I’ve seen more active and more price-elastic real-estate markets in Israel than in the US.
The US is big and different. The real estate market of Manhattan is not at all like the real estate market of South Dakota. The point is that there is enough cheap land. It’s not a binding constraint unless you need a specific location.
with state interventions to ensure market efficiency
Color me sceptical. State interventions often claim to pursue market efficiency while in practice they just implement crony capitalism.
I am very suspicious of invocations of generic “market efficiency” which do not specify exactly who and how will benefit from it. Often enough it’s no more than a “think of the children!” cry.
Yes, like it or not, that is what happens in a capitalist economy when nobody intervenes.
Bullshit. The US is the canonical capitalist economy and and it doesn’t happen. And people starve to death under feudalism or under communism, too, and in rather large numbers.
You should distinguish between the caricature of capitalism in your own mind (in which, I suspect, nobody ever does anything which does not lead to profit in terms of moar money) and real-life societies.
The point is that there is enough cheap land. It’s not a binding constraint unless you need a specific location.
Everyone needs some kind of specific location. Almost nobody can actually find a use for land in South Dakota; that’s why it’s so cheap. This reinforces my point that real-estate is non-fungible, particularly between locations.
Bullshit. The US is the canonical capitalist economy and and it doesn’t happen.
Please demonstrate, to the massive spite of anti-hunger and anti-homelessness campaigns in the USA, that taking away all state and charitable interventions (as I had specified: when nobody intervenes), with particular emphasis on the state interventions, would result in a state of affairs in which no statistically significant quantity of people are subject to death by starvation or exposure.
This reinforces my point that real-estate is non-fungible, particularly between locations.
Humans are non-fungible too, to about the same degree.
...that taking away all state and charitable interventions
You are still confused between the map and the territory. What you think of as “pure capitalism” does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist. It’s a model!
Let me assert that real-life societies which we call “capitalist” do much better at preventing death by starvation and exposure than societies which we call “non-capitalist”.
How many people starved to death in the US during the last ten years because they were too poor to buy food?
How many people starved to death in the US during the last ten years because they were too poor to buy food?
Reading through this, for the purpose of this debate it might be better to ask how many people starved to death pre-Great Society legislation, or pre-New Deal, as both sweeping-changes implemented socialistic attempts at poverty amelioration.
Would you like to compare the US to Soviet Russia which was as far from capitalism as it was possible to get?
By the way, the question how many people starved to death “pre-Great Society legislation” has been asked. The answers vary from none to some small number.
The poor tend to turn to crime or emigration in to avoid starvation. That means things can be quite bad witout showing up as actual famine. Things have to be very bad indeed for there to be nothing worth stealing.
There are examples capitalist countries which are indeed in this intermediate zone of high crime and emigration, eg South Africa and much of Latin America.
You are still confused between the map and the territory. What you think of as “pure capitalism” does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist. It’s a model!
You’ve got this backwards. I proposed a model of capitalism that fits the entire OECD. You have countered by chopping off my specification when nobody intervenes and saying I’ve confused map and territory.
We are talking about situations where economically useless people starve to death. That does happen in your model, that does not happen in OECD in reality. That makes me think that within this context you have a bad model which does not reflect the real life.
Of course you can propose a model in which anything you want to happen, happens. So what?
We are talking about situations where economically useless people starve to death.
No, we are talking about situations in which economically useless people starve to death without state intervention. Thus we can simply count the number of people dependent for their subsistence on welfare-state subsidies, which is quite a lot, actually.
The US is big and different. The real estate market of Manhattan is not at all like the real estate market of South Dakota. The point is that there is enough cheap land. It’s not a binding constraint unless you need a specific location.
Color me sceptical. State interventions often claim to pursue market efficiency while in practice they just implement crony capitalism.
I am very suspicious of invocations of generic “market efficiency” which do not specify exactly who and how will benefit from it. Often enough it’s no more than a “think of the children!” cry.
Bullshit. The US is the canonical capitalist economy and and it doesn’t happen. And people starve to death under feudalism or under communism, too, and in rather large numbers.
You should distinguish between the caricature of capitalism in your own mind (in which, I suspect, nobody ever does anything which does not lead to profit in terms of moar money) and real-life societies.
Everyone needs some kind of specific location. Almost nobody can actually find a use for land in South Dakota; that’s why it’s so cheap. This reinforces my point that real-estate is non-fungible, particularly between locations.
Please demonstrate, to the massive spite of anti-hunger and anti-homelessness campaigns in the USA, that taking away all state and charitable interventions (as I had specified: when nobody intervenes), with particular emphasis on the state interventions, would result in a state of affairs in which no statistically significant quantity of people are subject to death by starvation or exposure.
Seriously. Call bullshit all you like, but the numbers don’t lie.
Humans are non-fungible too, to about the same degree.
You are still confused between the map and the territory. What you think of as “pure capitalism” does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist. It’s a model!
Let me assert that real-life societies which we call “capitalist” do much better at preventing death by starvation and exposure than societies which we call “non-capitalist”.
How many people starved to death in the US during the last ten years because they were too poor to buy food?
Reading through this, for the purpose of this debate it might be better to ask how many people starved to death pre-Great Society legislation, or pre-New Deal, as both sweeping-changes implemented socialistic attempts at poverty amelioration.
Compared to what?
Would you like to compare the US to Soviet Russia which was as far from capitalism as it was possible to get?
By the way, the question how many people starved to death “pre-Great Society legislation” has been asked. The answers vary from none to some small number.
The poor tend to turn to crime or emigration in to avoid starvation. That means things can be quite bad witout showing up as actual famine. Things have to be very bad indeed for there to be nothing worth stealing.
There are examples capitalist countries which are indeed in this intermediate zone of high crime and emigration, eg South Africa and much of Latin America.
You’ve got this backwards. I proposed a model of capitalism that fits the entire OECD. You have countered by chopping off my specification when nobody intervenes and saying I’ve confused map and territory.
So what is the purpose of your model?
We are talking about situations where economically useless people starve to death. That does happen in your model, that does not happen in OECD in reality. That makes me think that within this context you have a bad model which does not reflect the real life.
Of course you can propose a model in which anything you want to happen, happens. So what?
No, we are talking about situations in which economically useless people starve to death without state intervention. Thus we can simply count the number of people dependent for their subsistence on welfare-state subsidies, which is quite a lot, actually.