I’m sorry if you feel offended, but I’m using this terminology objectively. I do not believe that being a landlord automatically makes someone a bad person. However, landlordism is an harmful feature of our predominant mode of production. It relies on the prevalence of homelessness as a credible threat, after all.

Your list of anecdotal bad experiences people have had with landlords is utterly immaterial to the discussion of whether landlording is definitionally unethical.

I don’t think I listed any anecdotes. You expressed interest in emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords so I copied some examples of it that I had already written. The ethicality of being a landlord isn’t relevant to the economic role of landlords as parasites.

The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do.

First of all, how is that true?

The fact that landlord’s do not collect rent based on any labor that they do hasn’t been in question since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at the latest. Rental income is also known as passive or unearned income. That’s the appeal of it to landlords or prospective landlords. It’s an established concept. Even if you think that residential rental agreements are perfectly free and voluntary, that’s irrelevant to the fact that landlords do not produce or provide anything.

I didn’t throw anything back at you. I’m checking in with you to see if you’re still having trouble and, if so, where.

You won’t understand the solution until you understand the problem. I’ve already explained to you how landlords are parasitic. For similar reasons so are employers and land owners. The wealth they accumulate as owners of private property is not from any labor that they do themselves, but rather the labor of workers. To be clear, I’m not using the term parasitic pejoratively. I’m just being objective. Yes, workers produce housing today because that is how housing is produced, but landlords and their ilk are just overhead to housing production. If you still don’t understand, then please explain why you think that landlords are indispensable.

You are referring to private employers and landowners who are also parasitic and non-essential to housing production.

The answer, which should be obvious, is that workers produce housing. How do you insert landlords into that process in a way that isn’t parasitic?

“How is house made?” You think landlords are necessary or helpful to housing production? How can that be if they are fundamentally parasitic?

Lol I don’t know what you mean by “the Adjuster” and the main-est-stream news media I regularly listen to is Democracy Now!, so I didn’t know that a narrative is being blitzed. I’ve read some posts suggesting that it’s all a plot to cover up insider trading, but that idea seems a little too complicated and unlikely.

I haven’t talked about it very much with people off line, but when I have no one has had anything sympathetic to say about the victim or unsympathetic to say about the alleged assassin. The women I’ve discussed the case with agree that this Luigi guy is handsome. Idk fellas, I hate to do him like this, but we might be better off if he stays locked up.

It’s not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That’s what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.

If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here’s a short list I wrote from a similar thread:

• Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
• landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
• landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
• and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.

I never said landlords do no work.

I am not as well read as I would like, but I don’t think Marxist theory really faults anyone for acting in their apparent self-interest. The point is to become aware that you belong to a class with common interests, likely the working class, and that you can team up with your fellow workers and tenants to build leverage and get a better deal. Eventually, you can stop surrendering the wealth you and your class create to the minority bourgeoisie class.

To your point, a landlord who also has to hold down a regular job is still part of the working class. However, they might fall into the subcategories of labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie. Because they have it a little better, they’re less reliable or even traitorous in the class struggle compared to regular workers, even though they rarely have the juice to make it into the bourgeoisie.

If it’s already a whitehead then go for it. Just make sure everything is clean. I am not any kind of doctor health professional.

Landlordism is parasitism. That doesn’t mean that the only alternative is a system in which people can only acquire housing by way of long term mortgages.

I didn’t imply that all tenants are perfectly well behaved. I implied that you a repeating the misconception that landlords provide housing, that they undertake a remarkable burden that makes them deserving of every cent of rental income they collect. It’s a trope that elides the simple fact that renting housing is predicated not on any sort of actual work a landlord does, but rather the ability to withhold or take away housing from people. Stop pretending otherwise. Your parents are or were landlords. You dishonor them to try and sugarcoat it.

Where did I say that you were lying?

That’s nice that you found a place to stay after traveling the world, that you found some personal benefit from a system that leaves more than half a million people without proper housing (at least in the US). What does that have to do with anything that I wrote?

This sort of landlord apologia isn’t necessary and is actually harmful to the reputation of landlords like your parents, the OP’s aunt, and their beneficiaries. You even managed to sneak some resentment towards tenants in there. Maybe after expenses the rental income was disappointing to them sometimes, but at the end of the day your parents owned other people’s homes. Just be conscious of your station and have some quiet dignity about it.

Don’t take it personally, but landlordism is fundamentally parasitism. It’s a matter of fact that private property, whether it’s a townhouse or a factory, enables its owners to extract value from working people. If people personally resent landlords like your aunt, it’s probably not so much because that’s where the theory guides them as it is that almost everyone has had a bad experience with a landlord or knows someone who did. Landlords have earned a bad reputation.

It was a pleasant experience for me here in NJ. The building had WiFi and a quiet area with desks for anyone who wanted or needed to get some work done. The staff ran a tight ship, but they were friendly about it. It was very easy to get dismissed for various reasons, which is what happened to me. I’m glad I wasn’t because it was a murder trial with a young defendant, which would have been a bummer.

Yes. If I’m actually some kind of cosmic being that can choose to be born yes, I am taking that pill. I’m taking all the experience pills.