Economic Robbery
A great wave sweeps this land and drowns the poor. The rich it buoys up, carrying them off to some far-fetched wonderland were their wealth is without bound. It is wave that cuts the rafts from beneath the feet of the poor and uses the material to build yachts for the rich. It is a great and legal robbery that bears the name rent; a word that innocuously refers to the lending of property in return for compensation. A word that ignores the seismic effect of such an enterprise throughout the whole of human economic life.
See how the tide rises all around us: how every commodity slowly approaches the status of rent. Every company now sells a subscription. More of us rent our homes than any time in the last half century. Rental enterprises spring up for cars and phones. Our media is primarily accessed by subscription. Our online world is rented out by but a few companies. See how even basic items can now be subscribed to. Novelty ones as well. See how nearly every good that is not a subscription must be bought again and again and again, ever approaching the perfect recurring payment of rent. See how it bolsters the profits of every firm and eliminates the property of the poor.
“Having is no good” said those who have, and a great nodding has gone through the land at the wisdom of this proclamation. So great is this wisdom that the havers have greatly increased their stock. In the meantime, the others have either cast off theirs as an inconvenience, or been robbed mercilessly of it.
For truly, is it not more convenient to rent? To be able to swap out for fresh new things whenever you desire? A whole catalog of possibilities open up for a fraction of the price. No longer must you put down large sums of money upfront. Small and incremental payments leave you free to switch services at any time. Surely the best quality can be found? And besides, what of those things it is better not to buy? A tool for one use, a movie for one viewing, a car for one journey or a home for but a few months. And if these are good, why must I ever settle for one thing? What possible advantages are there to ownership? When I rent, I pay little at a time, though I pay it often, and the things that I have are always the best: with rent I can always upgrade my phone or my car, always see the latest releases on my streaming services, always find a better apartment, always get access for a small upfront payment, always constantly receiving upkeep and updates. Tell me, are you not happier to rent? To always be able to easily expand your roster of things, to swap them out, to always be on the cutting edge of new products and media?
Yet as you rent your possessions shrink accordingly. You cut from beneath your feet piece by piece the accumulation of assets that buoys you and your children up towards wealth and generational wealth. What you rent is not your property. It cannot be resold in a time of need, or accrue value over time. Every thing that you own adds slightly to your wealth, but as more and things are yours are had through rent your wealth slowly shrinks to the diminishing number of dollar bills in your bank account. In time, a great chasm opens up beneath the renters and their children and they fall into unrelenting poverty, unable to accrue wealth. Havers, on the other hand, gain and gain. But the opening of this chasm is not always a choice.
Renting is so often thrust upon us. It is those who have who strike the critical blow to open the fault line that swallows the rest. They have long walked our streets performing an economic mugging of the disadvantaged. Those who have little can be easily forced to sell much of what they have: a simple economic downturn or a small act of economic predation frees from their grip many assets. The wealthy, sheltered by their resources, are safe and ready to pounce: snapping up what little the poor had. As the economy waxes and wanes, this opportunity opens again and again and the wealthy are always ready. Some sell us these assets back at inflated prices. But a growing number keep them and offer them only as rent. The act of economic highwaymanship is completed when it is realized that the poor need not own at all; and that their depravation is a great opportunity for continuous profit and robbery.
You will even find that the opportunity to buy is slowly eliminated: as companies realize the great profit that is rent, and the revolution of permanently robbing the consumer, they will cease to offer their products for sale at all. Only by subscription will you have access, and so you are forced to rent, and as a result rend your future wealth in two and toss it to the gutter to wash away come the spring rains.
And as your wealth falls, remember that you can be legally robbed at any time. Services can be revoked, and property can be reclaimed. You, having never had a legal right, have no recourse. See how families are tossed on the streets the moment they cannot pay. See how a service can be revoked at any time without compensation. See how you, unable to ever say of what you rent “this is mine,” find quickly that you truly have nothing. Rent creates the fiction of ownership by granting you having and having alone, and this suffices every day, day upon day, until that final day when the true owner says “I am taking that back.” On that day you will wake up and realize that you truly have always had nothing.
It is for this reason that rent is always theft. You are charged as if you were buying the product, but no ownership rights transfer. The owner assumes some risk and provides some service: repairs or upgrades, but this does not match the massively increased price that the renter pays over time. Unlike in a sale, the item is never owned and the payments never stop: for things you would have bought, such as software, a home, or a car, the payments quickly outstrip the value of the asset. Even before, since no ownership is trading hands, the only value you receive is the thing itself as service: a much less valuable commodity than the thing itself; especially when that thing itself accrues value. For when you hold an asset in your possession the amount you have spent on it is what you paid minus the value of the thing currently. But when you rent you spend all the money you put towards that thing and have nothing remaining.
The Perfection of Rent
See: three types of goods we deal with in an economic life. First, is the asset, the property that is not transient and can be owned. It has value that can accrue or be recovered; it is an item such as a house. This is the foundation of wealth.
Second, the consumable. It is transient, like food, and it is often necessary. Money spent towards these sustains a life.
The third, is the service: what is provided for you by other people on the basis of payment. This includes things such as a maid or a mechanic. This too is usually transient.
Within a normal life, there is some balance between the three. Some things are assets that build wealth, some things are necessarily bought as consumable goods, and some services are essential. We will all spend on all three. But observe rent’s alchemical genius: it transmutes assets into services. No longer does the haver of many things have to content themselves with that: their assets can generate income practically by themselves by becoming services to another. The renter, on the other hand, sees an imbalance form in their own life as things that could have been assets become services. This stunts the growth of their wealth and ensures the gap between the lender and the renter.
While the renters rent, havers expand their assets, their stock swelling as the stock of the poor diminishes. Over time, their wealth grows and the wealth of those who rent shrinks. On and on until for the poor renting becomes the undeviating path upon which life is lived. A life facilitated by the wealthy, who neither live it nor imagine it. A life that facilitates the wealthy, as it allows them to expand their assets to the point where they no longer need to sell their labor, and so are free from the toil of subsistence. It allows for that final transformation, where the assets of the wealthy build up to the point where they become Capital: property that itself generates income and wealth without needing to be sold.
The poor on the other hand, see their assets slowly decline again and again until they are forced to depend on selling their final asset: themselves. Renting makes them into perfected workers who are utterly dependent on selling their labor to the advantage of the economic system and the wealthy.
The perfection of rent goes beyond the act of rent. It invades other parts of the economy: once permanent goods such as clothes become transient; forming their own sort of subscription as you are forced to buy them again and again. All objects begin to fall into this pattern: their life cycles become short to force upon the purchaser a sort of subscription. Rent is only the most perfected form of this ideal. Slowly, all but the wealthy are stripped of their assets as assets cease to be available to them. The only things in their economic life are consumer goods and services. The only asset that cannot be removed: the person themselves, is forced to be sold to buy consumables and services. People become workers, tied to their job. Dependent on its revenue for all parts of their lives. They become exactly what is most convenient for the economy: the person who works and spends all continually, never accruing wealth or saving that could stymie the flow of money and labor. Only the wealthy gain the privilege of assets: including the keeping of themselves. They are the only ones who don’t have to sell their labor and reduce themselves to workers.
For here is the thing: the economy is built for the benefit of the owners, not for those who work, yet it needs a ready supply of workers to function. It is for this purpose that my property is crushed down to the smallest possible amount meaning that I will have no choice but to sell my body for work, and the status of the owners will be secure.
I will be placed onto a hamster wheel to run out the course of my life without change. Already, this is a reality for many, but the conversion of goods to services that is involved in rent straps me down as if to a wheel of death. The havers then throw knives as each of my assets become rented from them, and I am perfected into the worker of their economic dreams: the slave who only exists to work and fulfill the jobs my betters will not do. For they have the option and I do not.
