comment: >
  
  Yeah it's usually higher  or the same everywhere else, at least we'd be getting paid the actual cost of living
context: Someone realised you need people being able to afford to spend money to keep economy going. >
  
  Adam Smith, the father of free-market capitalism knew this 300 years ago. >
  
  Dude actively asked for certain taxes like beer taxes to be lowered to improve the condition of the poor. >
  
  Don't get him started on landlords. >
  
  Any other good places to get in depth info on landlord-ism. Books, videos etc. >
  
  Henry George created an entire movement and economic philosophy centered around value being derived from resource point of origin and demand for an abstract good that humans should be collective owners of: land.
  Landlords maintain a non-productive service on a scarce resource which is a human need for all, from which they extract extreme profits relative to their contribution of mere ownership and (as minimized as possible) maintenance. His proposal was to tax the shit out of the monopoly on valuable land (really just tax all land -- and only land).
  The parasitic reward structure would collapse as landlords would now have to compete to maintain their profits. Want to charge a higher rent? Well you're paying X amount on your downtown block of land in taxes that are returned to the people, you better have improvements to justify people not going elsewhere so you can absorb demand. You have a decades old structure in a part of town suddenly being reformed and seeing skyrocketing demand? Well your tax bill just skyrocketed too, are you going to develop the high capacity residency needed to answer for your land hoarding or will you go under?
  I'm not a Georgist anymore, but his work is worth learning and understanding. >
  
  Interested on why you don't consider yourself a Georgist *anymore*. 
  I've read up on what he proposes somewhat and a lot of it makes sense on the surface. Would appreciate a little nudge in the direction of what could constitute a failure in his proposition. >
  
  well if owning land is taxed to the extend the expected profits are zero , why build anything in the first place. you wont be able to sell it. >
  
  Nono, the tax is proportional to the value the land provides. What gets built on top shouldn't get taxed to hell (at least as I understood it). Point being the tax spreads the benefits from the usage of the land itself. >
  
  My place is built on land rented forever from the government. I guess they can go tax themselves? 
  Barring edge cases like this:
  The problem is land does not provide much value until something gets built on it. Say you buy a forest and leave it be, at best hoping for speculative gains at worst losing money on it. Very different proposition to buying a forest, burning it down and building a large factory on the land. If you want to tax only the land and not what's above it then these two would be taxed the same. In the real world the latter activity would be taxed in proportion to revenue generated, value of the factory itself, CO2 et cetera. It's also not like the land value does not get taxed. In my country it's just another form of wealth which is taxed at 0.3-0.5%. >
  
  The minimum wage exists because companies would pay less if it were legal. Appealing to their ethics or empathy or any other such qualities is pointless, they will only pay more if they are forced to. >
  
  Companies would pay none if it was legal. >
  
  Or rather, they DID pay none when it was legal. They also sent kids into coalmines, and shot people to death for asking to not be treated like shit.
  There is no limit to corporate depravity when unchecked by law >
  
  In what way is it different to the Dutch consumer price index? Couldn't get an English wiki link >
  
  As far as I know the Dutch one is primarily a metric, but isn't directly tied to anything? While in Belgium for the majority of jobs it's part of the collective labor agreement that as soon as the index goes above a certain value it automatically triggers a wage increase. 
  Rent pricing and such is tied to it as well. >
  
  Omg rent is tied to it too? Sounds amazing. I'm moving to Belgium >
  
  Kind of, while there are some limitations rent wise its usually not quite as strict as "you cannot raise rent this year".
  Either way, if affordable housing is what you are looking for .. Belgium ( or Flanders, more specifically ) definitely isnt the place for you either.  40-50% of ones monthly budget going to rent or mortgage is not uncommon at all.