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Gumshoe
Gumshoe

in reply to spindash64

The first picture is Karl Marx. Most modern leftists/socialists (represented by the woman) who admire Marx hate landlords. From an ideological perspective, Marxists are generally against people using investments in private property to earn money. They think all property that generates wealth should be owned collectively, and that people who make money from owning property are basically parasites. More practically, they're usually living in expensive cities and don't like the rent being, high, and tend to think the reason for it being high is landlords are greedy, rather than because housing supply is limited.

The bottom depicts Henry George. Georgism is a much more liberal economic philosophy that has no problem with people owning property and making money from it, but which believes that land specifically is given most of its value not from the person who owns it but from the community surrounding it, so that community should be given the benefits of that value, and that a large Land Value Tax would solve this problem, while also reducing the need for other taxes like income and sales taxes.

It's still generally not good for landlords, because they will lose out on the skewed benefits they receive from what is usually a very restricted market, but it's doing it using free-market principles instead of nationalisation, so its far more popular with libertarians and economists than it is with socialists.

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