We could start with really basic, tiny changes.


Instead of having a park, where we pay a guard to evict the homeless… We allow people to set up tents.

Instead of having private mobile home parks where people are basically paying rent for the right to live out of their cars, we could have public mobile home parks, a bit like current public parks, where people can just go, and use them, for free.

Not evicting people when they set up a tent. That only requires land.

We can build roads, we already do. 
That requires land, materials, and construction work. 
Building housing requires land, materials, and construction work too.

We allow ourselves to build public roads, and not public housing. 
But it’s more of a mental block than anything.

We allow people to go and sit in a public park, for free.

Just not to sleep there.

If someone wants to be a farmer, to work the land, and produce stuff? 
Or to set up a tiny home?

We stop them, we tell them they can’t just access land like that, some private owner has to profit.

For us humans to have a right to access the planet, for free, and exist, and sleep somewhere, for free…

Landlords need to lose the right to charge us for access to the planet.

People can still get paid for doing work. If you want housing, or tents, people need to do work, it’s true.

But the land itself, the planet we live on? 
That does not require any work to exist, it’s just here. 
And so the choice to artificially restrict people from accessing most of the planet, unless they pay a private owner rent, or a sum that requires a 30 year mortgage… 
That part is not needed at all.

A farmer can work a piece of land, and adding in some private owner who owns the land and charges the farmer rent for the right to work, is not actually improving anything. 
The wealthy landlord gets wealthier, and others just suffer, the farmer has higher costs, so you and me at the grocery store pay higher prices too. To pay to rent that farmland from a private owner, and to rent the land under the store from someone, and so on.

I know that people will rush to try and pretend that if someone owns land, and is charging a farmer for the right to work that land, or for a homeless person to live there, it must somehow totally still be work. 
Maybe landlording is work, maybe it was work to buy the land, or grandaddy worked to buy it before someone inherited it, but people rush in to pretend that charging people access for the surface of the planet, is somehow very fair hard work.

Well no.

Paying for access to land, is not actually paying for other people’s work. 
It’s paying for someone’s passive income.

Most of the rent you pay, or of the 30 year mortgage you are locked into paying, is other people’s passive income.
And it’s not a passive income to the actual construction workers who built the housing.

The farmer who pays rent for farmland is not paying someone who built that farmland, or who somehow worked to create it out of thin air.

The farmer and the agricultural workers work the land, and the landlord just collects rent, a passive income.

We can’t both have people with the right to access land for free, and also others having the right to get a passive income from threatening eviction.

It has to be one or the other.

As long as we grant landlords the right to a passive income, we can’t have basic rights like a right to housing. 
It’s just unaffordable to rent the planet from them, even if we tax ourselves to the bone to try and grant ourselves more rent subsidies.

If wealthy people lose the rights to passive income from just owning land, well then we can get rights like a right to housing. 
Then we can decide if we just let people set up tents, or if we want to work a bit and pay taxes and ensure that everyone gets something slightly better, like guaranteed bathroom access and public fountains or something. 
Stuff that actually requires work.

But if we want to guarantee wealthy people a right to a passive income, by allowing them to threaten us and our kids with evictions if we don’t pay up… 
Well then we can’t have a free right to access the planet.

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