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compared to anything in the productive economy.
This is the heart of it imo.
People love to reference financiers being the lifeblood of innovation, and they are. But what in reality most of it is chasing are those sweet, sweet asset backed guaranteed passive income steams. Ideally underpinned by government.
I'm not by default in favour of nationalising things. But when the private sector investment is devoid of risk, you've got to question what benefit they offer other than massaging government books.
hugo7
@bens0n
Appreciate the language of 'parasites' is not always helpful but I'm with @Dramatic_Hammer here. Surely people can see how damaging it is that those parties that have access to capital are able (or have been able in the past) to buy up a relatively scarce resource and then effectively make tenants pay their mortgages for them, while many struggle to get on the property ladder in the first place?
Landlordism should obviously not be banned, but it should without a doubt be made far less lucrative. It's getting to the stage now where banks and pension funds are investing huge sums of money into property, such is its profitability compared to anything in the productive economy. Leaving to one side the impact upon those who rent, this is madness economically and will only lead to further underinvestment in the portions of the economy that keep people in jobs.
Finally, the arguments concerning the poor provision provided by social housing associations are not evidence that they should be avoided altogether, but that social housing should be properly funded and in some cases be brought back under the watch of local authorities rather than farmed out to third parties. There are also of course innumerable private landlords who also fail to comply with even basic standards, so let's not present private renting as some kind of utopia.