patrick.net

This magazine is an unmitigated tidal wave of frass.

It is chock full of long discredited Marxist ideas, thinly wrapped in a cheese single of snazzy graphics so it will more readily slide down the gullet of youth with low critical thinking skills.

"Capitalists don’t stay in business based on the quality or quantity of the commodity they produce — they stay in business based on whether they turn a profit."

It's exactly the reason. 50-60 years ago GM's biggest problem was trying not to corner over 50% of the market because of the quality and design of their cars. Yet from the 70's on they began making some of the ugliest and poorly built cars in the industry. They turned the quality around in the 90's and later, but their market share is 17.6% today because they'll never regain the lost credibility. It also destroyed two of the most prominent brands of 50 years ago, Pontiac and Oldsmobile. Anyone who can remember a '67 Pontiac GTO or Olds 442 would never believe the brands would perish. Only capitalism could produce products like that anyway. Communism could never have designed or produced a '58 Chrysler 300.

Socialism couldn't, so what's left?

I don't know anything that can solve a proble. Last time I tried, I came up short.

The article is a rehash of brain-dead fallacies that have been plaguing humanity for at least 2000 years. Here are a few obvious facts countering the fallacies:

1. Expensive housing is a phenomenon in the coastal cities created by anti-development zoning laws, which (the zoning laws) are not a product of capitalistic free-market, but socialistic central planning.

2. Of course houses are being built for the working class every day! in areas where zoning laws are lax and are not cramping capitalistic free market: where zoning laws are lax, like in the open plains of Texas, Arizona and Nevada, capitalistic small builders are competing against each other building new housing for the working class. Expensive big developments in the coastal cities and consequently oligopolistic development and large commercial land-lordinging (with sufficient market concentration to set price) are all results of zoning restrictions in the coastal cities and central banking pumping money into favored gambling industries such "heads-gamblers-win-tail-taxpayer-lose" gambler-banking in the Northeast and venture-gambling money-burning near SFBA. Central banking is not an element of Capitalism but Socialism/Communism as it is Plank #5 out of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, written by Karl Marx himself.

3. It's ludicrous to think Karl Marx and his friend Freddie Engels would be plucking away without pay. Communists are always on the pay of someone, usually big bankers who want central banking or seeking high investment return opportunity in a new country by burning it down first! Karl Marx was funded by bankers, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were funded by bankers and German military intelligence, Chinese commies were funded by Russian-run Communist International, which was again an institution funded by bankers to create investment venues by burning down countries. We live in a world where not even the Sierra Club can place a fund-raiser on the ground without letting the fund-raiser keeping 80-90% of the money raised from door-to-door knocking! Profit motive is what gets people out of bed! Including all communists (even the Jacobin Magazine itself pays $200 to the hack for writing up the trash article). If we put housing allocation into the hands of communists, you can bet you'd have to hand your daughter's pussy to them in order to get in line for housing assignment! As it was played out in every single Communist/socialist country where government bureaucrats assigned housing! A society like that is no different from a large slave plantation! except the communist bureaucrats are usually more cruel than private slave owners because you are not even their pet/property therefore they care even less about your well being. It is no co-incidence that Charvez' family and Castro's family became billionaires while Venezuelans and Cubans starved; both countries will be good investment opportunities soon! for big bankers!

4. Capitalistic Free Market is the only remotely fair approach to resolving the myriads of conflicting desires from all the different people. Profit/price is the signal device telling the managers of their own capital how to allocate resources. A relatively free capitalistic market place allowing each individual to allocate their own capital is the most efficient way for a society to allocate resources. Even relatively peaceful anti-development regulations would result in high housing prices while fires burning down the entire towns due to uncleaned brushes resulting from government regulations! People are positively stupid when it comes to voting on other people's money and property; people are much better at voting with their own wallet and their own feet! Individual responsibility and division of labor (i.e. free exchange based on private ownership) are the keys to prosperity and human dignity.

5. What the Jacobin communist revolutionaries really want to do is burning down your society, so it can be a good investment opportunity for the big bankers during the rebuilding/development after the fire . . . just like the original Jacobins did to France.

An interesting side question is: who is funding this college-dropout un-American Bhaskar Sunkara character that is running such an overtly communist magazine? and why. Obviously, just like Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Hitler (the last monster a national-socialist, an off-shoot of socialist ideology), Sunkara is a bought-and-paid-for failed intellectual shit-stirer as well.

Reality says

Expensive housing is a phenomenon in the coastal cities created by anti-development zoning laws, which (the zoning laws) are not a product of capitalistic free-market, but socialistic central planning.

Yes, exactly that.

Current owners are using laws to prevent a free-market solution. It is in current owners' interest to keep prices as high as possible, and rising.

You'd think that tech companies could save billions in salaries if housing were cheaper in the Bay Area, but I haven't heard anything about tech companies supporting less restrictive zoning laws.