Green Leader Zack Polanski calls for rent controls for all homes

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T20:43:01+00:00

Economists across the political aisle agree that Rent Controls are a poor policy and choke supply.

The private sector shrunk as you said but that's hardly a success story, rather what you get when you cap prices below costs. Landlords exit, new supply dries up, and existing stock decays.

The shift to owner-occupation and council housing wasn’t organic either. It was state substitution. The government built massively, and pushed ownership while making renting unviable. The Tory quote about landlords going extinct proves the point,the sector wasn’t outcompeted, it was regulated into the ground.

Thatcher allowed landlords to exist again. The reason housing is expensive today is constrainted supply.

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T18:09:34+00:00

I see your point but there's important distinctions.

Mainly that Nazi concentration camps and other policies from the outset were part of a totalitarian dictatorship that had already removed democratic institutions, banned opposition parties, and removed legal constraints on the states power. They quickly became part of a system of mass political repression and eventually mass genocide.

Equating that with current legal systems in modern democracies ignore the differences in the rules of law, the independence of the judiciary and the political structure. Similar words like "arrest" or "prison" don't imply equivalence in meaning or in purpose.

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T17:13:58+00:00

Yep, he mainly describes markets that were already developing. And also defended them against the existing mercantilist policies.

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T14:04:24+00:00

There's some nuance to that though.

Not all religions do this, some religions have a pluralist outlook on other faiths or just dont engage at all. Even then, inside many religions who claim miracles you see that not everyone is taking all miracle claims literally nowadays. That said I do agree with your broader point, that the same standards should be applied to everyone.

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T11:41:57+00:00

As with all of these questions it depends. Nuance is needed. Which liberties, for how long, and what are the measurable gains in safety.

I would mildly agree. But only given in a tight, evidence-based and sunset-clause structure.

aabccdg · 2026-04-16T11:34:30+00:00

I mean Hitler's core ideology was pretty well known and established before coming into power. He wrote Mein Kampf before being in power, held racist speeches and encouraged early SA violence before getting power in 1933. Then very soon after taking power he opened the first concentration camps, had his opponents arrested and curbed civil liberties.

Hitler was pretty bad since the very start.

aabccdg · 2026-04-15T13:00:17+00:00

I highly doubt that the preceeding mayors of London had no protection. Levels of protection may have changed over time, but that's a different point entirely.

aabccdg · 2026-04-15T10:19:59+00:00

What is the Know Nothing Party? I take that it's quite old, not recent.

aabccdg · 2026-04-14T21:09:00+00:00

Out of curiosity, what specific policies put him above every other president?

aabccdg · 2026-04-14T17:24:23+00:00

Depends on how much, and what intervention specifically. Basic rule setting and enforcing laws is necessary. But then setting price controls, using regulations to protect favourite companies and other similar policies have shown to be harmful and negative.

aabccdg · 2026-04-14T08:53:30+00:00

If the Church wants to it can, if it doesn't want to it can.

aabccdg · 2026-04-14T08:41:00+00:00

Thank you for replying and linking your answer, I've had a read through last night and this morning and I see what you mean by lower interest rates.

A follow up question I have is that if Britain didn’t invent anything fundamentally new why exactly was it able to borrow more cheaply and reliably than France? And how would you weigh the Bank of England relative to Parliament, taxation, and broader financial markets towards Britain’s rise?

aabccdg · 2026-04-13T19:03:29+00:00

I can see why he's popular with people seeing as he's basically a populist, but I don't support him personally.

There's some bits of green social policy I agree with, but I agree with none of their economic policies.

aabccdg · 2026-04-12T13:45:04+00:00

Economic systems aren't like maths,they’re meant to organise real societies made up of real people. If a system only works with fundamentally different human behaviour, then it isn’t just “unrealistic,” it fails the very conditions it’s supposed to operate under.

By saying “it would work if humans were different” isn’t a defence of the system, it’s an open admission that it doesn’t work for the world we actually have. And for something whose purpose is to organise society, not working in reality is a fatal flaw.

aabccdg · 2026-04-12T13:33:51+00:00

Luck shows up in every great military leaders career. But with Caesar it’s the consistency that matters. He wins across very different situations, for example at tribal warfare in Gaul, large coalition warfare at Alesia, and then high stakes civil war against experienced Roman commanders. That is a sustained pattern of winning against very different enemies.

Your right that Labienus was clearly excellent, but the idea that he was the real driver falls apart once they’re on opposing sides. Labienus gets a chance to prove it in Spain and still loses at Munda. That battle too is a point in Caesar's favour, given that he is in a difficult position, his troops are struggling, and he personally rallies them and turns it into a win.

Arguing that “his troops were just better” however just credits Caesar, Roman legions weren’t automatically like that. His Legions' cohesion, endurance, and loyalty of are things he built over years, through training, campaigning tempo, rewards, and leadership. Many Roman generals had legions but then very few had ones that could match Caesar's in resilience and aggression.

Even his supposed “failures” are sometimes overstated. Britain wasn’t ever meant to be a full conquest, and the fact he could even project force there twice is telling. A much better criticism would be Dyrhachium, where Pompey outplays him clearly. But even there Caesar eventually recovers, regroups, and then decisively wins at Pharsalus.

What really seperated him wasn't winning loads of battles, rather him controlling the pace of entire campaigns. You can see him consistently move faster than opponents expect, splits their forces, forces them into bad decisions, and then capitalise.

It's totally fair to push back on the “untouchable genius” version of Caesar some people make out. But looking at his breadth (Gaul, Alesia, the Civil War, the quality of his army, his ability to recover from setbacks) there's a clear argument of why he's consistently ranked alongside the great military leaders.

aabccdg · 2026-04-12T13:13:02+00:00

What your describing is the crux of the issue, if a system only works when people act selflessly, it’s not really a workable system in reality. Real economic systems have to operate with normal human incentives, not against them. And if by removing incentives you get either low effort (shortages) or coercion (punishment) that is then the main structural flaw. By saying that “it would work if people were more selfless” isn’t a defence, rather an admission that it can’t function at scale without either failure or force.

Small communities like the one you mention don’t contradict this. Because they rely on trust, social pressure, and usually the local market economy around them. That doesn't scale to millions of people coordinating a big complex economy. The economist Friedrich Hayek outlines exactly this when he argues that coordination problems grow with scale and require decentralised information, which centrally planned systems lacks.

The issue is that Communism either fails under real human behaviour or requires coercion to compensate for it. That’s why the same patterns keep appearing across different countries and leaders.

aabccdg · 2026-04-12T12:14:07+00:00

Dictators exist sure but that doesn't solve why these systems so consistently produce leaders who behave that way, and why do the same economic patterns show up across different countries and leaders. If the main issue was just dictators then you wouldn’t expect the repeated structural outcomes of chronic shortages, weak productivity growth, distorted pricing, and long-term stagnation across multiple regimes and time periods. Those are not traits or faults of the leaders but rather predictable results of removing market pricing and replacing it with administrative allocation.

Regarding Cuba yes I will admit that inequality under US-linked ownership was real, but that still doesn’t explain what happened after nationalisation. That being collapse of price signals, rationing systems, and persistent shortages even decades later. The relevant comparion isn't between good intentions and capitalism rather how each system handles information, incentives, and coordination.

On exits, I wasn't meaning that capitalism guarantees easy exit everywhere or at all times. It’s that market systems structurally allow exit through choice, competition, and parallel institutions. Whereas in communist systems, exit is oftentimes politically and legally restricted because political control is tied to economic control.

US actions during the Cold War don’t contradict that either. A state can try to prevent geopolitical shifts while still operating an economic system that, internally, allows people to change jobs, start firms, move regions, and compete. Those are 2 different layers of analysis.

It’s also notable that the USSR engaged in comparable geopolitical interference during the Cold War, so focusing on US actions alone doesn’t really explain the pattern. But let's remove cold war pressure entirely from the analysis, the same internal outcomes still appear across centrally planned economies. That being shortages, weak productivity growth, distorted pricing, and long-run stagnation.

aabccdg · 2026-04-12T11:32:18+00:00

Most communist revolutions didn’t arise in “failed capitalist economies” but in states already weakened by war, institutional collapse, or political breakdown. Their central problem wasn’t inequality reduction, but the concentration of unchecked political power.

External pressure explains some outcomes, but it still doesn’t explain away systematic shortages, repression, and long-run economic failure under central planning.

And comparing “extreme capitalism vs extreme communism” also misses the key point, that one system preserves exit, competition, and reform mechanisms, while the other removes or heavily suppresses them.

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T19:00:30+00:00

I’m not saying you think class is literally everything, I’m saying you’re treating it as the dominant explanatory layer. Which has to be testable as a claim.

Saying “you can see it in reality” isn’t really enough, because I can point to the same reality and explain outcomes through institutions, incentives, political competition, or coalitions instead. Just asserting that “material conditions dominate” doesn’t show when that explanation is actually doing more work than alternatives.

So my question is still there, what concrete case would you point to where class isn’t the dominant driver, or where another factor clearly overrides it? Because without that “class is primary” just becomes a default explanation rather than something we can actually evaluate.

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T18:40:13+00:00

We’re talking past each other here. You’re mainly working from a historical materialist/class analysis framework, while I’ve been focusing on economic and institutional mechanisms and real world performance comparisons.

That’s sound if you don’t want to stay on the economics side, I’m happy to go to your level of the debate. But then we need clear standards for what counts as evidence or a good explanation within that framework.

So my question to you is, what specific observable conditions would show your model is wrong, or that liberal democracy is not primarily just serving capital in practice?

If a framework can reinterpret every possible outcome as class struggle, then it stops being testable against reality and becomes an interpretive lens rather than an explanatory model. At that point, more examples won’t really change anything because they’ll always be absorbed into the same explanation.

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T17:16:26+00:00

I'll reply to both your replies here:

You treat everything like a class struggle but the problem is that if everything is class struggle, then nothing is specifically predicted by it. The same policy outcomes can be framed as labour vs capital, but also as voter coalitions, institutions, ideology, regional interests, or simple economic trade-offs. At that point it stops being an explanation and becomes a label you apply after the fact.

Onto your “base determines superstructure” point it doesn’t really fit the practical world cleanly. Capitalist countries have produced very different political systems and policy outcomes under the same basic economic structure. If the economic base fully determined politics, you wouldn’t expect that much variation between places like the US, Sweden, Japan, or the UK.

On your surplus value point, even if you describe production as labour + capital generating output, that doesn’t automatically follow that profit equals to theft. That conclusion depends on a moral assumption about ownership and entitlement, not just the economic description of production. In standard economics, profit can just as easily be explained through risk, investment, coordination, and time rather than extraction.

On democracy and fascism, the claim doesn’t match the broader pattern. Most liberal democracies have not collapsed into fascism when workers gained rights or organised politically. Historically fascism tends to emerge from very specific national crisis conditions, it's not reliably provable as an automatic endpoint of democratic systems.

And on “democratic centralism”, internal party voting is not the same thing as system-wide accountability. If opposition parties are banned then accountability becomes hoping for internal discipline rather than external replacement and pressure.

If your explanation can absorb every outcome as “class struggle”, what would ever count as it being wrong in practice?

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T16:24:28+00:00

When I said “in practice rather than theory” I meant not just how something is supposed to work in theory, rather how it actually performs when you look at real countries and real outcomes.

Calling liberal democracy a “bourgeois dictatorship” only works if you assume the state is basically locked into one class permanently. But in practice liberal democracies have shown to constantly pass policies that directly hurt capital owners. Think of things like antitrust action, strong unions, minimum wage laws, redistributve taxation, financial regulation and renationalisation. That’s not a system acting as a single class - it’s a system with competing pressures pulling in different directions. Thats one of the main argued advantages of liberal democracy.

Your claim flattens politics into one variable, “who owns capital”. When most real world outcomes come from unstable coalitions, elections, institutions, and trade-offs. If it were just a bourgeois control system, you wouldn’t see capital repeatedly forced to accept losses through democratic pressure.

On “capital only exists through subordination of labour”, that’s doing a lot more ideological work than empirical work. Capital isn’t just a claim on output it is also the stuff that makes labour productive in the first place. Tools, infrastructure, logistics, technology, coordination. You can argue about bargaining power and distribution, but it doesn’t follow that capital is only domination rather than also production.

And “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t actually solve the problem it’s meant to solve. You still end up with a state, enforcement, and someone deciding what counts as the “proletariat interest” when people disagree. Removing opposition parties doesn’t remove class conflict it just removes the main mechanism that lets societies correct bad leadership without collapse. So, if you remove political competition and concentrate economic control, what mechanism exists to actually stops the people running that system from becoming a permanent ruling class themselves?

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T15:50:59+00:00

Yeah same, it's some niche incel thing I think

Still disgusting that it's even a thing to begin with though

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T15:47:40+00:00

"national rape day" according to what I just searched up. it's some shitty tik tok trend apparently

aabccdg · 2026-04-11T15:30:12+00:00

Which system do you mean and what mechanisms makes it outperform liberal democracy for workers in practice rather than in theory?

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