ON MONDAY morning, veteran's day, everyone on the street where i live set out their garbage, evidently forgetting that although our small town has trash pick up twice a week, which is almost unheard of these days, it does not have service on holidays, any holidays.
So, by monday evening everyone had replaced their trash in their garages, to await thursday's regular pick up. Everyone, that is, except the people who live across the street on the corner, who, i reflected, are the only people on the block who rent.
So the renter's trash sat on the street for four days, and by the time thursday morning rolled around, neighborhood cats had ripped open their garbage bags, and had spilled their garbage all over their yard and out into the street.
I, or anyone else living around here, could have told them this would happen, but my guess is, they wouldn't have listened. After all, they're americans.
Plato was a utopian socialist, but his prize pupil, aristotle, was very definitely an advocate of provate property, making his well known comment "that which is owned by everyone is cared for by no one".
Aristotle had a point, What he said rings true today, if you loook around most american communities. Public and rental properties are always the least maintained. And that's a blow to us socialists. Of course, socialism need not include the abolition of private property.
So maybe home ownership should be universal, or, perhaps we should invent something called "renter's equity", in which renting comes to be more of an investment, less of a temporary arrangement. Something similar to a lease to buy arrangement, with the added feature that a renter obtains the right to participate in the future sale of the property, and to benefit, to some extent, from it.
Of course, as soon as you compromise an owner's right to rent his property outright, the free marketeers will be out in force. That is, until they have to drive across town , over to the other side of the tracks, and clean up garbage.
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