Not really in a lot of cities, most scarcity is based on government regulations (=not allowing more of them to be built, or not allowed to build larger ones). There are a few locations where there is no actual usable space to build more, but mostly, that is not an issue.
Or you could create more "limited edition" monkey pictures at essentially zero marginal cost.
cf NFTs where digital art itself can be copied and viewed infinitely, and the NFTs themselves are just tokens issued at near zero cost by providers which could happily issue infinitely more tokens referencing the same art (even though at the moment, for the sake of trust and collectibility and not dampening the hype yet, it's more lucrative to issue finite numbers of additional tokens referring to more low-effort variations on the original art instead.)
A piece of cardboard print with graphics on it, no rights to the image, art, athlete or organization.
I thoroughly recommend the book Other People's Money by John Kay. In it he reminds us what the actual value of the financial system is and talks about what it has become. Bitcoin was an attempt to get the actual value of cash (just one facets of finance) without paying tax (interest) to the banks.
These are the questions that need to be asked.
You can.
> What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction?
They're lending you the money.
I assume you have some different, less obvious answers to this? If you're against the lending of money for interest, how about a halal mortgage? https://www.qardus.com/news/halal-mortgages-everything-you-n...
Practically speaking, not really. A tiny fraction of people might earn enough to save enough to buy a house, but most will be priced out at every stage by people taking mortgages. Some people inherit existing property and trade it for other property. But if you are starting from scratch it's virtually impossible. Do you know anyone who has done it?
> They're lending you the money.
Are they? If I lend you my car, I don't have access to my car during that time. But money is just made up. There's nothing moving around. Banks aren't losing anything when they lend you something. They just create a deposit and a liability and get on with it. As long as they are all doing it at roughly the same rate nothing stops the economy filling up on debt, as it has done and continues to do.
Remember, banks lending money is nothing like you or I lending money. The banks control the ledger. They don't play by the same rules as us.
The best time to start building was 10, 15, 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
After a bunch of regulation, now, the "papers" cost more than materials to build, and most of the area is zoned as eg farming area, even though there has never been any farming there. Of course, prices have gone up A LOT, there is a lot of NIMBYism, by people who already build their house, and don't want another one next to it, and young people are basically fucked.
We might disagree, but in places with available land (and there are many), the only thing that stands between housing and non-millionaire people are (local) governments and regulations.
I'm not sure are about states granting banks the right to create money. Do you have a source for this? As far as I can tell they do it simply because we all use them and trust them to keep the ledger. The state (meaning, the US or UK) doesn't seem to have much control over it.
The banks are obviously granted the limited right to create money by the government. Whether it's through regulation post facto or a charter a priori, by now virtually all modern states have a wide control over their banking systems, including setting required reserve rates.
> by now virtually all modern states have a wide control over their banking systems
This doesn't seem to be the case.
> including setting required reserve rates.
Can you find what the required reserve rate for the US and UK is? From what I can find the US does have a required rate but it's 0% and the UK doesn't have one at all.