Is buying to rent immoral?

Link up cause to effect. The chains with intent will be shorter, and hence more direct. If someone does A to get B, which then causes C, then that's less direct than someone doing A to get C, where B is an intermediate side effect. You buying a computer game might, after several steps, drive up someone else's cost of living, but to deliberately buy a house to rent it out is doing so far more directly.

Not necessarily. Lots of chains with intent are very long, and lots of unintentional chains are very short. Directness and intent may have some kind of correlation, but you can't use one as a measure of the other.

I doubt anyone buys houses to let because they're thinking "I really hate poor people, so I want to make life as difficult for them as possible". Their intent is the same as someone starting a computer games business, namely "I want to invest my money and make a profit". And that will always result in living costs going up for the poor.

If A = investing the money, B = making the profit, and C is poor people getting poorer, then it doesn't really matter how many steps there are between B and C, because the intent is all contained within the A->B link.



If I thought my position wasn't defensible, what makes you think I'd want to continue to hold such a position? Why would anyone want to believe something that they know is rubbish?

I've already told you what I'm taking issue with. It is not the idea that buying-to-let is immoral. It is the poor argument being provided to support it. I don't understand why you keep wanting to bring up whether or not I agree with the thread title, when regardless of what my answer is, it has nothing to do with whether the OP's argument is a valid one or not.

Suppose I told you, for the sake of argument, I do agree with the thread title. Ok, so what? It still doesn't mean the arguments that have currently been provided are any good. Or suppose I told you that I don't agree with the thread title. Again, it doesn't change the quality of the OP's argument. It's faulty either way.

Look, your stance is that you want to make money out of poor people, and make them worse off. You feel guilty about it, though, since it's clearly an immoral thing to do, so you don't want to admit it and also try to make yourself feel better by saying that everybody else does it so it's okay.

I think the main thing is that it is part of the terrible aspect of our society thats destroying communities and making us into a bunch of competitive individuals. What happened to looking after people around you and taking care of people. Now were all just looking out for our selves. Luxury ruins everything. The problem is people forget that were all the same and when you take care of each other it makes the world a much happier place to be in. I'm not criticising any particular individuals, just the concepts that govern us

Purchase to rent essentially reduces the amount of properties that are available for live-in ownership. Increased scarcity in property forces demand and prices up. What I'm saying, in very un-erudite words, is that if fewer people bought to rent, far far more people would own live-in property. You might argue that there will always be people that want to rent, but it's not really the point I'm making: the housing situation in the UK at the moment is such that it is extremely disadvantageous to rent compared to buying.

Which suggests that despite high house prices there is even more of a shortage of rented property?