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I read this article this morning and am having some thoughts about the issue of Failure to Launch.  This article complains that children are being coddled, but doesn't suggest much more solution than having a family meal:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201612/the-failure-launch-epidemic

 

Competition for resources has made it much more difficult for a young person to own his home.  When you own your home you have a greater drive to keep it.  When most of your energy is being drained to a vampire rent lord you lose ambition.  If the housing industry is being manipulated by realtor vampires, why put all that energy into a middle man between you and the former owner of the home?  When the government is devaluing the dollar to make it look like there are gains in the economy, how can you keep the fruits of your effort?  Why put any effort into feeding the parasites?  Our parents 401K's gain money through rental properties, our parents generation is living off of our generation.  In China three generations live together, and China is now buying up 'investment' property in the US.  Why leave home? 

If you refute my arguments please divulge if you own rental property, and how that is good for the economy.

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I rented many places prior to purchasing my first home at age 27. I rented rooms, shared homes, rented apartments, rented homes. At one time, I bought a trailer/mobile home, where I rented the lot upon which it set. I've also rented out a room in the first house I bought for several years.

In the sense of the economy, these are all examples of mutually beneficial trade.

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Tenderlysharp is completely right: massive intergenerational theft is taking place, and to add insult to injury we're being mocked in so-called "failure to launch" comedies in movies and TV that cater to an older generation audience to get cheap laughs off of us, the ones they have screwed over.

Social Security and Medicare, the massive national debt, large chronic deficits, and the interest that we must pay every year on the debt have robbed us blind, have robbed us of opportunities. This is Objectivists' "baby", or at least it should be. However, far too many prominent Objectivists, such as Dr. Michael Hurd whose blog is mirrored here (the biggest Objectivist forum on the internet), portray us as video-game playing parasites, when in reality we are the ones trying very hard to survive and we are the ones paying for the profligacy of the older generations.

Edited by Dustin86
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Competition for resources does not explain rising house prices. Land-use regulation does. Competition for resources is a constant. Land-use regulation is not.

In a free market, if population is expanding, people have an incentive to provide more housing. New York city in the 1950s is the stock example of rising population, rising housing stock and stable prices. Population is not increasing in the US today at a rate that would explain what's happened to real estate prices, much less in the places where the increase is the greatest - urban, coastal California in particular.

To conflate this with the effects of Social Security and of student loans is to misunderstand the issue seriously. As for ownership, I own up to a refusal to get into ad hominem arguments.

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18 hours ago, Reidy said:

ad hominem arguments

I can see how calling someone a vampire/parasite would not be conducive to a rational debate.  I need to work toward the root of the frustration I was expressing. 

People who vote for socialism are predominantly renters.  Having no personal claim to a piece of this land there isn't much to fight for. 

I am also curious about the power and psychology of the socialists who own the media, who make billions of dollars off of musicians, actors, journalists, artists who only receive a fraction of the profit from their work.  The artists in turn make more work about being victimized out of that frustration, perpetuating the trend toward socialism. 

 

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Property ownership was a requirement for eligibility to vote in the 18th and 19th centuries. Maybe it's due for a comeback.

The fact that artists rarely own media companies is, I suspect, simply a matter of division of labor. Some people are good at music or acting while others are good at running companies. With the internet, musicians can go directly to the public without a middleman, and they've had the option of producing and promoting their own concerts or exhibiting their own paintings, etc. for much longer. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and so.me other actors got together and founded United Artists in the 1920s. They didn't put MGM out of business.

The artists in any medium who've gotten rich are, just the same, the ones who've worked with record companies, concert promoters, galleries and the like. Maybe they're on to something.

Edited by Reidy
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  • 2 months later...

This issue has become very personal to me.  I don't know if failure to launch is the concise priority in the issue, but a consequence of the philosophical basis of rent not being thoroughly explored.  When I started this thread I was relieved to have just gotten out from under a year contract with a slumlord.  There were so many things they did that were wrong I didn't take the time to fight it.  I just wanted out. 

A few days ago I got a letter from them slapping me with a $2,500 bill for damages they claim I made to the apartment.  As much as I dislike them, I respect property.  I left the place cleaner and in better condition than when I entered. 

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What if owning the place you sleep at night had a substantial impact on the child prodigy speed at which the world has evolved in the last 200 years?  What if rent is dragging us back into the feudalism of the dark ages?

Consciousness and existence are corollaries.  No consciousness without existence, no existence without consciousness.  If you own your self isn't it significant to own your shelter? 

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You may have stumbled upon an overlooked and under exploited market niche: single person dwellings.

To the extent other private parties do not provide what you are looking for in the free market, and to the extent there is a desire by younger persons starting out to work towards ownership rather than pay rent, a small, VERY small detached home may be the unidentified and undersold ideal.

If this sort of thing is something people would want but think to themselves no one else would want it, and hence worry about resale, the market might never get off the ground.  So really, the task is to help change the culture so that people feel more comfortable getting what they want with the knowledge others will be there to buy also when its time for an upgrade.  The builder would need to change the way people think about tiny detached homes.

Persons capable only of more modest livelihoods, who accept their own limits, might indeed settle in a tiny home for life rather than have any plans to buy larger.

Really I think the reason why choices are limited (other than government regulation) is a lack of demand and imagination on the part of consumers who really do drive the market with their pocket books.   

 

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24 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

What may be ideal for some has nothing to do with what is ideal for me ... or what is ideal for you.

This leads to absurdity. Do you believe there are no essentials, no human nature? Is every concrete essentially different from every other, and any generalization or induction is impossible? Doesn't that annihilate objective morality? Who's to say what's right or wrong, it all depends on the person, what's right for you may not be right for me, what's good for Hitler may not be good for the Jews. Was it was still morally right, for him, to try to kill them?

No, we all share in common a human nature, human values, a human moral code, and human ideals. All other things being equal, there is an ideal approach for a young, single person trying to save money. I'd argue for a few reasons that it's better to live with roommates than to live alone in a small, detached home. But if we can't agree that there's any such thing as an ideal, as right or wrong, as human nature, then that discussion is rather pointless.

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Some young people inherit large sums of money, or are wealthy due to gifts, others are poor and/or live only on a small income or on student loans.

Some people prefer independence and their own space, others prefer having a lot of company.

Some people do not like the country, trees, grass, yardwork, mowing grass, shoveling snow, or the complications of running of household, others do not like the noise or the bustle of the city, even though it may be more convenient to live near restaurants and stores and the relatively care free lifestyle of apartment or condo life, would mean more time for leisure.

What is ideal in terms of where we live is context dependent, it does depend upon who you are.  To ignore this fact and insist on a single universal solution is tyrannical, and your invoking Hitler and "the Jews" in response to a post about residential dwelling markets, verges on the insane.

 

 

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8 hours ago, epistemologue said:

No, we all share in common a human nature, human values, a human moral code, and human ideals. All other things being equal, there is an ideal approach for a young, single person trying to save money. I'd argue for a few reasons that it's better to live with roommates than to live alone in a small, detached home. But if we can't agree that there's any such thing as an ideal, as right or wrong, as human nature, then that discussion is rather pointless.

Living along in a small, detached home may save less money than living with roommates, but why does it necessitate attaching it to an ideal, or even right or wrong? I like strawberry rhubarb pie. You may not. Strawberry rhubarb pie may be a little more expensive than apple. Does this make the preference less than ideal, or right or wrong?

In a world where prescriptive law (moral or otherwise) seems preferential to descriptive law, maybe the price differential holds more weight. I'm of the mindset that my taste buds set the objectivity of my preferences with regard to what I eat (obviously setting nutrition and other health related issues aside). In so far as preference goes, I'm willing to concede that you, objectively, may like apple pie more or value your pocketbook more than your taste-bud input, but in so far as matters of personal preference goes,  this moves the matter out of of the realm of prescriptive morality at that point.

Edited by dream_weaver
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  • 2 months later...
On 12/12/2016 at 0:28 PM, Tenderlysharp said:

I need to work toward the root of the frustration I was expressing. 

On 12/11/2016 at 1:09 PM, Dustin86 said:

Tenderlysharp is completely right: massive intergenerational theft is taking place, and to add insult to injury we're being mocked in so-called "failure to launch" comedies in movies and TV that cater to an older generation audience to get cheap laughs off of us, the ones they have screwed over.

 

We were born into a crippled economy (which we're forbidden even to try to fix without the permission of our local slave-drivers), equipped with nothing except whatever we may or may not have gleaned from John Dewey's educational system, commanded to go out and start producing more than $9.50 an hour "somehow" (and to pay for any of our elders' false teeth or Viagra or organ transplants, while we're at it) and if we complain about any of it we're told to shut up, take it and like it.

 

Yes, gentlemen, our elders have screwed us over quite thoroughly. They've made it much harder for us to "launch" than it ever was for them.

That's not a comfortable subject for many of them, though, so they don't want to know that anything has changed at all. It's much easier to say that we're all just helpless, snivelling infants, who can't live up to their standards.

That's not to deny the existence (nor even the prevalence) of millenials who are, in fact, helpless and spineless weaklings. I'm not saying there isn't a grain of truth in that depiction, but it's only a half-truth; the other half is that, with each passing year, our society makes it even harder to "launch". 

 

And if we can't stop it then our kids will take an even harder beating than we have.

 

On 2/12/2017 at 7:07 PM, Tenderlysharp said:

This issue has become very personal to me...

A few days ago I got a letter from them slapping me with a $2,500 bill for damages they claim I made to the apartment.  As much as I dislike them, I respect property.  I left the place cleaner and in better condition than when I entered. 

Firstly, there's nothing wrong with it being a personal issue (as it is for me and should be for any person it affects) as long as we can still reason about it clearly and coherently.

Secondly, I'm sorry you had to do business with a landlord who was such a scumbag; I know what that must've felt like. But one lying bastard does not mean that all landlords are liars, any more than one welfare-mooching millennial proves us all to be moochers.

 

Direct your wrath towards the individual who's actually earned it.

 

On 2/12/2017 at 9:22 PM, Tenderlysharp said:

If you own your self isn't it significant to own your shelter? 

Not necessarily. If you have a steady and reliable source of income then spending some monthly portion of it on a temporary shelter shouldn't be the end of the world. It sounds like you might want to rethink your personal living arrangements (maybe) but rent, as such, is not destroying our civilization.

 

On 12/11/2016 at 5:40 PM, Reidy said:

As for ownership, I own up to a refusal to get into ad hominem arguments.

Only a Hippy or a Commie would turn his nose up at ad hominem arguments! :stuart:

 

 

 

P.S:

To be clear, it's not impossible to "launch" today; the obstacles in our way are not a blank check to blame all of one's problems on society and give up on solving them. I am not trying to advocate any form or variety whatsoever of fatalism.

What I'm sanctioning is the outrage which, as grievously misdirected as it is, seems to be a response to actual wrongs.

 

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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On 2/15/2017 at 0:07 PM, epistemologue said:

All other things being equal, there is an ideal approach for a young, single person trying to save money. I'd argue for a few reasons that it's better to live with roommates than to live alone in a small, detached home.

What kind of young, single person, and what are they trying to save money for? If they're an aspiring musician, whose band will need to be practicing regularly (and probably loudly) then roommates would be an objective downgrade.

For the past few months my roommates have been united in one long, sustained effort to make me doubt the validity of my own mind (for purposes I can't fathom) and SL's idea sounds incredibly good to me, right now. You're not me, though; you may never have been in such a situation and your roommates might be of a very different caliber than mine.

 

I'm not denying the existence of objective, universal principles, but "young and single" just doesn't cut it.

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On 4/26/2017 at 7:35 AM, StrictlyLogical said:

Careful!  Don't conflate "objective" with "universal".  Objectivity IS contextual... to ignore context (i.e. ignore reality) is irrational.

IF you're starting your own rock band, which must be able to play loudly (and perhaps not too well, at first), THEN you should avoid heavily populated areas when choosing where to live. IF you enjoy chocolate ice cream the most THEN it is proper for you to choose it, when selecting your ice cream (and, barring any extremely unusual circumstances, improper and immoral to choose any lesser flavor for yourself).

 

On the question of how to apply our wishes and preferences to any given decision, the answer Epistemologue gave had the basically correct format: there are general rules for how to consciously reason from wishes, urges or desires to validated goals and then to choices and actions, and these apply to everyone, universally. Actually, despite his screams of "subjectivism!", nobody in this thread has suggested anything other than that.

His error was not the insistence on universal principles and it is a different kind of error to reject the existence of such principles. If such things weren't universal then there'd be no standards to judge "good" or "bad" choices, nothing to guide any of us towards anything in particular and nothing for us to discuss except the "sez you - sez I" sort of emotional ejaculation which wouldn't be of any Earthly use to anyone on Earth.

His error was to drop the context of just how subtle, complex and multifaceted a human mind is, by asserting that a handful of personal traits and goals are all the information one needs in order to judge what's best for that person. It's not outright intrinsicism (since he qualified his assertion with those few traits rather than simply declaring "apartments are always good for all") but it does lean that way, by virtue of WHAT context he dropped. The way for him to solve his error is not to doubt the validity of universal principles, as such, but only to remember the full extent of what a complicated thing a human being is.

 

I concretized what "context" and "preferences" meant here because the earlier responses to him would seem to imply subjectivism (rationally!) - IF one hadn't taken part in those threads, a few years ago, which made the issue so clear to me (and which DW and yourself saw but Epistemologue obviously didn't). I'll start giving out links to them once I remember what the Hell they were called.

 

On 4/26/2017 at 7:35 AM, StrictlyLogical said:

Others make that mistake but you are better than that!  :)

It's never automatic but I do try to be. Thank you.

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  • 7 months later...

When I was young (now 67) I worked very hard to afford to live. From my first job at 16 I was required to pay my parents $25.00 a week for my food and shelter ( I was making only $45 a week back then). My father was on Social Security which I did nit begrudge him, he earned it by his own hard work. When I volunteered for Vietnam at 18 the Air Force payed me only $400 a month. I sent $100.00 home every moth for three years to be able to afford my own car and apartment. It was hard but I stuck to it. When I first came home and delayed marriage until I was 27 (having saved a 20 percent down payment on my first home,(  it made me and my new wife pennyless but nonetheless that made us a "property owner" to which we were emensley  proud. Time went on and gaining a BA at a predigious Big Est College, I could not find a decent paying job that was worth the energy and work I put in my college studies. Still, I saved what I could and after ten years bought a second bigger home in Florida (originally from R.I.) hopping for a better life. It didn't. My wife and I could not afford to live gracefully at all (everyone was paying minimum wage in Florida no matter what your education level) Still, every time I was knocked down by business closings or lay-offs I persisted knowing that my unfortunate position in life was nothing personal, it was just the way things were. I never gave up and I never gave in. Finally my last two jobs in my career (the last 20 years of my working life) I found that my knowledge and business savey was worth money -lots of money. The last seven years before I retired I was making 50K+(I understand that same job now, everything being equal is now worth 75K+ per year or more) It was a long climb but I never gave up. Why am I writing this: well young people today are marked with an intense fatalism. I've heard many a young person that are frustrated by their low income (especially college grads) but are not willing to put any time or effort in it. They usually tell me (para-phasing) "Whats the use, I'll never own my own car, home etc". That is not true. I did it. If I can anyone can. It may take a long range view but you will get there. And don't begrudge seniors for receiving social security. Most money they made when young was to bring you up so you would never know the pain of hunger or lack of shelter. I know you guys can't see a future that is worth living but it is there, just grab hold of it and don't give up. You  will find one or two that will help put you on the right path. It may not happen today, tomorrow, next week or next year but if you are consistant , someone will recognize your talent. Angry are you are now, I was too in my younger days was very angry (even to the point of joining the S.D.S) but I stood tall in defiance against the bastards that I felt were  "holding me down" and swore that someday,someday I would look back at laugh at them all. That time has come for me, it will for you too..

Edited by Collectivist
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