China's 1.4 billion population isn't enough to fill the country's empty homes, former official says

I mean, maybe a bit of a buffer, but China was pretty much just building them endlessly. A lot of people were evicted and wetlands filled for these (bad, cut-corner) apartment buildings to go up and then sit totally empty.

Capitalism destroys its own regulations because politicians are for sale! You're acting like politics and markets are different, but they're interconnected at their very core.

Yes and no. Capitalism without regulations may bring this kind of issues. But capitalism with regulations shouldn't. The issue is that the required regulations are not being applied or do not exist.

We should not blame or put the weight of the issue in capitalism, when we clearly know we don't live in a perfect capitalistic world, and very few markets are like that. The issue is with politicians.

>No, that’s an effect of collusion and cartelization of the economy.

That's just capitalism honey

No, that's an effect of collusion and cartelization of the economy. It's because you have very few actors supplying the product and the barriers of creating a similar product are too high, so new competitors cannot access the market. Then the current suppliers can sit on the product and wait for it to be at the right price, as long as it doesn't go to waste.

As you can see, all of this screens about real estate:

• Cartelization/collusion: The aren't that many companies that have properties on sale

• High cost to enter: Building is pricey, and it depends on the location of the property more than anything. So a building in one neighborhood is not a direct replacement of a building in another neighborhood.

• Real estate does not go to waste. Unless bad luck or poor choices, your building should work fine for a couple of generations. And worst case scenario, the land already has a price.

This is the time when governments should intervene and come up with a proposal to solve the cartelization.

Oversupply of life saving goods is a good thing. Only under capitalism is it bad, which is why we have so many preventable deaths and deaths of poverty. Overbuilding housing and making it available to everyone in anticipation of localized population booms or migrations is exactly what the government should be doing.

It certainly isn’t capitalist to have such an insane gap between offer and supply

Sure it is! Capitalists just do it in the opposite direction; keep supply low so prices stay high.

It certainly isn’t capitalist to have such an insane gap between offer and supply. If lack of offer is a problem, the issues with such enormous oversupply are even greater. Just wasteful. Damaging to the environment. And introduces a lot of economic woes.

Right?! Love how the article frames it as a bad thing because it doesn't make sense from a capitalist standpoint.

... isn't that the point?