I found out in another thread yesterday that getting “free rent” is actually considered “taxable income.” Although I looked around pretty exhaustively, I had trouble finding a definitive source. However, it's not really the minutiae of tax law that I'm concerned with here. It's the ideology. Check out this sentence from an article which points out that the IRS has “taken the view that there can be a taxable gift in connection with a landowner's failure to charge fair market rent”:
“These authorities rely on the assumption that there is value in the use of property and that allowing someone to use property without paying for the use is a gift.”
I don't know about you, but I find this very dysfunctional in an insidious way. If you own something, you own it. It really is none of anybody else's business if you invite someone to enjoy it, even indefinitely. But what is far worse is that this is tantamount to saying that a place to live must inherently be a commodity, and that any occupation of any kind must necessarily be a transaction.
The whole notion of “free rent” is kind of sick. There is no option to say, “No no, it's not free rent, because there is no rent at all. It's not a 'gift,'either. It's sharing.” There is no concept of that in capitalism. This is where that whole stupid trope of “you just want free stuff” comes from. No, I just want not everything to come into the world with a built-in price tag.
There's another related issue I heard the other day. My friend was watching Judge Judy, and as I passed through the room, I heard Judy incredulously asking somebody in her courtroom a question very sharply, as if there was something suspicious or even criminal about it:
“WHY DID YOU CHARGE THE TENANT LESS THAN YOUR MORTGAGE PAYMENT?!!”
Oh, I don't know, maybe because when you buy something, normally you're expected to pay for it. Do you understand, she thought there was something very wrong with a rental property owner paying part of their mortgage out of their own money.
Buying a building and paying the mortgage out of rent money is like taking out a huge loan for a large sum of money, putting that money in the bank and then making the loan payments out of the interest. Oh wait, rich people do that too. Nice little scam if you can pull it off. Except none of us can do that.
It sounds to me like they just want a lot of free stuff.