1. Note none of these Communists are talking about cutting back on property, income, or sales taxes on ‘necessary’ items like food. Obviously the government needs to keep running.

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2. I was in the same boat myself once, renting out a former residence for the mortgage money. I finally sold the place at a loss and counted myself lucky.

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3. Already calling for the liquidation of the kulaks, yup. Happens every time.
   The missus has been talking about investing in rental properties, and this kind of thing (plus the work involved in managing such investments) has me very leery.

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4. In Soviet Russia, after the great revolution, land was taking away from the wealthy and given to the former surfs. They suddenly had land and it was theirs to care for and to use as they pleased.

   It was the great equalization.

   10 years later it wasn’t equal anymore. Some of those former surfs had turned the land they were given into productive farms. They had cows and were doing “well” by the standards of the community. Other former surfs had not fared as well. Either because they didn’t work the land as well, or didn’t know what to do, or just because the land was “bad”. (Amazingly enough, there are more than a few documented cases where the “bad” land was surrounded by”good” land and “good” land that was surrounded by “bad” land.)

   The people looked at how horribly unfair this was. So they decided that the successful farmers were “bad” people and took the land from them and redistributed it.

   It is the case that these parasites always believe that anybody that is doing better than they are MUST be doing it at the expense of somebody else.

   I do a little game design. I was asked to help do some game balancing in the economics of a game. The owner of the game was a well indoctrinated Marxist sort of person.

   The in game economy allowed players to create things. But the in game assigned value of the created things was exactly equal to the value of the goods that went into creating that item. I.e. A sword required 2 units of steel and 1 unit of jewels and 1 unit of wood. It consumed 2 units of coal. When a character finished making the sword, the value of the sword was exactly the same as 2 steel+1 jewel + 1 wood. I.e. NO profit possible.

   In addition there was no ability for the player character to get value by being better at the skill.

   The owner was trying to manipulate the economy by doing things like: “Well, I KNOW that a sword is worth more than X, so I’ll make the required ingredients more so that the sword is worth more when created. Thus you ended up with things like a sword requiring 20 lbs of steel.

   She, as a lawyer, never ever figured out that economy is not a fixed pie. And that people add value to a thing by their efforts.

   A skilled baker can turn flour, milk, eggs, sugar and apples into a wonderful tart. An unskilled person will turn those same things into garbage that the dogs won’t eat.

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   1. “But the in game assigned value of the created things was exactly equal to the value of the goods that went into creating that item.”
      Which is to say, the value of labor, skilled or otherwise, is zero. Workers are worthless!
      Our salaried professional management class seems to hold this belief, as I saw during my stint in Corporateland. Employees were fixed costs, so their time was worth nothing, and it made total sense to save money by taking engineers’ time away from engineering projects to petition Management for basic office supplies. Hey, pencils cost real money!
      Likewise, politicians think it perfectly reasonable to have commoners spend their time sorting their trash for “recycling” or whatever the fashionable Cause is at the moment. It’s not like their time is worth anything, right?

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      1. It isn’t that it does not cost anything. It is that it doesn’t cost anything extra. If you want to consider the COST of computers to corporate culture, consider the fact that we now have managers, that can barely spell, barely type and have no idea what a formal greeting looks like typing multiple correspondences per day.

         So a person getting six figures per year is spending 20% of their time writing email and documentation and all the rest of the writing we do instead of somebody from the secretarial pool at 20K/year.

         And the quality is worse.

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      2. “Which is to say, the value of labor, skilled or otherwise, is zero. Workers are worthless!
         Our salaried professional management class seems to hold this belief, as I saw during my stint in Corporateland. ”

         Betcha your attorney associate thought HER timre and labor were mighty valuable, amirite?

         Once again, “Our Betters” reveal their hypocrisy. THEIR time is VALUABLE! because (reasons) (“Mr. Weinstein, call your office!”). YOUR time adds nothing except expense to the final product.

         I read, several nursing shortages ago, about a director of nursing who told a nurse, “I can replace you with a trained monkey”.

         Contemplate that.

         Just like the plumber, like the electrician, so, to, as an RN, as a midlevel, I have only my time and skill to sell. If that is un valued, then I am left with no income.

         Isn’t it odd that the folks who do not manipulate anything, who strictly earn income from the computer or the telephone, are still working, but the plumbers, the electricians, and so forth, are idled?

         And, BTW, the twit who counseled the retired homeowner/landlord to “get a real job”: so, therefore, it is safe to assume that the twit in question will never be medically retired after a stroke of injury, will never “age out”, and become too elderly to work on the line?

         Assholes. (spit!)

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         1. You see this in engineering all the time. Experienced engineer gets laid off and replaced with a new hire or H1B Visa worker. Then quality goes to shit and people wonder why.

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            1. “Experienced engineer gets laid off and replaced with a new hire or H1B Visa worker.”
               I’ve seen that one… but I also saw the variation in which Management thought it wise to lay off the engineering support staff (all three members of it), so the high-paid engineers spent a lot of their time doing the support jobs, badly. Qualifying vendors, managing CAD libraries, and so on, generally without coordinating their efforts nor being familiar with the company’s standards for such things.

               1. And part of that is that skill sets do not transfer. There is the “Peter Principle” which states that a person is prompted from the job they are good at until they reach a job which they are not good at.

                  There is an inverse skill set. The fact that I’m good at CAD doesn’t mean I’m good a making those things that my CAD represents. That is a different skill set.

                  Back in the late 70’s women coming out of High School were actively avoiding any class that could slide them in to the “receptionist” “Secretary” slot. But the few times where I had access to a secretary or “technical assistant” they were worth their weight in gold. Being able to say “I need a letter to such and such about such and such” and the secretary asking four questions. 20 minutes later there is a letter in front of me for my approval.

                  In the same way, the receptionist that answered the phone, handled walk ins, did the bank run and post office run was worth it to me, because that was time I was working and not walking around.

                  In all cases those people did their jobs much better than I did when I was doing it.

                  I remember doing my own books for about a year, then hiring a part time book keeper to come in twice a week to keep up on the books. At the end of the first morning they came to me and said “Done. And I don’t need to come back except maybe twice per month.” They did in 3 hours would I had already spent days at.

                  Or the secretary that I hired on a part time basis to organize the filing and paper work. And she was bored after the first hour because she had done everything.

                  I just wasn’t as good at those things as those experts were.

                  But Management never sees the cost of having an expensive person do things badly that a lower cost person could do well.

                  If you are going to sweep floors, be the best damn floor sweeper you can.

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   2. “Serfs”

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      1. Thanks. It didn’t look right and I should have double checked.

5. I would bet that every single person responding does not actually have any real investments, likely does not own their own home, and only has themselves to feed.

   Gotta love the “get an essential job” crap as well. Like suddenly everyone is capable of doing every job ever conceived. Just another “learn to code.” statement that demonstrates clearly how clueless the speaker really is.

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   1. Trump should declare “socialist helicopter altimeter drop test specialists” essential workers.

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6. Rather than lose my entire savings selling my house at a loss, I rented it out for the cost of my mortgage. I lost money on my rental because one year I had to replace the water heater and the other I had to replace the garage door opener.

   Renting out for the cost of the mortgage payment and taxes (or maybe slightly more, to cover repairs and upkeep) is a common practice. You still took a loss, but I’m assuming much less of a loss than if you tried to sell it during a depressed market glutted with foreclosures and short sales.

   Because you rented a property you owned, Ilhan & Ilk are calling you a parasite, but consider:

   If you were responsible and built up a good credit record, your mortgage payment would have been relatively lower, plus there was no middle-man property manager, which also helps keep costs down. So your renter was likely getting a nicer property at a much lower rent payment than he would from someone else.

   But somehow you’re the parasite?

   If they believe that any benefit you get comes at the expense of someone else, then I guess they’re upset that your loss on your rented property — which benefited someone else — came at the cost of some other parasite’s landlord’s higher rent for an inferior property?

   There’s literally no winning with these people. You can do the responsible thing, build yourself and your family up and benefit others, and they’ll call you a parasite and do everything they can to tear you down. Or, you can actually be a parasite on society, and they’ll praise you for being a “good citizen” doing the “right thing”…

   … right up until they have you executed for consuming without producing (a.k.a. being a parasite).

   As LawDog is prone to saying, “The back of my hand to all of them!”

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