Please Stop Calling Them Landlords - They're Land-Lorders
Please Stop Calling Them Landlords - They're Land-Lorders
It's a real estate monopoly cartel. It preys on the working class. It must be stopped.
There are only five types of people in this world:
Banksters
Bank-serfs
Land-lorders
Rent-serfs
The suffering homeless millions
Today, we’re going to focus on the relationship between #3 and #4.
As a writer, words matter greatly to me.
I don’t like the genteel words that the ruling class has chosen for this particularly lecherous societal relationship. It makes the arrangement seem harmless and benign, when in reality, land-lording is one of the most abusive and malignant forms of exploitation ever conceived by money-hungry sociopaths.
So let’s call a spade a spade and call these things what they actually are:
It isn’t rent, it’s usury.
It isn’t rentership, it’s time theft.
They aren’t tenants, they’re rent-serfs.
They aren’t landlords, they’re land-lorders.
And it isn’t a rental industry, it’s a collective real estate monopoly.
Let’s break it down.
It isn’t rent, it’s usury.
I cannot tell you how many land-lorders I’ve heard crow about how their rent-serfs “pay their mortgage.”
These people make me gag.
Is there anything as sad as making the poorest people in society pay for the second properties of the better off?
As long-time readers know, I am vehemently against charging interest and believe it is both a sin and a moral crime against human society, rational mathematics, and planetary sustainability.
Land-lording is just another form of charging interest.
Why?
“Letting property to make money is equivalent to charging interest on a loan. The landlord effectively lends the property to the tenant, and receives it back with interest.” — Peter G. Nelson
Put another way, when a bankster loans someone $500,000 for a house, he expects to receive the $500,000 plus interest.
When a land-lorder loans someone a $500,000 house, he expects to receive back the $500,000 house plus rent.
Like bankster interest, the land-lorder has done nothing to deserve his windfall profits. He has not contributed anything to society. He has not created an equal exchange of value. He has skimmed a profit in the form of shelter interest. And profit, as we have discussed before, is the ultimate inefficiency.
This is a huge reason why we need to ban for-profit land-lording. There will always be a place in society for not-for-profit shelter providers like Indwell, but for-profit land-lording simply must be banned.
Even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, said that land-lording “has its origin in robbery,” and that land-lorders “love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
It isn’t rentership, it’s time theft.
When all the land and materials on planet Earth were free, an enterprising family could build a home in less than five hundred hours. If they built it of stone, it could last for fifty generations, plunging the lifetime cost of a home construction down to just ten hours per generation.
Our grandparents spent less than 5,000 hours paying off their homes.
Our generation will spend 50,000+ hours just to keep a roof above our heads.
I’m of the old-fashioned opinion that a lifetime of shelter shouldn’t take more than a year to pay off.
The physical materials still grow freely, but because of the monopolization of all land and resources (capitalists call this “privatization”), the price-time of shelter continues to soar, with no end in sight.
How many hours must a rent-serf pay for their shelter?
500 hours?
5,000 hours?
50,000 hours?
No.
A rent-serf must pay an unlimited number of hours in order to receive the shelter that once was theirs for free.
This is time theft, and it is a crime against humanity.
They aren’t tenants, they’re rent-serfs.
There are currently 116,048,520 rent-serfs in America, handing over a huge percentage of their lifetime income to 23,825,084 land-lorders.
116 million people work all month and finish with nothing.
23 million people don’t work all month and get paid.
Active, productive, contributive workers must toil their lives away in exchange for shelter they will never own, yet will pay for multiple times over.
Tell me how this isn’t an impossibly abusive injustice structure.
Interestingly, a societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to perpetually work for elites just to stay alive already has a name:
It’s called feudalism.
Under the medieval feudal system, serfs were tied to the land. Today’s rent-serfs are tied to the house. If they stop working for even a moment, they lose their shelter.
When can a rent-serf stop paying their land-lorder?
Just like a Medieval serf: The day they die.
They aren’t landlords, they’re land-lorders.
“A propertied class is freed from the labour of production through its ability to maintain itself out of a surplus extracted from the primary producers, whether by compulsion or by persuasion or (as in most cases) by a mixture of the two.”
— G.E.M de Ste. Croix
Land-lorders do not provide a good or a service.
They hold a property hostage.
They literally lord a house over others.
Land-lorders lack the creativity, drive, risk, time, and/or skill to build real, productive businesses that contribute goods and services to the world, so they choose to lord land over others instead.
Land-lording is lazy, and it is a gross misallocation of capital. It is the textbook definition of rent-seeking:
“Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline.”
In other words, land-lording is a form of communal theft.
It isn’t a rental industry, it’s a collective real estate monopoly.
Monopolies are not only immoral but illegal.
Yes, I said it: For-profit land-lording is an illegal and immoral monopoly.
Even Adam Smith knew land-lording is a monopoly:
“The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.”
In other words, the land-lording class will squeeze from the productive class as much wealth as it can wring out before the rent-serf dies.
Smith continues:
“The landlords operate a certain kind of monopoly against the tenants. The demand for their commodity, site and soil, can go on expanding indefinitely; but there is only a given, limited amount of their commodity…. The bargain struck between landlord and tenant is always advantageous to the former in the greatest possible degree.”
Land-lorders own all the homes, and since rent-serfs by definition cannot afford to purchase shelter in a privatized economy, they have no choice but to pay maximal usury to a land-lorder.
But why do land-lorders have the “right” to charge what they do?
Because they own all the houses.
Why do they own all the houses?
Because they have a capital (or usually credit) advantage over rent-serfs. Real estate investors can always afford to outbid would-be homeowners. Therefore, prices rise. Therefore, more productive contributors have to become rent-serfs and compete for fewer rental properties. Rent costs rise. Investment values rise. Rent costs rise. Investment values rise. The whole inequality structure spins higher and higher until the working class is crushed.
Naturally, individual land-lorders (IE criminals who don’t hoard 30,000 houses yet) balk at the idea that they are monopolizing housing— “I just own one income property!” — but it is incredibly easy to show that they’re just lying to themselves:
Picture every land-lorder on earth as part of a cartel. How does this cartel gain money? By collectively monopolizing all available homes. They hold these houses hostage until someone can pay them a satisfactory amount of usury. If the rent-serf loses their job or has an accident and cannot pay the mobster’s monthly protection free, they are just weeks away from being thrown to the streets to die like a dog.
Do not think for a moment that I am being hyperbolic here — there are more than 500,000 homeless people in America, and tens of thousands die on the streets every single year.
But the land-lorder doesn’t care.
“It’s not my problem,” he says.
But it is.
Because who created this vile structure in the first place?
Land-lorders.
Every single land-lorder on earth — be it a billion-dollar hedge fund or a mom-and-pop land-lorder with one unit—is part of an illegal and immoral monopoly cartel that holds a human right hostage in exchange for usury.
If for-profit land-lording was illegal as it should be, tens of millions of houses would come available for purchase at drastically lower prices.
Some properties could be purchased by not-for-profit shelter charities to take care of the poorest in society, but the rest could be purchased at reasonable and attainable prices by working contributors, ensuring they don’t have to waste their lives paying usury, and never have to worry about dying on the streets.
But land-lorders wouldn’t love that one bit.
Why land-lording must be banned
Notice that I haven’t mentioned a single individual land-lorder in this piece. I have dear friends who are land-lorders. I have had several land-lorders who are genuinely wonderful people. That’s the problem with land-lording — it isn’t personal, it’s systemic. It’s such a broken and corrupt system that even good people get caught up in it and can’t see they’re part of an illegal and immoral monopoly cartel that is destroying hundreds of millions of lives.
In addition to all the reasons mentioned above…
Rent-serfs never have a home.
Not only is this deeply psychologically harmful to adults and children alike, but the family and community instability that land-lording causes are profound. Rent-serf families suffer the economic hardship and inefficiency of constantly moving and setting up new places to live, thanks in no small part to the whims of their land-lorders, who often decide to sell in hot markets, evict them to jack up rents, evict them to move in their own kids or parents, or turn the rental into a full-time Airbnb.
Land-lording creates slum cities.
Rent-serfs have no pride of ownership, and thus no reason to maintain the property in which they temporarily dwell. At the same time, because the land-lorders goal is to maximize profits and they’re seldom around to take care of their rental property, housing stock suffers, and neighborhood values decrease.
Moreover, Wall Street land-lorders have locked America in a downward profit-policy spiral, where they take their land-lording profits and use them to buy legislation that allows them to jack rents while decreasing building quality, unit safety, and rent-serf rights, then repeat the heinous cycle to worse effect.
Land-lording creates more wealth inequality.
When the working poor have to hand over their wealth to the landed gentry, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Land-lording has never once in history closed the ever-widening wealth gap.
Indeed, equality would prove very costly to the land-lorder class.
Land-lording decreases homeownership.
Would the world be better with more land-lorders or more homeowners?
The answer is clearly the latter.
But investors can always afford to outbid would-be homeowners, and they do. As time goes on, the cycle speeds up, with land-lorders outbidding more would-be homeowners, therefore decreasing overall homeownership, and increasing the number of rent-serfs.
Land-lording always ends in monopoly.
Small-time land-lorders don’t see it yet, but trillion-dollar hedge funds are about to eat their lunch.
All rules-free markets end in monopoly, and real estate will be no different. 1 in 7 American homes was swallowed by Wall Street last year, and this trend will continue until they own every house on planet Earth.
Land-lording sends a perverse societal signal
Legalizing land-lording sends a signal that non-productive extractive industries are morally acceptable.
No one should be rewarded with money if they do not create wealth.
All extraction industries should be illegal.
All rent-seeking activities should be illegal.
People should be embarrassed to be land-lorders.
They should feel shame that they abuse the working class with monopoly and usury and perpetual serfdom.
We need to structure a society that rewards givers, not takers.
In conclusion
Words matter, and we need to start calling a spade a spade:
It isn’t rent, it’s usury.
It isn’t rentership, it’s time theft.
They aren’t tenants, they’re rent-serfs.
They aren’t landlords, they’re land-lorders.
And it isn’t a rental industry, it’s a collective real estate monopoly.
For-profit land-lording isn’t biblical, meritocratic, sustainable, just, reasonable, pro-productive, equality-inducing, or a net-positive for society. It is one of the biggest economic exploitation engines in history.
If everyone in society started using these terms to truthfully and accurately describe this heinous extraction industry, it would be a good first step to righting the societal injustice of land-lording.
So start spreading the word…s.