On Friday Nathan J. Robinson posted a screenshot with the comment: “This landlord just gave the best indictment of capitalism I’ve ever seen. ‘I am socially useless and yet I make piles of money.’” And it truly amounts to a confession note. The fact that the landlord takes money with one hand, pays the mortgage with the other after skimming some off the top — and pockets the unearned appreciation in land value all the while — says a lot about how screwed up both our land property rules and credit system are.
The usual mix of defensive reactions from pro-capitalist bootlickers appeared in the replies. As invariably happens, a right-libertarian “Voluntaryist” type commented: “yes because it’s disgusting how *checks notes* all parties were mutually benefitted [sic] in the voluntary exchange of services for money.” Yes, you can pass off any exchange —– no matter how exploitative —– as “voluntary,” so long as you build the coercion into the background structural conditions.
But it’s another reply — of a sort equally common from capitalism apologists — that I want to focus on here: “That sounds like recipe [sic] that anybody can follow to get passive income. How is that bad?”
It’s interesting that the people who denounce Social Security as a Ponzi scheme are, by and large, the same ones who accept hustles like Wright’s — in which by definition only those who get in at the start are able to get rich quick, and the folks left behind are the ones who get milked — as legit.
R&I. -TxPAT
