As you know, if investors weren't hungry for real estate then home building would be reduced by approximately the amount the investors are demanding so all this increase in demand and therefore increase in supply is really doing is making real estate more liquid (which of course is a good thing for people who own their own homes).

I know realtors have tried their hardest to convince people that real estate is some finite resource, but there is no truth to that. Over the last few thousands of years the amount of livable space in the world has more than doubled as explores took to boats to find new lands, doubled again when some genius invented the idea of having two floors on one plot of land, grew by 50% when some other genius invented basements and since then we came up with the idea of sky scrappers and building livable structures over (and even in) water which make livable space close enough to infinite so we don't have to look at livable space as rare for at least the next ~54,368 years.

Claiming the lack of housing is caused by capitalism is a typical leftwing way to basically attribute to capitalism what THEIR PREFERRED POLICIES ALLOW and CAUSE.

In actual capitalism you can do anything you want on your land. Property rights are absolute. People want to maximize profit.

Houses get built, if anything there is overbuilding because of the economic cycle.

In regulatory nightmares, IE variant of leftism where the states takes property rights away from owner of the land and decides for them, you can have undersupply everytime the state, for any reason, decides to allow less building than what the market would clear at.

Do capitalists (actually all rational people) act inside that (or any other) system to maximize their utility? Of course they do.

But if land development regulation IS ILLEGAL, like in actual free for all capitalism, you can't have lack of housing.

Zoning as a concept should be unconstitutional, no government should have any saying on what you build on your land full stop, housing would be solved.

Awful. Numerous examples of people building atrociously on their land, undermining the structural integrity of their neighbours and erecting an eyesore blocking out their sunlight and ruining the view.

Maybe the inhabitants of planet Xog that you must be talking about are different to Earthlings?

All of your posts make you sound like someone who's just read Rand for the first time.

This is a very naive view of the law, especially Constitutional law. There is a often a reasonably persuasive argument in favor of each side. You should think of SCOTUS decisions in the following way. There are a range of opinions that would pass the red face test. The opinion of each justice will fall within that range. Opinions outside that range are patently contrary to law or illogical.

Within that range, each justice will be influenced to varying degrees by the following factors, in no particular order: (i) the justice's organizing principle for interpreting the Constitution; (ii) the persuasiveness of the advocacy for a particular result within the acceptable range; (iii) the judge's political leanings; and (iv) practical considerations (i.e., what will the consequences be in the real world if the justice's opinion carries the day).

(i) and (iii) are correlated because a particular justice often adopts an organizing principle that is more likely to yield results that align with the justice's politics. In other words, it is no coincidence that Gorsuch chose the organizing principles that he did.

Some judges understand that they are an absolute power and they can decide literally anything.

They can decide the very clear word x actually meant y and you have to behave according to their decisions.

That's the case of the Italian supreme court that simply decided the word citizen, when applied to all rights (except voting rights) meant "anyone physically in the country" for human and positive rights , in our constitution.

I mean roe v Wade was about judges explicitly finding "in the penumbra of the constitution" a right that no one ever thought was there so... There is no red face test for the American jurisprudential left.

Ror vs Wade decision was such an abuse of judicial power that anything goes now.

And I talk as someone who thinks that first trimester abortion should be an actual constitutional right

Unless you are masochist, you shouldn't be rereading any Ayn Rand novels. Whether you admire or despise her politics, she indisputably was a terrible writer.

Roe was grounded in an implicit right to privacy that had been recognized in many SCOTUS decisions that preceded Roe. You can agree or disagree that there is an implicit right to privacy in the Constitution, but that wasn't an invention of Justice Blackmun.

A better criticism of Roe would be that the opinion itself, which focused on viability and gave clear guidelines for how to weigh the interests during each trimester of a pregnancy, was overly prescriptive and legislative.

Regardless of what you want to think about Roe, it still seems reasonable to think that the framers would be ok with some sort of right to privacy. If Roe was the wrong place to discover it then ok but it's still something worth discovering.

A right to privacy from government intrusion is in the 4th amendment (no unreasonable search and seizure), not on the framers minds, and it has absolutely nothing to do with body autonomy (unfortunately).

Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), confirming a vaccine mandate by a state was constitutional, tells you that.

The FDA existence tells you there is no body autonomy right in the federal constitution.

And yes there can be no constitutional right to abortion if there is a constitutional right for states to mandate any medical procedure (including vaccines).

It's either you have body autonomy rights or you don't.

Currently, very clearly and transparently, on the USA you don't.

There is no connection of any kind from a right to privacy to abortion rights, because abortion is about when the fetus becomes something sufficiently akin to human life to gain rights of its own.

The privacy -> abortion connection was absurd and completely made up to begin with.

To clarify why privacy has absolutely nothing to do with abortion, let's take Switzerland, one of the few (only?) Countries to actually explicitly have privacy rights in the constitution.

Abortion was criminalized until very recently at all stages and that was considered by everyone absolutely constitutional, not even a hint it ever had anything to do with privacy

That's not what the attacks on "leftist lawyers" is about, which is the far right pushing to get European countries to withdraw from long-standing Human Rights legislation because those wretched "leftist lawyers" insist on defending people's rights to asylum and "leftist judges" apply existing legislation correctly.

If it wasn't for all these pesky establishment "leftists" we could just ignore all the laws we don't like.

No.

I already mentioned why i used the expression leftist judges to refer to italian supreme court decisions.

The italian constitution is full of positive rights unlike liberal anglo constitutions. Positive rights aren't , unlike normal constitutional rights, a list of things the government can't do to you no matter what. They are rather a list of things you are owed from other people resources, with the state seen as the agent that has to fulfill that obligation.

Now who does those positive rights apply to? the constitution is very clear and uses the word "citizen" (cittadino) many many times when listing those positive rights. In some cases instead it uses individual or person.

First example (i use the official english translation)

Article 3
All citizens shall have equal social dignity and
shall be equal before the law, without distinction
of gender, race, language, religion, political
opinion, personal and social conditions.
It shall be the duty of the Republic to remove
those obstacles of an economic or social nature
which constrain the freedom and equality of
citizens, thereby impeding the full development of
the human person and the effective participation
of all workers in the political, economic and social
organisation of the country

This is a very clear, positive right to redistributive welfare correct? and very clearly strictly limited to citizens. So people physically in Italy who aren't citizens don't have any constitutional right to any form of welfare, under any reasonable reading of the constitution. It's transparent, it's only for citizens. Then there is the bizzarre marxist right to "workers" but let's not discuss this now.

Normal law can obviously decide to cover non citizens as well, no doubt. But if parliament changes those laws, the removal of welfare for non citizens cannot be considered unconstitutional under article 3.

(the word citizen got expanded to citizen of any european union nation because of a treaty, but that's covered constitutionally so that's correct)

So what happened? ultra-radical maniacal leftist judges decided that the word citizen means immigrant non citizens as well. A judicial coup d'etat (on that topic), they completly warped the very transparent text.

So when local governments tried to only give public housing and/or help for rent to actual italian (or EU) citizens in poor conditions, to fulfill their constitutional duties, the court said no , you have to give them to immigrants as well. And given immigrants are poorer and with more children, nowadays almost all public/subsidized housing in the center-north is occupied my immigrants.

Public housing to non citizen immigrants is just an example but there are many others welfare related.

I don't know why you think in this case (and in all other welfare related cases) "leftist judges just applied the law correctly".

Then , to keep going, when you have several conflicting positive rights, you have to make impossible choices.

Why conflicting? because if i owe you housing, food, healthcare, but also jobs, freedom of association, savings (there is an explicit right to "protection of savings" in the constitution) and so on, resources being scarce and tradeoffs existing, it means you necessarily have to decide which rights come first (and crucially the constitution doesn't tell you that).

So basically the court OPINION on that, on which rights come first and with how much strength, determines what you can do as a parliament or a government.

Take covid restrictions: we have a positive right "to health", and a negative right to economic freedom, freedom of association and so on.

It's just a literal matter of opinions, not legal one rather purely political ones, how much you can restrict freedom to try to protect the positive right to health.

So it means any lockdown or NPI mandate can either be fully unconstitutional, of absolutely constitutional, purely and exclusively depending on the political preferences of the judges, as the constitution literally can't answer that question, being a positive right incompatible with negative rights (you can never guarantee both in full).

Tell me again judges aren't political, when their choices are necessarily so.

“the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump and his advisers have discussed constructing a network of mass deportation camps.

Trump isn’t worried about the dark spectacle of mass deportation camps — they’re part of the point.
As Trump has deployed racist and fascistic rhetoric about how migrants
are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he’s priming the public to expect a
deportation regime that treats migrants as subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-...024-rcna139841

The people being deported deserve to be treated well. Food, water and shelter in decent living conditions while they are in fact waiting to be deported. If the logistics dictate that camps need to be set up, then that's what needs to happen.

There should also be processes where some of these people are allowed to stay. I have zero doubt that among the mass migrants there are potentially "good citizens" that will add to our way of life.

Other than that, I am on board. The media will make it look horrible but what else are we supposed to do? At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and say "sorry, we are fully booked."

USA ranks 186 in population density.

unbelievable

yes, let's send them to Alaska and Wyoming.

There are very valid reasons why those states are empty.

you seem to oddly think that housing and social services are uniformly spread on equal measures throughout the globe

you're thinking with you heart and it shows when you bring up nonsensical data points like this

Seems like all of the best latinos have lived in the US and decided it sucks and went back home. Or they still want to go because they haven't learned that yet.

it's just such a stupid statement to make

Even in the parts of the US that aren't -30F for half the year, there is still lots of space.

"sorry, we're fully booked" is such a well thought out and supported position.