I fully get the issues with landlords in terms of coasting off of other people's labor and in general being parasitic. My question is, the resistance I get when I say that someone shouldn't profit off of another person's need for housing is that they bring up grocery stores/ restaurants profiting off of a person's need for food. And I don't really know how to address or answer that. Just wondering if someone can close the loop for me!
even within the context of a non-socialist system, with food you're paying for the value of the labour that has gone into it: the people working the fields etc, the people transporting it, the people processing/packaging it, and the people cooking it and serving it to you (and some portion of the labour that went into making the tractors/trucks/processing machines etc). that labour needs to keep happening over and over to keep providing you with food. some portion of that is the pure ground rent on the farmland etc of course, but i think we can mostly leave that aside.
for rent, theres some portion that is the labour in building the house/apartment, but that's almost all labour that happened once and isn't being repeated, and is going to be the smaller part of the rent payment. the main part of it is paying some arsehole because they happen to own the land instead of you. theres no ongoing labour here that youre paying for, its made-up ownership (and if you trace the line of ownership back long enough, the "title" starts at some arsehole taking it at sword or gun point).
so for food, the lions share is paying for actual labour, for rent the lions share is paying for someone elses ownership of land