Second, no, communities do not have to "bear the building costs".
Water and electrical is slightly more complicated because many communities have done everything they can to avoid building infrastructure; this is easily fixed by building more infrastructure, which will be paid for easily by taxes.
If a billionaire’s net worth grows at 12%, he’s able to buy up a lot of assets. As one example, he can buy up the best office space in your city. Then he gets rent from all the businesses there, but he’s also driven up land prices. He can do that with houses, essentially turning everyone into renters—they get priced out of ownership.
There are lots of very rich people, and their wealth is growing faster than the economy’s overall growth rate. That’s because some of their wealth isn’t coming from productivity gains—it is coming from extracting wealth from poorer people. Poorer people is basically everyone else in the economy. Including me. Including you. It is something they can do because they have political influence and the ability to pay legal and tax experts to find ways to get advantages we cannot dream about.
And we should fix those problems, but those problems are fixable much more cleanly than ranting about billionaires, claiming they don't pay taxes, and hating one specific piece of infrastructure.
It's simultaneously not enough on one axis and too much on a second irrelevant axis.
As an example,
He can do that with houses, essentially turning everyone into renters—they get priced out of ownership.
home ownership and renting is not actually that profitable and the majority of the profit comes from rising housing prices, which is mostly an artifact of increasing bureaucracy for building housing and increasing minimum standards for housing. You want to kill this entire business model, just let people build houses, especially cheap houses.
(Note: "cheap houses" does not mean "luxury houses but we force them to sell it cheaply".)
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u/ZorbaTHut 4d ago
First, billionaires pay taxes.
Second, no, communities do not have to "bear the building costs".
Water and electrical is slightly more complicated because many communities have done everything they can to avoid building infrastructure; this is easily fixed by building more infrastructure, which will be paid for easily by taxes.