This is why the digital good I buy the most of is music. MP3s are just dumb files. There’s no subscription fees, no DRM. Nothing but digital watermarks. The “service” is the ability to redownload and stream the songs that I’ve purchased on other devices, but I also store the raw files on my fileserver.

Now, the challenge for the vendor is that I can also just as easily pirate these same files.

And yet somehow I still buy.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Large Corporate Landlords: There’s a perception that these entities buy up substantial amounts of property, making it difficult for individuals to purchase a home due to increased prices and limited supply.

People keep looking for the bogeyman here but this is one where that’s too facile. Rents in Canada have skyrocketed, and REITs rent out their properties. Sure, they rent them out as expensive as they can, they’re jerks. But they’re profiteering off of the shortage of rental properties. And if they’ve got a crapload of property, and they’re profiting from the shortage… well they’re not really the cause of the shortage when they’re offering a lot to rent, are they? They’re profiteering from it, but they’re not causing it. If there was truly endless money buying up everything and then renting it out, prices to buy would climb, but prices to rent would plummet, and that’s obviously not happening.

You want to look at the cause? Look at people who prevent new housing from getting built. Petty bureaucrats. Wealthy NIMBY neighbours.

And yes, as much as it goes against Canadian values: if you’ve got more immigrants than you’ve got new housing, you’re going to run out of homes, and the people who have homes can price them as high as they want because everybody needs a roof.