There will come a point in history when most of humanity will understand the blindingly obvious mathematical and moral fact that is currently unthinkable to the vast majority of the voting populace:

That investors are extractive parasites who weaponize capital to passively extract wealth from the contributor class.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the monopolization of housing for interest… AKA for-profit land-lording.

For-profit land-lording, as we (and Adam Smith and all the classical economists) have discussed, is a parasitical non-contributing activity that simply monopolizes property in order to loan it to someone and receive it back with interest rebranded as rent.

Rent-interest is horrible for civil society for a whole host of reasons:

-It’s anti-meritocratic, anti-contribution, and anti-production.
-It creates massive housing debt bubbles that are now so big that humanity has forgotten that before financialization owning a house used to cost no more than 2–3X the annual median salary of a single worker.
-It’s mathematically unsustainable and leads to widespread poverty.
Every single society in history that has allowed interest to exist unchecked has descended into debt-serfdom, then oligarchy, then tyranny, then war and total societal destruction.

So naturally, billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos wants in on the action.

When will he stop?
After making (but verifiably not earning) more than $148 billion through monopolization, predatory financialization, and the erosion of democracy, Jeff Bezos pulled a Rockefeller and retired from Amazon in order to set his sights on monopolizing other industries.

But rather than setting his mind on monopolizing another low-stakes industry like books and dish detergent and sex toys, the centa-billionaire has decided to prey upon the most fundamental of human necessities:

Shelter.

How genuinely evil do you have to be to buy up family homes, drive up rents and squeeze the poor for all they’re worth, or turn houses into hotels and leave people homeless when they can’t afford to pay?

Vampires in a dangerous time
Arrived Homes.

The name sounds nice, but the vile company that Bezos just backed is a complete lie.

Renters haven’t “arrived.”

A house is never a “home” for renters.

In the words of mega-predator Dave Ramsey and his radio show co-host:

“They say in the question that the renter has made their house their home. It’s not their home. It’s your home. It’ll never be their home as long as they’re renting it. And when you’re a renter you kinda know that. Renting is always camping. It’s glorified camping…”

Here’s how Arrived Homes works:

-Using tons of cash and cheap credit that the average human being could never access, the corporation outbids local working contributor families and gobbles up single-family homes.
-Having now achieved a monopoly over individual properties, the corporation rents them to the highest bidder — sometimes a working local family for more rent than they would’ve paid to own, and sometimes as a community-shattering holiday rental like Airbnb.
-In order to minimize their exposure and risk of a crash, the corporation then sells shares of the rental properties under the guise of “democratizing” real estate and “providing accessibility”, while actually simply practicing monopolization for the purposes of extracting wealth from workers.
-This horrific practice is called financialization.

You take a human necessity like housing and turn it into a financial product to be bought and sold in order to exploit the poor and enrich the rich.

And whenever an industry becomes financialized, prices soar until the bottom 99% simply cannot afford to own and have to rent instead.

Enabling exploitation
Co-founded by a GM at the hyper-predator Uber, a social media manager, and a software engineer for an arms manufacturer, Arrived is backed by a who’s who list of venture vultures, including Jeff Bezos, the current CEO of Uber, the former CEO of Zillow, and the former CEO of Invitation Homes, a shelter monopolist famous for securitizing rental income and oppressing tens of thousands of families.

Arrived, of course, pretends like they’re the good guys, with their website proudly proclaiming:

“We’re empowering the world to build wealth through modern real estate investing.

Hilarious, right?

An honest pitch would read:

“We’re empowering the rich to build wealth through exploiting poorer people in need of human shelter.”

At least they’re honest about who their fiduciary is:

n other words, Arrived is straight-up admitting that they don’t give a damn about the poor, the working class, real families, justice, democracy, or economic sustainability — they work for Jeff Bezos and his ilk, to maximize their profits at any and all cost to the commons.

Arrived is just another extraction machine in the parasite anti-economy, draining wealth and human time from the real economy.

And investors are loving it. The number of active vultures has doubled in the past month, and they can now amass funding to gobble up a new house in just two hours. The startup is still small, but it’s in growth mode and has massive backers that will ensure it blitzscales to an international land-lorder on the scale of Blackstone or bigger.

The investment also makes sense for Jeff Bezos. He is, after all, an early investor in Airbnb itself. So why not fund a company that’s helping to steal properties from working locals to turn into permanent hotels for the rich?

I honestly don’t know how people can sleep at night, knowing they are literally making people homeless and driving up the cost of housing for everyone else on earth.

Enough is enough
Saint Augustine, a brilliant monk who lived about 1,500 years ago and essentially invented hospitals and universities, said that there was only one thing that could fulfill the human heart besides God himself:

Everything.

All the sex
All the money.
All the power.
All the fame.
All the houses.
Everything.

The human heart is literally unquenchable. It will always seek to do more, be more, and have more. The human heart can never be at rest, in the words of Augustine, until it finds rest in God.

But the reality is that most people don’t even believe there’s a God, and so they spend their lives on a never-ending shopping spree of stuff and sex and power and reputation in a desperate attempt to fill the void.

In the case of Jeff Bezos, this means acquiring MGM, and Whole Foods, and The Washington Post, and IMDB, Zappos, Souq, Blue Origin, Kiva Systems, Alexa, DPReview, Fabric.com, Woot, Goodreads, Twitch, Audible, Elemental, Quidsi, Annapurna Labels, Accept, Living Social, Twilio, HomeGrocer, Bill Me Later, eZiba, BankBazaar, Kozmo, Ionic, Songza, and Wine.com, plus VC stakes in Lookout, Juno, Grail, Workday, Vessel, Domo, Fundbox, Stack Overflow, Everfi, Remitly, Rethink Robotics, General Fusion, MakerBot, Unity Biotech, General Assembly, Business Insider, Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter, plus at least eight mansions, 100,000+ acres, a bunch of penis-shaped rockets, and a $500,000,000 hyper-yacht.

And now a startup that wants to turn every house on the planet into a rental.

It’s the next step on our road back to serfdom, where we the assetless majority slave our entire lives for the propertied rich just to stay alive.

There’s only one thing that can be done with men like Jeff Bezos:

They must be stopped.

Because if Smaug the money-hoarding dragon in The Hobbit taught us anything, it’s that people who love money will not stop until they are stopped.

Inside too many people, both on the lucky and unlucky sides of the street, just have a big reeking piece of toxic shit where their hearts & souls should be, and it's not something that can ever be cured.