Construction Spending Flat, Private Construction Negative

http://vimaxmedan.xyz/obat-testo-ultra-medan/

“Doesn’t mean you are some sort of evil person… Anymore than a leech, as in the worm, is some sort of evil for doing what it evolved and was born to do.”
Oh God, This ^ Yes! Easily the funniest thing I have heard this year.

One quibbling point though: once you remove all of the countless institutions that interfere in the property market, indeed it’s probably the most intervened market of them all, second perhaps to the markets in weapons and dangerous chemicals, you still nevertheless have the centuries old question of land.

Specifically where land is scarce: cities. You can build vertically, sure, but it doesn’t come close to compensating for the inability to build horizontally. You may counter by saying that in this day and age of mass transit and mass communication, nobody needs to locate their businesses, and subsequently their homes as well, in high-density landscapes. That’s certainly true, and we are going to see the effects of that redundancy unfold in a big way with the unraveling of automation and the gig economy.

But I don’t think it’s true in every case, or 100% applicable, principally because of the irrational side of human nature. People are willing to pay a premium to locate in, or in anycase seek ownership of, famous names; famous cities, even if that infamy is relatively local. I have so far tended to think of rent seeking in terms of investors exploiting returns on “Lands and Brands,” but thinking it over now, Land, where it has no intrinsic worth in potential to extract natural resources, is itself becoming just another kind of Brand.

The rent seeking of the future might very well be the art of being able to charge premiums on branding; that is exploiting irrationality in human beings. And because the main schools of economic thinking and their respective models, don’t acknowledge the existence of irrational desires in human beings, nor the inability of the market to supply another “Apple Inc,” they won’t acknowledge brands as rent seeking; they’ll say branding is an intangible form of “quality” that the market theoretically could supply. Homo economicus is a quality-seeking animal: not a fashion-seeking animal.

Well in any case, if you want to be a sophisticated worm, buy property in coastal towns with a budding tourism industry. Coastal towns are, doubly, triply, quadruply reverse-landlocked, which means in the event of premium demand for their locale, property is disposed to rise in price very quickly. That premium demand is of course derived from tourism, probably the most reliable industry based on human irrationality; there’s no greater brand in this world than beautiful scenery, and who isn’t attracted to the seaside?

I’d say it’s only rent seeking if you own the house specifically for the purposes of renting it out. It’s doubly worse if the bank bought the house for you with brand new credit because then you’re stealing from everyone via inflation as well.

I’m not saying don’t do it: I’d do it if I had the money and a good buy-to-let deal on hand, just don’t be a hypocrite. Call a spade a spade, and call your rich-dad-poor-dad get-rich-reasonably-fast schemes what they are: rent seeking. It’s not a morally contributive thing to do to society, it’s exploiting-opportunistic parasitism.

[oh in theory supply in housing should increase to meet the extra demand you pump into the market, but of course we all know that’s not how it really works thanks to the finite supply of land in cities as well as government control of planning.]

I don’t understand the rent seeking reference. I don’t see how landlords can be a contributor to this economic dysfunction
If I rent my house out how does that make me a leech?