UT is such a beautiful state. I miss autumn in Big Cottonwood Canyon. The Day’s Fork hike has some of the most beautiful colours I have ever seen.

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I agree with you about that, but these employees have chosen to do a job where they come face to face with customers daily, and some of those customers may get offended by seeing an employee wearing a BLM badge, in red states for example. The company doesn’t want to antagonise a potential customer and lose a sale, so they’re asking that no employees wear any political markings. And honestly, I think that’s a fair request if you work in a customer-facing role.

Notice that this ruling only applies to Whole Foods workers, not Amazon warehouse workers, who can probably wear whatever they want since they don’t deal with customers.

You actually can fire people based on their political beliefs, because believe it or not, political affiliation is not a protected class under current US federal law (maybe some state law though). There are only 7 current federally protected classes: age, race, sex, religion, marital status, disability, and sexual orientation. That’s why Republicans have been announcing they want to make political affiliation a protected class soon, because I guess that’s the next big battleground, is employers start to hire/fire based on politics.

I take your points, but I guarantee you this isn’t a decision about politics by Amazon, but purely a maximisation of revenue decision. Whole Foods employees interact with customers face to face, every day, all across the US, from blue states to red states. They know that their customers in some places consider BLM to be a political organisation, one that they don’t support, and that goes for proud boys, KKK, whatever. The point is, you don’t want to antagonise any customers coming in through the door, and corporate is aware that people are awfully sensitive these days and ready to kick off over any tiny thing, so to ensure no customer gets offended and takes their business elsewhere, and to ensure a policy which can be applied nationally for all states where Whole Foods exists, it’s just easier to say they won’t allow anything which their customers could potentially consider political.

That’s all this is, it’s not the political dog whistle some are making it out to be. This is just corporations wanting to remain neutral and take money from every customer, not just liberal ones. Hence I agree with this policy, it’s not coming from a bad place and it’s not an absurd request either.

And yes, as you said, not allowing someone to wear a religious article of clothing is a lawsuit waiting to happen, which will be a slam dunk, but this isn’t the same.

I think you’re way into the weeds here and forget the most important thing to remember about “freedom”: things like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are a compact between you and the government, not you and private companies. Private companies don’t owe you anything besides whatever the government has expressly legislated, such as explicit protection for religious clothing and icons like crosses, Sikh turbans, etc.

However, beyond that, individual companies have the right to request their employees look and dress in certain ways. The flip side there is, if you don’t like those rules, you are free to not work there anymore.

Of course, legislators can always choose to pass laws forcing companies to allow more exemptions, but that hasn’t happened yet for displays of a political organisation.

It’s not just a corporate thing, police, military, and fire brigade aren’t allowed to wear overt political badging either.

There’s a general rule that if you work for an organisation which asks you to wear a work related uniform of some kind, you don’t get to add anything to it, political or otherwise. You don’t see bobbies with a Pink Floyd sticker on their chest.

BLM is a brand though. The lady who founded it just bought a £1.25M house in LA’s exclusive Topanga neighbourhood for all cash.

That doesn’t sound like some sort of grass roots, help lift people up, Mother Teresa sort of organisation to me.

Hence yeah, people don’t like BLM. Some don’t like what it stands for, while others, like me, don’t like it because the founders used it as a massive vehicle for grifting and lining their own pockets.

I’m with Amazon on this, seems a reasonable ask for employees to not wear any political/cultural/social things at work with their official uniform.

Hope the driver goes to jail.

Why is it not accurate? House prices come down but cost of materials and labour stay constant or go up, what am I missing?

Also, I feel like we have gotten so far off track so as to forget what exactly we are arguing about.

The original discussion was how to fix the housing market so as to create way more affordable housing. My original argument was the government has to do that, by building houses at a loss, which only the government can do.

Your argument seems to have originally been that the true problem is the zoning and government red tape, but I feel like we have both come to the conclusion that neither of those is true. Firstly, even if zoning isn’t a problem, in places like LA and NYC there’s no physical space left to build, except vertically. In London, the only new land to build is way outside Zone 5. Furthermore, what incentive is there for private sector builders to flood the market with new supply, either horizontally or vertically? No industry likes it when the price of their product goes down, not a single one, and no industry is going to help that happen.

Finally, building vertically requires way bigger companies to get involved, meaning there are fewer of them, meaning it’s easier for them to collude to keep prices high. Building a ranch house out in Wyoming can be done by some local two-bit builder, but a skyscraper in Manhattan would need to be some big multinational. Ergo, even if the only solution is Shanghai style vertical flats, the prices are even more suspectible to collusion by the few big companies able and willing to build them.

Or, like I said, bypass all this bollocks and have the government build loads of houses and sell them at a loss, flood the supply and bring prices down for the altruistic, non-profit motive of getting more people into housing. Done and done.

Your own answer from earlier said so: increase supply massively whilst demand stays constant, means prices come down. Fair enough.

Well, if prices come down, margins by definition decrease, because building materials and labour aren’t decreasing too.

Ergo, even if zoning restrictions were relaxed massively, and permits handed out quickly and easily, there’s no incentive to flood the market like in 2007. This is especially true of big high rise, high density properties, as there usually are only a few companies who can build such buildings (in central London there’s like 4), so it makes collusion to keep supply low much easier. Sort of like how OPEC works.

Yeah but by whom? What’s the incentive for private sector builders to do that at scale if it means lower prices and lower margins by dramatically increasing supply?

The cops were all black too.

It’s not a metaphor, it’s as you say, an economic theory for the optimal rate of taxation, which exists somewhere between 0% and 100%. However, in the USA it has been put into practice over the past 30 years, where taxes on the extremely wealthy have fallen drastically over that time, with the thinking being that this would raise government revenue and also all that trickle down hogwash. Only it hasn’t, and it has only served to weaken revenues at the local community and state level, and caused wealth inequality worse than the gilded age.

In terms of housing, you are correct in principle, if the supply of housing was to drastically increase such that it outpaced demand, then sure, prices would fall. But this is a specious argument for a number of reasons. First, even if zoning was abolished tomorrow, it’s impossible to actually build new housing in most of the world’s most expensive cities, such as NYC, London, and LA, because there’s simply no space to build anywhere, except on the extreme periphery. London still has some brownfield land, but LA is boxed in by mountains, and Manhattan literally has no more space because it’s an island. So where do you actually build? Vertically, okay, but then you have destroy existing structures.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, even if you allowed easy zoning, and cleared out lots for mega towers, who is going to actually build so much supply so as to flood the market in order to crater prices and make housing affordable? That’s the dumbest thing ever, no builder wants to see prices come down, that would be like DeBeers flooding the market with diamonds, massively increasing supply and dropping the price, and killing their own profits/margins. Builders want high prices, not low, they have no incentive go on a building boom like in 2007 such that prices drop.

So you’re left with my original argument: you can’t leave housing solely to the for-profit, private sector. They have no incentive to build affordable housing, or flood the market with over supply in order to drop prices.

But that’s not what actually happens!! It’s like the Laffer Curve, we don’t actually see any of these benefits of letting the free market try to create all these supposed benefits and efficiencies. The textbooks say they should happen but in practice they never do. Even when the UK government releases state owned brownfield land, developers build overpriced flats no one in the local area can actually afford. So it doesn’t actually create any net new living space because 1) the local populace can’t afford it, 2) it gets bought by investors.

How does having investors scoop up luxury flats release downchannel housing at all? I have never seen that happen. Even in places where land is cheap and zoned for residential, like in areas of Utah, they never actually build affordable housing on it. People end up locked into renting.

Zoning is only a small part of the problem. Even if you zoned a bunch of new land today, if you let the private, free market have its course, then what do you think will be built on that land? Highly unaffordable luxury flats/houses, because that is what leads to the highest profit margins for the private sectors builders. And those flats will be bought up by investors or wealthy individuals to create more unaffordable rent.

That’s the core issue, individual private sector interests are not aligned to be altruistic interests for the good of society. They want to maximise profit, nothing more. Hence, you need someone willing to build houses and sell them at a loss, so average people can afford housing again. Only the government can sell for a loss and remain in business.

Ergo, you can zone all the land you want, but if you only let private sector builders have it, then you’ll just get more and more unaffordable properties built, chasing rich foreign investors, tech millionaires, or pension funds.

This is the core issue with Thatcherism/deregulation/privatisation. An individual company’s profit margins don’t always align with the good of society, but society needs essential services (water, sewage, electricity, food, housing, defense). These things need to be provided to all citizens, urban and rural, but doing so doesn’t always guarantee a profit, so you can’t just leave it to the private sector only.

Rent didn’t shoot up, how could it, the whole point of the law was it was frozen.

I think you’re missing the forest for the trees in this entire conversation: rent has been skyrocketing everywhere, in every G8 country, for the last 20 years. Especially in places like London, NYC, LA, Seattle, Paris, Toronto, Bay Area, etc. Hell, even in Salt Lake City where I used to live my rent went from £1816/mon to £2600/mon for the same flat, in just 2 years. And none of those cities have classic rent control (NYC has a few places which have it, but overall it doesn’t). So clearly with a free market, pure capitalist approach, rents have only been skyrocketing. Same thing for housing to buy, have you tried buying a house lately?

So to claim that rent control or rent freezes lead to higher rentals or less supply is wrong, because rents are going up in a free market too, and supply is already at an all time low (hence the prices shooting up).

So you’re fucked in either situation. The real problem is there just isn’t enough supply of shelter for people, and that’s because if you leave it to the free market, there’s no incentive to build affordable housing with no profit. Hence, because shelter is something required by citizens, government should be building it even at a huge loss. Just like government provides fire brigade and military at a financial loss, because people need these things. You don’t leave essential services to the private market because it may not be profitable to do them, for example, rural communities have shite internet, why? because it’s not profitable to dig and lay fibre optic cable into some rural hinterland for just a few hundred customers. So in Norway, the government steps in lays that fiber optic at a financial loss because it wants its citizens to have a better life. Same for housing. If the private sector isn’t doing it, the government should be. Just like in the 60s.

Depends on your definition of “success.” Countries such as Holland, France, Canada, Germany, and China all have caps on the amount by which a landlord can increase rent in any given year, usually by law it’s less than 5%, or indexed to inflation (but with 5% as the max). These laws are incredibly popular with renters and have been around for decades.

Berlin implemented a hard rent freeze in 2020 which was extremely popular with renters, but not with landlords, naturally.

However, rent control isn’t just a hard price cap like back during the war, there are many nuanced aspects, see here for information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

I unfortunately can’t read that article as it’s paywalled, but looking at the link, it’s an Opinion piece, so not factual reporting. It’s also from Bloomberg, one of the most pro-capitalist publications out there, second only to The Economist in its championing of all things pro globalist and pro capitalist.

The main stream media which is all very pro capitalist (as they’re all owned by billionaire oligarchs) has been shitting on rent control for decades.

Here’s a more nuanced article on the matter which doesn’t come from such a pro-capitalist, classical economic outlook: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

Capitalist/free market* economists.

Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It’s only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.