It's alright, Rand was wrong about that statement just like she was wrong about virtually everything she said.

paying people less than the money you make from their work also isn't theft

Why would someone agree to sell their labor for less than it's worth

Why don't the underpaid employees simply buy enough stock to sway company policy

I love them

When I go for a walk, the car-based infrastructure makes everything a nuisance until I get on a trail some distance from where I live. Turns out politics is everywhere.

He's literally singing about being part of a downtrodden underclass,

He's literally stealing valor to pander to poor people, and a specific subset given the "welfare queen" rhetoric.

It’s all part of how society works.

I said should, not does.

But he didn’t steal profits.

Back then, he used a considerable amount of money to run at a loss. Nowadays, he does steal a remarkable level of profits in the unpaid wages of the employees who keep winding up in the news for being forced to piss in bottles or drive to work in a hurricane.

I've seen no shortage of people reselling water bottles with water in them (common especially in places with lots of tourists) but just selling the fucking bottles?

Also, the sex pest business is bad and should be condemned but would hardly give carte-blanche for extrajudicial torture.

Did you just miss that the entire argument rests on unimproved land? By definition a home is on improved land.

Smith accounts for both, but says rent is not based on improvement of land but on the highest level of rent the tenant can sustain. Improvement of land would be expected to raise that amount, but unimproved land would still have a cost all the same. It's not the main element, though I think it actually does bear some relevance to the issue of monopoly since one could rent unimproved land for the purpose of housing and get takers, as it would provide the "service" of protecting from a large part of police violence.

Besides I really don't care what smith or anyone else says- I'm not giving you the things I've paid for for free. If you want to use it- you can make an offer. But I'm not evil for not giving you something I worked for. You are for wanting it from me for free.

I have already emphatically said that I'm speaking on a systemic level because hyper-individualized solutions to systemic problems simply aren't useful, so bringing it back to personal incredulity and your land isn't useful. I have no problem with you being compensated for the labor that you put in or even the labor that you can plausibly say you managed, you're making many assumptions about my stance. The right to personally own the land itself, however, does not have so strong a basis in liberal philosophy (you can see Paine argue against this in many later works).

But really, pre-Covid the numbers were something like 600,000 homeless a night and 18,600,000 empty housing units. I don't care to moralize about landlords, I just don't want people to be homeless due to anything other than wanting to be homeless (which makes up a tiny minority, barring "itinerant" homeless who should also be sheltered). Maybe public funds buy your properties off of you, or maybe you are not directly affected because there are so many extra units that only a small proportion are relevant. I don't care, I just don't want people to die of exposure.

Naturally, if you don't have your properties bought off to start with, that will drastically undercut the amount of rent you can ask for for your properties simply because there will already be a supply for people who need it, making your service more of a luxury because it no longer has the force of monopoly behind it, but you are all for voluntary agreements, so that shouldn't represent a problem to you if people simply choose not to rent out your units and instead they sit empty, right?

You mean bouncing?

It included the phrase "jew york times"