In The Guardian, Nick Bano writes about the housing crisis, and his arguments align pretty well with the thesis of Technofeudalism — that rent-seeking has replaced traditional investment as a deployment of capital. It’s well-argued:

We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.

Adam Smith was againt rent-seeking! So many capitalists seem to forget this when it’s convenient to. It’s a non-productive way to use capital, and does nothing to make the world a better place, or advance human achievement.

We now find ourselves in a situation where one in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord. We have four times as many landlords as teachers. As a consequence, virtually everyone struggles to afford a home that meets their needs despite a net gain in housing stock. Landlords are entitled to ask for whatever rent they think they can get, and insecure contracts drive a coach and horses through the concept of tenants’ rights. This is the market that Leigh, landlords and developers want to “free up”. Instead of confronting the horror of our situation and its causes, they pretend that there is an extraordinary shortage of homes. This is simply untrue, as the international and historical data shows.

It’s worse in Canada. That’s 1 in 12 families! There’s certainly no appetite for radical change here, as far as I can see. The Canadian economy runs on real estate.

Something has to give.