Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanE
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I agree. The best solution to rents which are too high is to leave the city for a place where rents are lower. This results in landlords having empty apartments and they'll lower their rents to find tenants. People seem to grasp this principle when it is applied to alcohol and tobacco taxes - low prices make booze and smokes more attractive and high prices drive consumers of these products away.
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At some point, you then have to pay the people who do
valuable and necessary but unprestigious jobs enough money to live where they work. I don't care if you live in an ivory palace surrounded by ivory palaces where only other multimillionaires live, someone has to deliver your pizza and wait your tables and unclog your drain and install your utilities and all the other things you aren't willing to do yourself. All of those jobs are important and require skills and talent that a lot of wealthier and better paid people don't actually have and never consider.
While I don't think communism is productive, I also think just about every "ism" is completely idiotic because life isn't binary or static. Some principles of every "ism" make sense when correctly applied. So if you're going to raise the rent in Vancouver, be prepared to deal with the sequelae of that decision - either a lot less service or a lot more traffic and pollution as your servicemen/women have to commute from wherever they can afford to live to wherever the jobs are.
This is what happens when your economy is a lie.
High prices on booze means more trade in illicit drugs because we have yet to face the reality that it is completely normal and endemic to humanity to use perception-altering substances. But dealers of legal drugs can settle business disputes in court, and are held accountable for their business practices. Dealers of substances deemed illegal have no such means of settling disputes and must do so with violence. They also have no incentive to play fair or restrict their sales to adults... I for one prefer to see drug dealers operate above the law, since they're going to operate no matter what the law is anyway.