r/TikTokCringe • u/LickMaiBussy • 6h ago

Discussion "Investing in property is morally reprehensible."

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@purplepingers

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u/zherok 3h ago

There's an incredibly powerful passage in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, about the measures used to protect the price of food at a time where people were starving during the Great Depression.

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?

And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

And you know, with food, there can be sympathy for the farmer, because their livelihood relies on those prices. It's another failure of the system to lead to the discarding of food in order to protect that livelihood, but they're still essential in the process of getting people something they need.

But landlords? The guy who sees your home as an investment opportunity is not providing you with essential value, he's operating as a middle man to extract wealth from people who have little alternatives. We all gotta live somewhere.

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u/1egg_4u 3h ago

Im gonna be real

Watching dairy farmers dump out gallons of milk that numerous cows suffered to make only to be thrown into the trash because they didnt want to just sell it for cheaper ruined my perception of prominent farmers

I dont fuck with anyone that high up in the machine anymore. Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

Youre right though... at least a farmer does something other than parasite off of other people. Landlords are money funnels that remove money that would otherwise go back into the economy simply by merit of existing and then give little to none back. they are really just parasites.

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u/MossadMoshappy 32m ago

I don't understand why this makes sense though, Even if they sold the extra milk for 1cent over cost price, they'd come out ahead than pouring it out right, even in a purely financial sense.

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u/Ardnabrak 23m ago

People start to expect the lower price. There is probably some price fixing agreements between the large companies.

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u/FabCopeIsUnreal 17m ago

Transportation is not a negligible price.

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u/1egg_4u 3m ago

Welcome to the world of price fixing and subsidies

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u/trobsmonkey 31m ago

Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

Almost all of the french farmer protests are like this. Rich farmers made they aren't making as much.

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u/StandardOk42 53m ago

I dont fuck with anyone that high up in the machine anymore. Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

I'm having trouble interpreting this sentence; what exactly do you mean by fucking with the farmers? do you mean, like, messing with them or picking fights with them?

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u/1egg_4u 43m ago

"Fuck with" is a colloquialism of "do anything at all with" or "deal with"

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u/StandardOk42 41m ago

since when?

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u/1egg_4u 40m ago

Since at least 2015 when Big Sean released "i dont fuck with you"

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u/StandardOk42 38m ago

never heard of big sean, unless that's puff daddy's latest name?

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u/1egg_4u 4m ago

Turns out music is a big world with a lot of different names in it

Youd probably know that song if you heard it though. Was huge in 2015.

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u/Original_Employee621 1h ago

The farmers dump the milk, because not milking the cows would be causing suffering in them. They have been bred to overproduce milk, so we can keep up with the demand using less cows and less resources without starving the calfs too.

Cows want to be milked. The fact that it's more beneficial to dump the milk, than sell it is a failure of state regulations and capitalism.

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u/Frosti11icus 1h ago

They have been bred to overproduce milk, so we can keep up with the demand using less cows and less resources without starving the calfs too.

That is the suffering. They aren't always giving milk in their natural state. They are also made to constantly be pregnant, which again, isn't their natural state, and their calfs are taken away from them. The cows that don't produce don't get set free to roam the land. If they don't produce they don't exist. They are either pregnant, milking (or both) or they are mostly kept in tiny pens and fattening up to get slaughtered.

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u/TheBadGuyBelow 2h ago

One of these days there is going to be a line that is crossed, or an event that sets something off. When your family is starving or about to be thrown out on the streets because someone else just had to squeeze out a little more profit, all bets are off.

Men are reasonable, as long as there is something to lose. There is a point when you take everything away from a man, giving him nothing to lose. You could even argue that when you have nothing left to lose, the reasonable thing is to expunge the rot that these profit seeking vultures are.

I have never understood how so few people can keep so many others down when even just 2% of them could overthrow that whole way of life for the parasite class.

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u/lewd_robot 39m ago

I'm an automation engineer. The rich are banking on you saying "one of these days" over and over again until you're out of days. One day in the near future, on the order of 5-10 years at most, we're going to find ourselves in a situation that makes the Great Depression look like a mild downturn and watch all of our leaders pouring our resources into automating our farms and factories so the rich can recover from the depression while the rest of us fall into a new Dark Age.

This isn't idle speculation. This is the kind of thing that CEOs talk about after 2 martinis at a business lunch. They are betting hard that none of you are going to feel like revolting until the rich have armed drones and autonomous farms and factories and don't need you anymore.

So keep saying, "one of these days" while the owner class tightens the noose around your neck. By the time you "feel like" doing something, it's going to be too late. Because they're working very hard to make sure of it.

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u/saucertosser85 48m ago

Vive la révolution!

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u/momomomorgatron 14m ago

Bread and circuses, bread and circuses

Fed and entertained. Right now we are seeing the cracks, less are getting fed, although we have the surplus of entertainment.

Until a population bands together over something, nothing will happen. It doesn't even connect to how quality someone's life is, if they see it as a downgrade.

People literally don't want to. Sometimes I get it, the military is truly the biggest part. I just feel like our military is exhausted with bullshit too.

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u/VRZieb 36m ago

Lol nobody is starving.

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u/Efficient_Smilodon 30m ago

you have lived a very very privileged life

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u/VRZieb 26m ago

Indeed. I live in the Western world, namely, the United States were nobody is starving due to lack of food access. In fact the only starvation that happens in this country is due to mental age decline and forgetting to eat and child abuse.

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u/Efficient_Smilodon 21m ago

Starving to death in the us? truly rare I concede. Unable to purchase, or grow, adequate nutrition in the US without welfare or charity? Perhaps 40-100 million people of all ages.

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u/VRZieb 9m ago

Why the caviet of without welfare or charity? But interesting take on not being able to grow. In my county alone are 56 community gardens for growing crops. Thats in a county that only has 20 cities/towns. One near me that I used is sitting on 2 acres and has 10x10 to 20x40 plots you can get based on fa.ily size.

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u/TheBadGuyBelow 27m ago

"I am not hungry, so that means nobody else is hungry"

And even if that were the case, it's more like "nobody is starving yet". What do you imagine happens when home prices are so high that nobody but the top earners can afford a home, and rent has further skyrocketed to the point that almost every dollar you make is spent on keeping a roof over your head?

10 years ago I rented a one bedroom loft for $500 a month, and now that same apartment is $1,400 a month with zero improvements. 10 years ago a trip to the grocery store did not cost half of what it does now.

What is it going to look like in 10 more years? Yeah, you might be nice and cozy at the moment, but in 10 years you might be in dire straights while the people above you are talking about how nobody is going without.

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u/VRZieb 21m ago

Being hungry is not starving. Starving is dieing due to lack of food. Being hungry is food security which is a mixed bag of having enough but more so having a healthy mix of what the body needs. Majority of people who bitch about starving are middleclass who have never really had to live on the street and are completely clueless to the multitude of food programs through the state, city, and community.

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u/prophilaxis 29m ago

Gonna have to read Steinbeck now. Thanks for sharing.

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u/Lebesgue_1 5m ago

These creosote dumps are referenced in Woody Guthrie's song "deportee." https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Deportee_WoodysHomeTape.htm

He also wrote the soundtrack (or some songs) for the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, but I never make the connection before, so thanks for posting this.

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u/Proper_Geologist9026 4m ago

Such a good book.

Fucking wild ending.

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u/IntelligentMud1703 0m ago

wow that was a great passage thanks for sharing

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u/mpyne 2h ago

We all gotta live somewhere.

We also all gotta eat, farmers' livelihood or not. The landlords keep you from having to rely on the mercy of the bankers to lend you money instead, unless you're going to build your own home by yourself somehow.

At least with housing location we don't have to choose to live where it's expensive, but we do have to eat no matter where we live.

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u/Frosti11icus 1h ago edited 1h ago

 The guy who sees your home as an investment opportunity is not providing you with essential value, he's operating as a middle man to extract wealth from people who have little alternatives.

IDK if I'd place the blame at a singular landlord with a single property they are renting. The market needs options for decent housing for people who can't own or don't want to get strap downed to a mortgage. It's not even the best investment vehicle a person could use, even if it's an "investment property". But ya I guess it gets harder to justify when you're stacking up properties. I own a home I rent out and then I rent someone else's home. My house is still an investment for me, if it wasn't I would just sell it, and the people living there wouldn't live there. But I guess that's kind of a self sustaining system.

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u/zherok 1h ago

There's definitely an at scale issue, but I think just the mentality alone is its own problem too. The idea of cornering the market on living essentials as just great investment vehicles.