that is true and your point is well taken. i think the crux of my point is that its out of scale with what i feel is fair. that is, the risks do not seem big enough to warrant the returns. i get that the returns are determined by the market, but i dont think thats a compelling argument in favor of fairness.
Up voted for admitting it violates a perception of fairness - can't argue with that! To put it in stark perspective where I agree with your sentiment, if not in policy perhaps, note how rental prices skyrocketed in the depressed town of Williston, ND when oil was found and it became a boom town. These landlords are siphoning off an infuriating amount of this boon while adding little to no net new value for luck of having bought and held onto their deeds in that town which not long ago had been worth little. One might even argue that the men gainfully employed in oil extraction are better tenants than the people who scrape by in life when the town was depressed. But, even then, thesee landlords held out when the property was worth little; they took risk to maintain land and provide shelter when the town's prospects were dim rather than buy bonds, perhaps, or something else better diversified and with less risk than real estate.
i think thats a very simple and flawed way of thinking about it. it sounds like all you are using to determine if someone deserves something is if it is legal- the problem is your idea of "deserve" changes when the laws change. that seems silly.
hardly, obviously there is a difference between what is "legal" via a governing body and "natural law" or "right and wrong". I would agree with you that not everything that is "legal" is "right".
but in this case if I take on the risk of investing in real property, and of the risks that comes with that, then I deserve fair market rent on that property. and if over decades I accumulate multiple properties that produce in your opinion large amounts of income then I deserve that, too. and if I leave these properties to my descendents, then there's nothing inherently wrong with them owning those properties and getting that income, is there?
using your logic, you could also ask the question if people who cash out in IPOs "deserve" to become millionaires overnight.
correct, i think in lots of cases, including several i have first hand experience with, many people didn't deserve to become millionaires overnight that did. also, people who hit the lottery buying domain names in the early 90's... same thing. do we really think those people deserved millions, in anything other than the most technical sense of the word?
i understand your argument about compensating for risk, it's not dumb and not outrageous, but i'd like to challenge it to some degree. hopefully it's fair to assume that risk is simply the financial risk, i.e. how much you could lose, and at what probability? in that case, would it be fair to say that any positive expected value investment would result in undeserved profits? in other words, wouldn't there be cases where the rewards outweighed the risks?
if we accept that narrow definition of "deserve", then i guess it would be my job to argue that the three categories i mentioned show an imbalance. or course, knowing true risks is impossible, but you might be able to make a pretty good case in some instances. but i really dont know enough to do that.
but, i think that formulation doesn't really fully resonate with the way most people intuitively judge desert.
six people ante 200k each, then roll a die. who ever had the number that is rolled takes all the money. does the winner deserve the money more than the losers? in that example, sure, i think most people would agree, its a game of chance and they all entered willingly. did he "earn" it? ehhh, i guess?
now what if six people go off and build houses for a year. at the end of that year, they get paid proportion of the sum of all houses value based how many sq feet of house they personally made? someone might build a really shitty but huge house. would they deserve their pay? "but the rules were pay based on sq ft"... well, sure, but the spirit of the rules? probably the spirit is to pay people based effort, skill and product, so as to incentivize them. so maybe a flaw in the incentives then? i realize this is meandering from my original point... but i think its on us to do the right thing, not rules to force us to. ok, anyway... i think in this case most people would probably say this person doesn't deserve all the money because the house they built is so shitty, and they just found a loophole and exploited it.
that is all just a very long winded way of saying that i think desert is based on more than explicit contracts.
