alt Hacker News> Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity
I can easily live a full and meaningful life without owning gold, drinking cocoa or eating mustard. Those aren't essential and have decent substitutes.
Electricity is essential, just like housing and it's very highly regulated.
That's overly reductive. I was hoping that the specific commodities weren't going to be the focus, but I guess that was naive.
If you're going to use "housing" as an umbrella for its substitutes, let me do the same. Instead of wheat, beef, pork, cocoa, sugar, etc, let's call that "food". So now food is as essential as housing. Why doesn't the housing complaint against speculators work for food speculators?