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!

  • FidelCashflow [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    And yet if they had the power to figure it out they wouldn't be a liberal.

    Fair enough, I should have picked a more sensable way to bullshit it. However, my thesis that you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into still stands.

    If anything would convince a liberal it wouldn't be the true and real science. It would be some soppy store about a little girl that grew up to make cady or whatever

    • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I think a lot of liberals have decent instincts -- this is why they'll say a lot of good things. They don't wind up doing a lot of good things because:

      1. They (like a lot of people) don't think through the implications of their purported beliefs;
      2. Their good instincts clash with their aversion to big changes;
      3. They are far too naive/optimistic/trusting in existing institutions (both public and private); and
      4. Solutions to the above are the road to leftist ideas, and liberals' brains have been marinated in wall-to-wall anticommunist propaganda since birth.

      Note that this doesn't preclude them from being policy wonks (and they'd love to wonk out over some claim about how taxes work). It's just that their wonkery is confined to a narrow spectrum that checks all the above boxes.

      So they'll reason as well as anyone -- the problem has more to do with their starting assumptions. They're like an engineer who's working with the wrong tensile strength numbers.

      • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Liberals usually have a piss-poor understanding of game theory and as you said, blind trust in institutions. They can't convince of people taking the selfish, personal advantage approach to anything because they assume everyone is "rational" and will work with the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, as long as they follow the RULES and do it RIGHT.