute rent is determined
Speaker 1: by the social power of the landowner. And this has
Speaker 1: really interesting effects, right because again absolute rent isn't based
Speaker 1: on the production process and is instead based on you know,
Speaker 1: the social it's it's it's a social product of power
Speaker 1: and this, you know, this, this means that landlords and
Speaker 1: rent extractors can do something that capitalists aren't supposed to
Speaker 1: be able to do. They can get profits that are
Speaker 1: larger than the general rate of profit, and they can
Speaker 1: do it just by virtue of being powerful and owning land.
Speaker 1: And this has a bunch of very very weird knock
Speaker 1: on effects. Right. If you've ever seen landlords talk about rent, right,
Speaker 1: you've seen the consequences of this. These people genuinely believe
Speaker 1: that they have a sort of moral right to returns
Speaker 1: with no risk all of the time, and that all
Speaker 1: of society should be structured in such a way as
Speaker 1: to guarantee that they have this free income that they
Speaker 1: do fucking nothing to do other than own buildings, and
Speaker 1: it should be guaranteed, you know, it should be structured
Speaker 1: to guarantee this by forcing tenants to pay rent no literally,
Speaker 1: no matter what is happening, you know, like regardless of shit,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, a pandemic. Now. The other sort
Speaker 1: of important difference is that is that absolute rent does
Speaker 1: not obey the laws of supply and demand. It is
Speaker 1: a product of social power, you know, it's the power
Speaker 1: of land ownership itself health, and it's also sort of
Speaker 1: the power you know that the social power is. It's
Speaker 1: not just purely the product of light ownership. It's also
Speaker 1: a product of the organization of the land owning class
Speaker 1: and the extent to which they're backed by the state
Speaker 1: and you know, a sort of militaries as polices, and
Speaker 1: this causes economists who are attempting to use supply and
Speaker 1: demand to explain rent to get very very important events
Speaker 1: very wrong. One of the things that Corneal points out
Speaker 1: is that Maurice Aidelman, who is a very very famous
Speaker 1: oil economist, predicts in nineteen seventy two that the price
Speaker 1: of oil is going to collapse based on oversupply and competition. Instead,
Speaker 1: the price of oil between nineteen seventy three and nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four increases by four hundred percent because oil produces
Speaker 1: banned together to exercise their power, and this organization, known
Speaker 1: as OPEK becomes a genuine world power. Here's here's how
Speaker 1: Corneil puts it. The sharp inc of nineteen seventy three
Speaker 1: and nineteen seventy four in oil prices did not result
Speaker 1: from a world shortage of oil. It was rather the
Speaker 1: outcome of a long historical process by which OPEC nations,
Speaker 1: acting as landowners, developed the means to extract a rent
Speaker 1: on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields,
Speaker 1: an absolute rent in addition to the differential rents they
Speaker 1: had collected in the past. In nineteen seventy three, a
Speaker 1: seat of converging political and economic conditions helped establish their
Speaker 1: collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil. With
Speaker 1: this power, Opek felt entitled to set my market prices
Speaker 1: of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the
Speaker 1: previous constraint of the market price. Now, rent itself, absolute
Speaker 1: and differential would come to determine the market price of oil.
Speaker 1: Now you may be asking yourself, VIIa, that this is
Speaker 1: all well and good for describing the price of how
Speaker 1: for describing how the price of oil changes? But what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with me? And the answer
Speaker 1: is that while Corneal is specifically focused on resource rents
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons, he is doing a study of the
Speaker 1: state of Venezuela, you can apply his analysis to the
Speaker 1: kind of rent that we all pay. If you follow
Speaker 1: Corneal's conclusions about absolute rent through to the American rental market,
Speaker 1: it produces startlingly different conclusions about the source and sort
Speaker 1: of nature of the so called housing crisis that are
Speaker 1: traditionally presented. If rent levels are a product of the
Speaker 1: social power of the landlord class, the behavior that's otherwise
Speaker 1: inexplicable like landlords sitting on empty properties instead of renting
Speaker 1: an amount at lower rates, suddenly become clear armed with
Speaker 1: the backing of the state's secure at social power by
Speaker 1: carrying out evictions, and with the state's implicit backing to
Speaker 1: carry out technically illegal evictions, landlords can extract both differential
Speaker 1: and absolute rents, allowing them to tell the market to
Speaker 1: take a hike as setting ever increasing rents that renters
Speaker 1: have no choice but to pay or be swept decided
Speaker 1: in brutal anti homeless rays. This has massive consequences on
Speaker 1: any potential strategy to reduce rent. Opek, remember, was able
Speaker 1: to use its social power to increase the price of
Speaker 1: oil by four hundred percent, even in a period where
Speaker 1: the actual supply of oil was enormous, by pure virtue
Speaker 1: of organization and the power of their landownership. While American
Speaker 1: landlords is certainly weaker and less organized than Opek, their
Speaker 1: social power is still such that increasing supply is not
Speaker 1: guaranteed to drive down prices, because in a situation governed
Speaker 1: by the extraction of absolute rent, rent is not determined
Speaker 1: by prices. Prices are determined by rent. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: this means that you can reduce rent by breaking the
Speaker 1: social power of the landlord. And indeed, even in very
Speaker 1: hot housing markets like Toronto and Los Angeles, this strategy
Speaker 1: canon has worked. Tenets. Unions which deploy the power of
Speaker 1: collective bargaining and the social solidarity of renters to combat
Speaker 1: the power of landlords, have succeeded in reducing rents and
Speaker 1: can and will continue to do so. But these efforts
Speaker 1: are only the beginning of a process that finally answers
Speaker 1: the question why are rents so high? If rents are
Speaker 1: high because of the social power of landlords, the way
Speaker 1: to bring rents down is to crush the batters completely
Speaker 1: and appropriate them, to seize every last building and plot
Speaker 1: of land from every landlord in the country and drive
Speaker 1: them as a class from the political mainstream into the
Speaker 1: pages of history. And then, and this is crucial, not
Speaker 1: to replace them with another landowning class, or, as Leninist
Speaker 1: proposed that it actually did replace them with the state.
Speaker 1: Only by destroying the category of landlord, not by regulating
Speaker 1: it or nationalizing it, can we finally escape the long
Speaker 1: nightmare of rents and enter a world where people's ability
Speaker 1: to live is determined not by the sort of capricious
Speaker 1: and arbitrary will of a small class of landowners, but
Speaker 1: on their human need for housing. This has been It
Speaker 1: could happen here. You can find us in the usual places,
Speaker 1: and yeah, go go into the worlds and make the
Speaker 1: world without rent to reality. It could happen here as
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or
Speaker 1: check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
Speaker 1: It could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.