Then that sounds like something specific to California. In most other places, your property tax can go up any time, whenever the county decides to re-assess.

That's great if you're a big bank. If you're an individual, good luck getting a 0% loan on anything besides perhaps a car.

That's why deposit insurance (FDIC) exists.

I'm not giving the government "approval" for anything. I'm just pointing out that it's hypocritical for them to advocate for their citizens to act a certain way, and then not having policies which reflect this (and instead which seem to work against it). It's in their power to make policies which make it much easier for citizens to follow their advice.

It sounds like you really don't understand capitalism very well. Investing in rental properties is little different from investing in shares in a corporation. You have risk and reward. There's more work in being a landlord, and somewhat less risk, but it's definitely not zero. Have you totally forgotten about the 2008 crash and all the real estate investors who lost their shirts there? You have to be a complete moron if you think that real estate is risk-free. And the way things are going now with rents spiraling higher, another crash could be looming, and again real estate investors could lose out.

I don't know where the hell you live that renting costs more than buying, that's simply not true

Then you've obviously never rented a house. Renting a house ALWAYS costs more; how else would your landlord pay the mortgage otherwise? Perhaps if he bought it when it was much cheaper, but even then usually rents go up to match current house valuations, regardless of what the sale price was. The only exception is if you get really lucky and your landlord doesn't feel like raising your rent and you've had it locked in for some time while house values have risen.

I want a free market economy without the distortions imposed by rent / interest / capitalism.

You can't build big projects without capital, and you can't borrow money without interest (who's going to loan money to you for free, unless it's a family member?). Your ideas make no sense, and I'm not going to toil away at trying to find your ramblings elsewhere. You sound little different from a Marxist: some nice-sounding words but no substance behind them and no actual ideas for a system which would work in practice.

That's an excellent point about the "plebes" which I didn't think of, and I'm sure it's absolutely true. It's being used ostensibly to make sure they'll get paid, but probably more importantly because they want to discriminate against lower-class people; if they have too many lower-class people move in, other residents will think it's turning into a "ghetto", and move out, and then they'll lose a lot of money, have a hard time keeping units rented, and have to lower their rent.

I recently had an experience with this with a hotel; I've had to stay in some hotel rooms lately for work, and I got one thinking it looked good enough, and was just a bit cheaper than the other chain I had been to previously. Well the building wasn't a complete trash heap, but that small difference in price apparently resulted in a very big difference in clientele, even compared to competing hotels nearby. The hotel lobby reeked of smoke, my "non-smoking" room smelled, and the guests were obviously of a very different socioeconomic class than I'm used to, and they made a lot of noise too. It was really eye-opening how big a difference there can be with just a relatively small difference in price (~15-25%). And this was still a good bit above the prices at places like Howard Johnson and Super 8; I can only imagine what those places must be like. Anyway, I'll be more careful in the future about booking rooms online and not just going by the photos and amenities list, which looked totally comparable to the higher-priced place I went to the next night.

Two problems with your idea:

1) "unearned income": this is a hallmark of capitalism. You can't have capitalism without it; the entire idea behind investing is that you put money into something, sit around and do little or nothing (besides watch and manage it), and later you can cash out and have more money than you put in. The whole reason this is exists is so that people can pool their money for bigger projects than one person can afford alone. Corporations exist this way; they wouldn't exist without investment and "unearned income" (except maybe employee-owned corporations, but these are rare). Without investment, you wouldn't have big companies with billions of dollars in assets, doing things like producing the computer you're using to read this. An employee-owned company would not have the capital to build a $5B fab to make a microprocessor.

2) rent vs. buy: what do you propose people do if they're not in a position to purchase a home? A lot of renting happens not because people can't afford a house (rent, after all, is usually higher than a mortgage payment, though in the case of small apartments there's probably no condos that small/cheap available), but because they don't plan to stay long enough to make it worth it. I'm in the boat myself. I have the income to buy a house, but I don't really want to stay where I am for 30 years, or even 15 or 10. Buying a house carries a lot of overhead costs (such as 6% realtor's commission, plus a bunch of legal fees), making it a poor financial choice to do so unless you're planning to stay a certain amount of time, which varies with prevailing rents and interest rates. And of course, at the low end, people who can only afford an efficiency apartment are certainly in no position to purchase a home. Apartment communities can offer these units cheaply because they take advantage of economies of scale, which don't exist with individually-owned units.

If you have a better system, let's hear it. If it resembles what the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations had, well, they tried it and it didn't work.

Trusting the all-powerful Invisible Hand isn't the answer, and obviously neither is enacting poorly thought-out laws. There's other things the government can or could have done. For instance, they could have not bailed out the banksters in 2008, and instead forced the failing banks to be broken up and their loans expunged (which would have cost investors dearly, but too bad).

Huh? I never said anything about it being a requirement; the parent explicitly used the word "recommends" after all. Obviously, it's just one of those PSA-type things, and it does make good sense too, I'm just pointing out how it's somewhat useless since the government also doesn't enact any policies to help people follow this advice, and instead actually has policies which make it more difficult for people to do so (such as bailing out the lenders).

That's called "investing", and is an integral part of capitalism. It's not much different than investing in a company and not actually working there.

The other thing you're missing is how much time and effort goes into renting. Sure, a good amount of the time you can ignore it, but when the plumbing gets clogged or something breaks, as the landlord you're on-call at all hours to fix it, and you have to fix it at your own expense (except for this new phenomenon I'm seeing in rental properties where there's a "deductible" for repairs, but that's another subject). Also, as an investment, there's no guarantee of a return. The 2008 real estate meltdown should have taught you that: lots of rental property owners lost their properties (and all the money they invested in them) to foreclosure back then.

The Internet has pretty much ruined everything from vacations to concerts to you name it. Find a nice restaurant you like? Some popular idiot posts it to a foodie group and now it's so crowded is not worth going to. Good vacation spot? Now the whole world competes with you for it and because of that it's not worth having anymore due to crowding.

"No one goes there any more. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra

I love how the government recommends this, but then does absolutely nothing to make sure affordable housing actually exists for most people so that they can follow this advice.

No, it doesn't. I never said it did.

One thing I've heard a lot about mental illnesses is that you can't treat them very well unless the person believes and understands they have a problem. Otherwise, counseling is completely ineffective, and medication doesn't work either unless you can somehow force-feed it to them on a regular schedule (something you can only really do if they're institutionalized).

A frequently-cited problem with schizophrenics, for instance, is that they'll take some medication, feel much better, and then decide they're "better" and don't need medicine any more, and stop taking the medication, and then go back to nutty behavior.

Maybe, maybe not. Tenured professors are really hard to fire.