Fo Shizzle Wrote:I contend that there will be far fewer poor due to an unhindered free market. Without regulation people would be free to work.."untaxed" and be allowed to spend their income any way they wish. Much more disposable income would be available to everyone...and..since a free market monetary system(that would be based on assets, not promises) and could not be inflated..the poor would benefit through actual value of their currency.
Landlords could certainly decide to not maintain their structures. But what if by the lack of maintance and sanitation, a tenant is harmed? Would the landlord not be liable for damages? Would it not be in his best intrest to maintain a safe structure? What if the building collasped due to his neglegence and damaged adjacent structures? Would he not be liable for those damages also?...My point is that failure to maintain your property would be at your own risk.
If you contract with someone and they do not live up to the contract...what do you do?....You take them to arbitration.
The same thing would occur with your police example...If the protection agency that you contracted with broke the contract...they would be libel for damages...It simply would not be in the business intrest of these contractors to do shoddy work.
One thing you mention...I totally agree with..."When ever you place societal power in the hands of the few it rarely ends up well."
Our current system of government totally backs up your assertion.
That's all fine and dandy if everyone is ethical and is gracious to the renting class. People desire power. It's been that way for thousands of years. If you put a class of people in charge of the well-being of others (their housing, their safety, their infrastructure), haven't you, in essence, created a government supporting the poor? Aren't these poor people having to pay this "government"? The rich people are now paying for all the infrastructure, police, fire, etc. and the poor are relying upon them.
As for being liable for damages, who would they be liable to? Are they going to a commercial judge? Wouldn't the judge be swayed, at times, by the party who paid him the most money?
If you have enough money, you could buy your own community and become the dictator of it with no one really to stop you. If you get enough of this monopolization of communities, you get a bunch of dictator-run communities. Then, this free market system breaks down. People can only live in these communities run by a few, where the few can squeeze the money right out of you to enrich their own pockets, because that's what some people tend to do. In this scenario, the world has reverted to medieval Europe, back to a type of feudal system.
Now that was just one possibility. The problem that is deeply ingrained in a free market system is that not everyone has the same wealth. There are the poor, who you said would have to depend on the wealthy for protection, housing, etc., and you have a middle class, who would just probably own their homes and could afford some modest things, and you have the extremely wealthy, who would be able to "own" people by controlling their housing, protection, etc. Eventually the gap between the wealthy and the poor would become a wide chasm because of economic turbulence, eliminating any way for the poor to work through the caste system. Some of the middle class would make poor business decisions and would slip into the poor class; some would make excellent decisions and would be able to buy other houses for the poor to rent, becoming part of the elite class.