Down with the Rentier class
"Modern economists agree that the power dynamics of the rentier-tenant relationship are oppressive" Wikipedia.
In my contrarian way I was inspired to go into property by my Marxist A-level Politics teacher many years ago. I finally understood how it all worked.
Written by a guest blogger, who wishes to remain anonymous, on his exit from the world of Property Investment.
'I recently visited Charles Dickens Portsmouth birthplace and watched the bizarre, Peaky Blinders-style, serialisation of his Great Expectations on the BBC. I'm sure the screenwriter, Stephen Knight knows best but I have to say it owed very little to the original. However it gave me some insight, with its glimpses of how the shipping insurance business was run, just as, a while back, did a Little Dorrit dramatisation for TV featuring the Circumlocution Office, into the drabness and drudgery of the lives of Victorian office workers.
I was put in mind of how Dickens was writing almost at the same time as Karl Marx was demonising the class that let out property using the French word rentier and how this spawned the idea of 'Rentier Capitalism.' Looking at the way now, if recent legislation is anything to go by, landlords are viewed in the press and by politicians, you have to think that Marx won the PR battle and continues to win it. There is no such thing as a good landlord as downtrodden tenants have entirely cornered the market in virtue while landlords have done the same thing with vice. This being the case, and having come to terms with my inherent wickedness (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!), I have decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. As a result I have decided to go the full Dickensian in styling a new office refurbishment I am undertaking in my front room. From now on my diminutive assistant and her fellow clerks will be chained to one of many high stools in front of a lectern-like arrangement on which my vast ledgers will be laid. There she will scratch away with a quill pen in the flickering light of a candle surrounded by dusty tomes on rental law. I will sit hunched over a wide low desk at the front of the room to make sure no one is shirking. Should she ask for a raise at Christmas for her and her young son, I will take great pleasure in refusing her request and reminding her how lucky she is to have a position in my company at all. I will then do a tour of my properties in order to issue section 13s with maximum rent rises to all of my tenants a week or two before Christmas.
Scrooge would be proud of me! I just hope there are no ghosts around……