Bakari, please clarify your position on rent? Some of your post sounds like do not consider rent moral. I have rented apartments, never felt cheated.
I pay rent, and I don't feel cheated either. My landlord is a really nice guy. My mother owns a rental house. She keeps the house in good condition and has spent more on repairs than she's gotten in rent so far - due to the inspection report missing some important stuff and damage from the first tenant, it will be a whole lot longer to break even than she expected.
The fact that something leads to less than ideal conditions for society as a whole doesn't automatically imply that the individuals who gain from it are evil people who set out to take advantage of others.
I think this same confusion is why the small employers here seem so defensive about the topic.
Fisherman aren't bad people, who are deliberately taking more than their share of the world's fish. But the world's waterway are still being overfished. I'm sure Regan and The Real George Bush and Jr all genuinely and sincerely believed that running massive deficits was actually good for the country in the long run, that the economy would expand so much as a result that the debt would never catch up to us. And now here we are.
(note: I am still developing this idea. Its relatively new to me, and this thread and similar ones in the past, as well as other reading I'm doing and have done, and conversations in real life, are all helping me refine them)
Why do people pay rent? Everyone has to live somewhere. Its illegal to live on public land, and everything else has been claimed, so opting out of the system is not an option. But having a space in which to exist is a basic necessity just like air and water. We, as a society, accept as a given that no one person has a right to hoard oxygen, or to claim all rain water. These are common commodities which everyone has a right to access to. There is also more than enough land/living space to go around - or at least there would be, if some people didn't hoard more than they can possibly use, in order to leverage payments from those without enough capital to purchase their own.
Like anything else, living space is supply and demand. Roughly half of all residential real estate in the US is rental (substantially more of commercial, I believe). When an investor buys a 2nd (or 3rd, or 10th, or 100th) living unit, he reduces the supply, thereby increasing the price. The supply is artificially at 1/2 what it should be, if people only bought houses (or condos) that they actually planned to live in.
This is a huge part of why they are so expensive in the first place. And that cost increase is not linear - once it gets expensive enough (so that it would take a decade or more for even a frugal person to save the entire purchase price on a middle class salary), it becomes practically necessary to take out a loan, which doubles or triples the cost in interest payments, it makes taxes and insurance more expensive, it makes real estate agents necessary who add in their fee, and it eventually comes full circle and forces people to need to rent because buying is too expensive.
Obviously no one investor is buying enough real estate to single-handedly cause this trend, just like no single commercial fisherman overfished the entire world. So each individual landlord can feel comfortable that he is just participating in the system as designed, and is not being immoral.
Particularly if its a single individual with one or two units, like my mom or MMM, who charge a fair rent and are attentive to any problems the tenants have, and (eventually) get a return on their investment (though not an excessive amount); but even if its someone who inherited an apartment complex or two from daddy, and they hire a manager and a maintenance person to do all of the work, and all they do is collect the checks, they still aren't extorting the money from their tenants, who all willing signed the rental agreement.
But in the big picture, investors
collectively push costs up and price potential homeowners out of the market, thereby insuring themselves a ready supply of tenants. In the big picture, since everyone has to live somewhere, all of the landlords are collectively, in effect, extorting their rent payments. If someone makes minimum wage, or they are just out of college and haven't had time to build a 'stache, or they just lost their stache in a divorce or whatever reason, if they can't afford to buy, then they have no other choice than to pay
some landlord somewhere for the privileged of existing in space.
What I think could be a good solution would be to keep private property rights, but to not have them be unlimited. A communist / Aboriginal American / hippy commune approach whereby nobody can own the land has the same tragedy of the commons issue as the ocean fish free-for-all. I think it makes sense for a person to own their own home, their own piece of land. And they should have to earn it themselves. I have no problem with free market pricing. Land in more desirable locations should be more expensive than in crappy locations. But no one should be allowed to own land that they do not personally live and/or work on. That would reduce the power of capital, and force every individual to earn their own way in life, while at the same time reducing the cost of living for those who have been less fortunate so far.