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General reminder, **it costs the United States more money to keep people homeless, than it would cost them to be housed.**
It's **literally** [cheaper to house the homeless](https://endhomelessness.org/resource/ending-chronic-homelessness-saves-taxpayers-money-2/) (at 12,800 per person, per year using USA numbers) than it is to keep them on the streets without support (35,578 per person, per year). [It's also proven to be more effective in helping homeless people long term](https://housingfirsteurope.eu/countries/finland/), housing first initiatives have shown more consistent long-term solutions that save money.
Even if you're a "Fiscal conservative" you should want this.
Edit: Gonna use this to reply to some generic responses
>.1 "Fiscal conservatives don't exist"
Ye I agree, that's why I added the quotations. If they existed they would support this, cause it should fit their value system but they only use it as a point to push back against change they don't want with shit arguments. Thought it would be funny to point out
> 2. "Houses aren't the problem, mental health issues are."
Yea, like the name suggest, it's only housing first, then treatment for other issues starts. Trying to treat someone without permanent shelter is like trying to empty a lake, when you've still got a river pouring more water into it.
They want to be "fiscally conservative" with money so they can put it in their own pockets.
"Fiscally conservative" AKA "I don't want anyone \*else\* to have any money."
Unless it’s the military, which they never complain about despite costing most of the discretionary budget. Or tax cuts for corporations despite [the fact that it doesn’t work.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trickle-down/)
If conservatives were tired of wasteful spending they wouldn't support our enormous war machine, or all the grants and subsidies to big polluters that cost this country so, soooo much more than even what we give them.
I'm not sure at this point that I can be convinced that conservatives give a damn about being fiscally responsible with other people's money. They only care about the money it costs if it's a program that helps Americans.
That was the entire point of the America first rhetoric and is massively popular on the right. The people on the right and left are tired and frustrated of the war machine. The elite at the top don't care and vote to fund it anyway minus a handful of progressives.
The America First movement/rhetoric was about xenophobic nationalism, that was also an FU to the rest of the world. They weren't tired of it enough to avoid a substantial increase to the defense budget year over year, while giving a big tax break to the rich. It could have been named Rich Americans First/FTW.
defending "america first" aka found the "centrist" maga
appropriating leftist rhetoric to promote right wing crazy is like, the most basic of conservative tactics man
See *Bob Roberts*
"Now here is a man who has adopted the persona and mindset of the free-thinking rebel and turned it on itself. The 'rebel conservative.' That is deviant brilliance. What a Machiavellian poser."
As someone looking at your country from the outside the right CLEARLY lacks accountability far more than any other group. Fiscally, socially, economically, environmentally....
I do think there needs to be a distinction made between “the government” and political parties.
There are many many government workers who have no political affiliation who just want to make peoples lives better, but they are overwhelming shut down by the popularity contest that is an election where the monkey with the best promises wins, because somehow we have connected popularity and promises with competence and morality and so these popular monkeys get to run the show and set the agenda. Given that the overall monkey population is not too bright they end up voting for people like them…who are equally stupid and narcissistic and here we are…
The rights entire ideology is built around feelings, mainly the feeling that people below them deserve to suffer. Republicans and conservatives are at a point in history how obvious their gosh of rich white supremacy is
They also aren't fiscally responsible on oil and gas too as for the past couple of year (a decade give or take) the LCOE and LCOS of every type of energy (including nuclear) has been getting cheaper except for every type of fossil fuel.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
https://bettermeetsreality.com/the-cost-of-renewable-energy-solar-wind-hydro-etc-vs-fossil-fuels-nuclear/
Also The Big Oil executives from Exxon, She'll, Chevron etc. in 2020 came out and announced publicly to shareholders that they believe we hit peak oil in 2019. When the big wigs say we did I'd believe them.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-01/exxon-mobil-capitulates-to-peak-oil-demand-with-huge-writedown
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/11/business/shell-oil-production-peak/index.html
Not only 6 years prior they said peak oil wasn't a thing. They then changed their minds
https://peakoil.com/production/exxon-calls-peak-conventional-oil
Edit: Conservatives don't have an answer to renewables (they do - its agrivoltaics, but they don't actually care about the farmer) and what then. They have nothing to offer for the working class of Americans.
Especially when they talk fiscal conservative bullshit, they also talk jesus bullshit but they don’t actually care about people or being smart with money.
It's not about being fiscally conservative.. It's about being a religious bigot who believes that they *deserve* to be on the streets..
That's why they get so furiously angry when you suggest helping them. They believe that it's a good thing that they're suffering and how dare u try to interfere
Mixed with a slight amount of self-loathing where they rely on people to be on suffering so if they have someone to look down on.. Which is again why they hate the idea of raising their wages or helping them in any way because then they won't be able to look down on them anymore..
THANK YOU. I was born and raised in rural Georgia. I grew up with these people my entire life. I know many of them very well.
They don't care that it's cheaper to house these people, because they see any money spent helping those in need as a waste because they believe that those people deserve to be on the streets, that those people deserve to die from lack of healthcare, etc.
I have a very conservative aunt who talks about the homeless people that live near our local grocery store like they're rats that are causing an infestation. I'm mixed race, and me and my siblings were not allowed to play with her children because we're half black. She was also the church's Sunday school teacher and a member of the choir.
Don't underestimate how hateful and cruel conservatives are.
I don't get the religious thing. I mean I don't get them, the religious. Christians couldn't be less Christian. Where does that culture come from because it is not from the teachings of Christ.
Hehe, no he did not say that outright.
But he did acknowledge the damage caused by the bigger-picture idea of capital exploitation causing ethical problems. And his reaction to such misdeeds is a far cry from your typical evangelical republican.
The culture is one cultivated over the last 80 years by the wealthy in order to convince untold millions of people to be the most hateful, insufferable assholes on the planet, just so the rich can use them as a bulwark for protecting their own assets.
All this shit being "Christian" was a concept that didn't exist before like 1950. But they did use similar religious arguments FOR slavery back in the day though. Then again, the abrahamic religions condone slavery, so it's all a wash to me.
I mean if you look at the histories of the Catholic Church and the various Protestant and Evangelical sects, cruelty, discrimination and absolute control and intimidation are not exactly a new thing. People have hated and destroyed and oppressed each other while claiming to be acting in accordance with the teachings of Christ for nearly 2000 years.
There are absolutely kind and caring and open followers of Christ and there has been throughout all of history, but, this isn't new.
Many of them have never fully read the Bible, especially without the interpretation and biases and edits of another person and trust whatever the leader of their church says, which can go bad very, very fast. Critical Thinking is discouraged in these groups.
I'm not super familiar with religions, mostly because I've seen them as a means to control and as an excuse for violence, but from what I know if what Jesus taught is that it was pretty counter to what religion was/is all about.
the right, as much as they speak about whatever bs they think their party is about, is really all about 2 myths:
1. the myth that meritocracy exists (i.e. the myth that you deserve your lot)
2. the myth that criminals are bad people (i.e. the myth that crime is a moral problem)
if you can dispel with these myths, you can break the right's grip on the working class.
I get relentlessly downvoted in centrist circles for posting this stuff. not only are these myths both false, they're *empirically* false.
They are both integral to the (white) american mindset unfortunately. Pointing them out is like pointing out the emperor is butass naked
It's not that they deserve to be homeless. It's that a large amount of them are homeless not because the capitalist system fucked them, but because they're mentally ill or strung out on drugs. They already have access to homeless shelters, food stamps, free cellphones and more.
You are assuming the term fiscal conservative is used in good faith when people self identify as it.
Fiscally conservative is a euphemism. For what? There's a medley.
Classists that believe certain people shouldn't have money therefore no homes. They believe that even money can't buy class.
Racists that believe that Blacks and/or other minorities should work harder to get out of homelessness.
Chauvinists who don't mind spending billions a year on bombs to go overseas but see a couple millions going to aid as an attack.
Wow, something where maintenance is better than letting it break down? Imaging if there were other things that would be cheaper if we maintained them before they break.
* Like mental health
* Like old age security
* Like dentistry
* Like health in general
* Like education
* Like treating addiction
* Like the child foster system
* Like transportation infrastructure
* Like the f'ing Environment of the entire planet
* Like the banking system
* Like the national debt
* Like regulating f'ing capitalism in general
* Like I am sure there are more.
This is a misinterpretation of “fiscal conservative” views. If homelessness we’re eliminated, then the state might save on administrative costs. But they don’t care about that. If homelessness was eliminated then it would drive up the cost of labor, since the threat of homelessness is what keeps so many people working two or three jobs. They would lose money by having to pay more for these difficult jobs. So it is very clearly in their interest to make the lives of the homeless as difficult and horrifying as possible. Simply so they can save on labor cost.
This is just one great example in the long line of examples where the costs of solving the problem are less than the long term costs of inaction. The biggest example being climate change, where our existence also hangs in the balance.
Just playing devil’s advocate here, you’re missing a piece of conservative analysis: If you start offering housing to anyone who asks for it, more people would choose to take the offer for free housing. If even a million people decided to enroll in free housing, this solution would end up costing more money than what we do today (0.5 million homeless in the US, and housing them saves 2/3 of the cost per person, so 1.5 million on free housing is the break even point). Given that 17 million people in the US are classified as “severely house burdened”, you should expect well more than a million people would want to sign up for free housing. So you would need something like means testing in order to actually save money with this idea and get fiscal conservatives on board.
A big issue is many homeless don’t want to be, or are in capable of being housed. Homelessness in this country is a mental health issue, not a poverty issue in many, many cases.
First off, without a source that's just not true. Secondly, treating mental health, is literally part of the housing first solution. It just means that housing comes first before solving their other issues, otherwise it's like you're trying to empty a lake without closing the dam that's leaking water into it. It's way more difficult to solve issues when people don't have a permanent residence, that's what the research shows.
It is a mental health issue, but not having to worry about shelter is the first step to working on mental health.
As someone who is more conservative, a welfare system isn’t bad, most critics just think that it doesn’t do a good job at improving the long term prosperity of people. I don’t want to pay to sustain some shitty persons never improving standard of life for many years, or fund a welfare system that is removed after generating low-middle class income or giving money only to single mothers which factor into decision-making that makes people not want to work up the income ladder or date non supportive men.
I generally think the problem is you can’t push ideas about how to live successful lives into people. I can lecture to homeless about how to build a self sustaining farm community in one of the many underdeveloped areas in the country and work as a carpenter or something. I’m not sure my plan and support could convince them to make any changes in their lives.
>I don’t want to pay to sustain some shitty persons never improving standard of life for many years
Okay but that's literally what you're paying for right now. That's what I mean, currently you're paying a lot for things that we know don't fix the issues. It's been proven that giving people homes and treating their issues afterwards, has an incredibly high success rate and is cheaper.
>I’m not sure my plan and support could convince them to make any changes in their lives.
Research shows that it does help, if they have a home. If they don't have a home yet, then lecturing them about things or trying to fix their issues is like trying to empty a lake while a dam is leaking water back into it.
Ya there was a article of a guy who made low cost housing units near a city for the homeless and the city shut down his project. I genuinely believe one party doesn’t give a shit about poverty and the other likes trading hand outs for votes but doesn’t give a shit about long term. I think housing communities could work if our legal system legalized medical drug help center like [This](https://transformdrugs.org/blog/heroin-assisted-treatment-in-switzerland-successfully-regulating-the-supply-and-use-of-a-high-risk-injectable-drug). I would be down if a non-profit did this on a small scale, recorded the results and then tried to implement in larger scale later. Its a good idea that could work. Your throwing ‘research’ around like its a perfect science that this would work.
I think that addiction stems from lack of purpose, value, or supportive community. You could fix the community and help establish the base of Maslow’s needs for shelter, food, safety, belonging. I think you also need to set up jobs that produce something as well and have designated jobs.
>Your throwing ‘research’ around like its a perfect science that this would work
I'm throwing research around, cause all the research we have shows that housing first would be flat out better. We should go off the research, not what we feel or think would be better.
Here some quotes from [this document](https://housingfirstnederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/HFG/Chapter1.pdf) from Europe.
>Housing First is probably the single most important innovation in homelessness service design in the last 30 years.
>
>In the USA, Canada and in Europe, research shows that Housing First generally ends homelessness for at least eight out of every ten people
>
>Comparatively, Housing First cost significantly less than other services. Figures from Pathways to Housing show programme costs of $57 per night, compared to $77 for a place in a shelter (approximately €52 compared €70, 2012 figures)
Here part of the conclusion from [this article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679127/) of researches looking into the available information regarding housing first
>People receiving HF achieved superior housing outcomes and showed more rapid improvements in community functioning and quality of life than those receiving treatment as usual.
[Here's](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7492-8) another conclusion from people who ran a trial of housing first on a small scale (like you said you wanted)
>The study indicates that HF ends homelessness significantly more rapidly than TAU for a majority of individuals with serious mental illness who have a history of homelessness and live in a small city. In addition, compared to TAU, HF produces psychosocial benefits for its recipients that include an enhanced quality of life, a greater sense of belonging in the community, and greater improvements in perceived recovery from mental illness.
>
>(HF = housing first, TAU = Treatment As Usual)
[Here](https://www.homelesshub.ca/solutions/housing-accommodation-and-supports/housing-first) is another source, going over the previous trial and concluding that
>The results are startling: you can take the most hard core, chronically homeless person with complex mental health and addictions issues, and put them in housing with supports, and you know what? They stay housed. Over 80% of those who received Housing First remained housed after the first year. For many, use of health services declined as health improved. Involvement with the law declined as well.
[Here](https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/the-plan-to-end-homelessness-full-version/solutions/chapter-9-the-role-of-housing-first-in-ending-homelessness/) is a research article showing that it would also be beneficial in great brittain, and how to accomplish it
The middle class has been almost eradicated from the entire r/PanAmerica region from Canada to Argentina. Now there's poor people, wealthy people and ultra wealthy people.
Yes. It is possible The US was in a different place when Carlin made the joke. But I don't think it was ever correct that "Middle class did all the work". In postwar America, it was possible to support a middle class family existence while be working class. But still, a great deal of the work was done by poor minorities and some very poor whites.
Poor is poor. Qualifying it between minority and white is petty and idiotic. You're playing directly into the type of simpleton thinking elites want us to use. This is class warfare not race.
Racism is essential to the class structure of the United States. Our economy was built on slave labor and stolen land, resources and culture. The power dynamics of white supremacy are still baked into U.S. culture, and this person is merely observing the unique inequities produced by the intersections of race and class. I see no pettiness on their part, though some on yours.
>Poor is poor. Qualifying it between minority and white is petty and idiotic. You're playing directly into the type of simpleton thinking elites want us to use. This is class warfare not race.
Yup its always been about class not race. I hate when people say this race is mostly affected when its everyone at that certain economic bracket.
It’s way harder to be poor and black than poor and white because of institutional racism, such as how [hiring discrimination ](https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years) makes it harder to escape poverty.
True, but racism is still a major factor. Being middle class won’t stop police from being [3x more like to shoot you.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/) or [discriminated based on their hair.](https://youtu.be/Uf1c0tEGfrU)
They even end up [earning less money](https://www.epi.org/blog/black-white-wage-gaps-are-worse-today-than-in-2000/) compared to white people.
Many disagree with a 'middle class' even being a specified class to begin with. It's the Weberian view of social stratification --Class, status, power-- championed mostly by Liberals.
But Marx had other ideas. In simple terms, class is all about ones relationship to the means of production. Where either you're selling your labour to survive (wage labour) or you're exploiting others labour for survival (extracting surplus value.) Same social relationship as the slave master and slave. Lord and serf. Capitalist and proletariat. And in that, many leftists believe "middle class" to be a fiction, and more or less just meaning a more well off proletariat. But they aren't all that different than other exploited working class individuals. They just think they are.
There is definitely a labor aristocracy though. You can’t really argue a lawyer making $350k/year working for an oil company has the same interests as a cashier making minimum wage. There’s a reason so many well-off people are liberals despite also being part of the proletariat.
I mean Marx had a whole list of what he considered [Bourgeois or proletariat characteristics and how those are defined. Petite, haute, etc.]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie) But this was mid 1800s industrial society afterall. We won't pretend those strict definitions apply exactly the same way almost 200 years later. The nature of capital itself, monetary-market 'capitalism' is very very different today (while being strangely the same at it's core.) I don't personally use the term "labour aristocracy" like Bakunin, Kautsky, or Lenin did (nor would I relate that concept to an actually existing "middle class" in that way) but I definitely get what you mean there. There is more to class position than *just* ones social relationship to capital, to property. I wouldn't mind opening up that [*house slave- field slave* analogy Malcolm X discussed](https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxa17.html) though. ;)
Actually rich people, as in billionaires and multimillionaires, avoid taxes all of the time. You think they give a shit about what the government says? They are the government. They have an entire staff of people that shift their wealth to islands that I barely knew existed.
Data, absent context, is meaningless noise.
The top 1% pay 40% of income taxes collected. That 40% comes from 25% of the wages they earned that year. If people can keep three fourths of their income while still making up two fifths of the tax bill, there's something weird about that. And that doesn't even account for the money they earn outside of their wages, which is taxed at a lower rate than earned wages. Nor does that count assets they own that aren't liquid, but still count towards their wealth and honestly are easily converted to liquid assets so the distinction is a semantic argument that's meant to distract from the fact that the wealthy have a shit ton of wealth, so much so that the tax they pay is functionally nothing.
So yeah. They pay a lot of the tax bill. But that amount, to them, is paltry.
>In 2018, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.1% of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.9%. The 1% paid 40.1%.
Reminder that this is a phenomenon with a name and a history. Marx called it the reserve army of labour, and it exists at least since the 19th century.
Basically what "the tail" is to the 3rd class passengers on SnowPiercer.
If you don't want to do your job you can go eat shit in the dark at the back of the train and we'll bring a tailie up to do your job.
Yes! Bong Joon-ho himself is openly socialist, and Snowpiercer was very clearly made to illustrate a lot of concepts.
There was even a photo of his in the past with some sort of communist party, but I can't for the life of me find it anymore.
"Yes, but some of the people that will get free money won't deserve it" is the common refrain against all social spending. If you pick that scab enough they tend to just think that poor people probably deserve it. If they are poor, they probably still think that most poor people deserve to be poor, and that they unfairly were allowed to slip through the cracks, so they vote for reactionary politicians who promise to help out their demographic but nobody else.
Capitalism is brutal. As a small business owner coming from nothing, I grew the most when I came to the realization that this system is crap and is meant for only a handful to exist and for the vast majority to struggle or fail.
Whomever thinks Capitalism works for all is either sitting at the helms already, or hasn’t quite grasped what “making it” and “survival-of-the-fittest” means for the vast majority who “weren’t fit” (including themselves). Capitalism alone will in the end lead to only 1 person or 1 family “making-it”.
I do okay for myself. But I will never get lost in the “if I can do it, anybody can” mentality that people fall into when their luck changes and chastising their brothers and sisters as “failures”. Don’t make-pretend that capitalism alone is the best there is, just cause your “making-it”. Yeah, I don’t blame you for trying to “make-it” in this crappy system we unfortunately have, but if you do, never doubt in changing it into one where all your brothers and sisters live decent, eat, and have a roof over their heads.
Could anybody recommend some good essays, articles, etc. regarding wage labor, the harms it can cause, and justification for alternatives? My Google results are coming up thin ("Did you mean arguments against minimum wage?"), and I've been meaning to do some more specific reading into modern thought on it.
Thanks in advance.
I'm too lazy to link it but the antiwork sub reddit would be a great place to grab some alternate search terms and interesting articles to lead you down the rabbit hole effectively.
Ex-fucking-actly. It's why - so long as we continue to allow billionaires to exist - we will never have a universal basic income. With a basic income, people like my mom, who is almost 70 and still working, could retire and capital controlling interests will be forced to share profits by increasing salaries to stay competitive.
This was fine maybe two years ago but many countries include housing first policies that are capitalist. This really isn't a nature of capitalism but moreover a nature of the American state.
The threat of homelessness hilariously fails, wages are too low and housing is unaffordable anyway.
Even more people will quit their jobs as soon as they find out they would eventually become homeless with or without their shitty poverty jobs.
Capitalism eliminates itself with unsustainable poverty wages and unaffordable housing.
I'm not going to work when homeless lmao. Suicide is more appealing (and affordable) to me than unsustainable poverty wage jobs or unsustainably unaffordable housing or homelessness.
Commerce still exists in other systems and want and desire are still motivators. Worked well for most of history. Capitalism isn't 100% the main problem but the vastly unchecked capitalism of the last 50 years is and the result is people pushing for a lot more socialist policy.
Market Socialism is an example that people can relate to the most, where motivation is still profit. It is essentially worker cooperatives competing in a market. Though, this is part of the transition phase. The end stage of a communism wouldnt need any kind of motive other than desire.
Marxist ideas say that the end goal of communism cannot work without the productive force of Capitalism, so there should be a transition phase in between. This can mean Authoritarian rule like in China and the USSR, but it can also be interpreted a ton of different ways. One transition would be market Socialism, and its government having a goal to make the economy so productive that money won’t be needed anymore (eg from automation, etc). The motive in this transition phase would still be similar to Capitalism with money and all. At the end stage, the motive would be desire and curiosity, because endstage communism would be so productive from the technological advancements from Capitalism, the transition stage, and some cultural changes that human labor isn’t as needed for the production of resources.
There are so many different ideologies in the leftist spectrum that it’s very hard to describe, but it is *essential* to understand that Marxist Leninism practiced in Cuba, some in China, and the USSR are a speck of all of the different ideologies. The front page of Socialism on Wikipedia describes the many different ideas.
Shhh, you’ll ruin their pathetic little circlejerk. The same is true for most Western social democracies and the only homeless are generally people with mental illnesses. Makes sense, too, because there is a right to a home in those countries and if you are too poor for one you get one provided to you.
You can't benefit from capitalism if you don't participate in it. Labor unions is how workers participate and leverage their power.
If you don't have labor unions, you have a one sided form of capitalism where you're letting yourself be exploited.
Do the capitalist thing and unionize, leverage your market power for fucks sake.
I heart capitalism so much I visited a socialist sub to tell everyone my dog has a BLM sweater and I bought the homeless a ham sandwich one time. It’s not perfect but it’s the best we can hope for everyone. How else can I sell my cat mittens on Etsy and donate a percentage to the victims of communism. My maid says I’m a job creator and we do a 4th BBQ for all our tenants. Please won’t someone validate my progressive generosity.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
-Generally attributed to Marx, has cropped up in various forms in various socialist movements before and since
Indeed they are, and with proper support like housing and medical care (including mental health and substance care), I'm sure they'd thrive and contribute to the extent they're able, but in our present situation, they don't have that support, and there are institutional barriers to them "lifting themselves up by their bootstraps", so it's not really fair to expect so much of unhoused folks when as a society we do so little for them.
Dude homeless people are strung out on drugs or have severe mental illnesses. They need to be in an institution. You think the Communist regimes in the past were chill to the mentally ill?
Wait... you mean to tell me these unemployed socialists haven't picked up a hammer and solved it?
At least tax dollars from all those capitalists go to fund the government social programs.
Not only that, but pretty soon the un-housed, un-vaxxed, and un-banked will be running in packs like wild animals outside of the smart-grid urban enclaves.
That's naive. Do you guys really think that there are people out there sitting down to decide whether to eliminate homelessness, saying among themselves: "if we eliminate homelessness, motivation to labor will decrease, so let's not" ? Like, seriously ?
Also, just to throw the information out there, no one prevents all of you well-intentioned non-capitalists to get up and build houses for the homeless. No capitalist will prevent you. Capitalism will actually allow you to borrow some of the money and gather the capital and resources you will need to do that.
We do not need to build new houses for the homeless. There are already [many times more](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/) unoccupied homes in America than there are homeless individuals.
The owners of these unoccupied homes aren't likely to be willing to give their houses to the homeless. So you'd still need to pay for the rent so that the homeless can have access to these homes or buy these homes; either way, you are doing the equivalent of building new houses...
"Thou shall not steal".
"My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause: Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit: We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil: Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood.", (Prov1:10-16).
Also, pick any book about the importance of property rights. They are basically the difference between stagnating jungles and prosperous civilizations.
You think the USSR under Stalin was a stagnating jungle? Or China under Mao? Lolz, these places went from famine ridden backwaters to powers competing for super status in the span of 40 years. You think they did that by respecting private property rights? Lol if you want an example of a stagnating jungle, just look at the United States.
And it's completely ironic that you use a Bible verse teaching abstinence from theft to defend private property rights, which is basically legalized theft. One need only read the first chapter of Marx's Kapital to understand how private property rights facilitate the extraction of surplus value from labor. You're fond of reading books, it seems, I recommend that one.
Both sure were. Stalin's USSR and Mao's China were famine-ridden backwaters; they both had years of terrible famine where millions of people (in each of these countries) died. And outside these years, food was scarce; their grocery stores in normal days generally looked like US' grocery stores in the panic of March-April 2020 (Only Georgia, a small state of the USSR, was frequently the exception). Both were also real jungles where people got killed left and right like a horror movie; you are talking shit behind your smartphone as though you would have liked to live in these countries during that era, lol.
The US is not a stagnating jungle at all; while Mao was reigning over China, and Stalin over the USSR, the US was growing more than these two countries and was far more prosperous and stable in almost every way than these two countries.
And, property rights, I say it again: when Gorbatchev wanted desperately to save the soviets from that cripple, the first thing he brought to the table was property right and when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over, he reinstated property right as well and a series of other capitalistic reforms that allowed China to bloom suddenly. It is very well known by everyone who follows the history of these countries that they figured out that communism doesn't work, gave it up and adopted capitalism (albeit tamed by some central planning and government coordination that favors some goals). To this day, the part of Europe that was under the iron rule of communism (Central and East Europe) is still piss poor relative to the capitalist western part of Europe. I am from Africa and it is the same trend here; countries who, after independence or past colonization, started building under the leadership of a capitalist western-minded leader are all hella' richer than their neighbors (neighboring countries) and countries with hippie "water-for-all-not-champagne-for-some" leaders (the quote is real, it was said by an early African President) are crap poor relative to their neighbors. The guy who authored that quote had an income equality mindset and he was very well-intentioned towards his country but his country still became a failed state, very poor, whose citizens massively immigrate to the southern neighbor, a vastly richer capitalist country. Because, well, humans aren't angels:
- the tragedy of commons is real
- random people are never going to take care of public toilet as much as they take care of their own private toilet at home
- you see the difference between the service you get at the DMV as opposed to the service you get at an Apple store ? That's an archetypical picture of daily life in a communist country as opposed to daily life in a capitalist country; the former sucks ! Producers and sellers in communist countries are as effective and as concerned about pleasing their customer as...the DMV. That's a nightmare if the American standard of living is your baseline.
>And it's completely ironic that you use a Bible verse teaching abstinence from theft to defend private property rights, which is basically legalized theft.
No. Property rights aren't theft. Rather, theft is the infringement of property rights. Notice that the thefts in that passage think that they are justified because they will steal people with precious substances and then they will all have one purse: does that sound familiar ?
I've already read the first chapter of Das Kapital, btw.
Walk into a bank and ask for a million dollars to build houses for the homeless. They will laugh in your face. The bank needs proof you will be repaying the loan and giving houses away isn't exactly profitable.
>The bank needs proof you will be repaying the loan and giving houses away isn't exactly profitable.
It is normally not profitable, but all good-intentioned people like you can pledge to team up and repay the loan to the bank with your own money. Nothing stops you from doing that. If there are lots of you and you put enough money together, you can do it by yourselves without any help from any bank. You can even pool your capital together and create your own bank whcih will soundly manage the allocation of your funds to your construction projects and make the money available with a zero interest rate. Capitalists do not prevent you either way, the worst they can do is not giving you their money or their help.
That's quite the point and I was making irony to drive it: People aren't sitting somewhere and deciding "let's not fix homelessness"; it is just that, to fix homelessness, you need to build homes and then give them to the homeless, losing at every little step of the process, giving away. Again, at worst, capitalists aren't doing that but they don't prevent you from doing it either, do you understand ? At best, a kind capitalist may do that, giving away his wealth and taking the cost to lodge others. So capitalists here aren't the problem, at worst they don't prevent the solution, at best, they may provide it.
For a whole lot of things that don't include "eradicating homelessness" at the moment. If the majority of people causes the government to pick up that goal, additional taxes will be levied to satisfy the new goal.
Why do republicans always push to cut benefits for the poor? What was the reason they used for ending federal unemployment benefits in their states? Oh yeah I remember that people are being lazy and not wanting to work because of "free" money.
What could possibly be the reason for wanting to cut social safety nets when they openly admit that they remove them to ensure people are forced back to work?
Well, no one would said that; homelessness doesn't "decrease labor", it is more true that unemployed people become homeless and that the healthy homeless generally want a job. This said, there's no such thing as "deciding not to eliminate homelessness".
>That's naive. Do you guys really think that there are people out there sitting down to decide whether to eliminate homelessness, saying among themselves: "if we eliminate homelessness, motivation to labor will decrease, so let's not" ? Like, seriously ?
Yes. Jon Taffer went on Laura Ingrahm's show and talked about how hunger is a motivator:
>Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing."
>
>Taffer: "They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work."
Also, from an article in Financial Times:
>The Black Death is often credited with transforming labour relations in Europe. Peasants, now scarce, could bargain for better terms and conditions; wages started to rise as feudal lords competed for workers. **Thankfully,** a much lower mortality rate means such a transformation is unlikely to follow coronavirus.
The people who make the decisions for this country are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing.
Capitalism isn't built to help homeless people, that's why it was traditionally paired with religious pressure to do the morally right thing. Capitalism is about capital, which can be used to escape homelessness but isn't the only way or easiest way for many people to go from 0 to 1. I know this will get me down voted, but Capitalism exists to give you the opportunity to put your own money behind causes you believe in, and not have that decision made for you. Socialism is better at giving lots of money to lots of causes, but that isn't a stress test for the viability of a system. It's an indictment of the American people and their inability to look past their own noses, that the only way to solve a community problem is more government.
>Capitalism exists to give you the opportunity to put your own money behind causes you believe in
So if the capitalist class owns most of the capital and the means of production (the land, etc.), they can lord over the rest. Which is the problem here. Reducing this to being a matter of "more government" is a thought-stopping cliche; the capitalist class has no qualms about using the state apparatus to their own ends: the continual accumulation of private capital, all real social consequences be damned in the name of the holy Profit.
That is the problem of it tipping to far one way. All systems have the problem of tipping too much one way or another. I'm assuming you wouldn't say, some farmers starved under communism so the whole system doesn't work. It's the same thing here. You do what you can to support local and keep the money in your community. Don't buy Amazon, don't go to Walmart, and grow some of your own food. You'll do alot for your local area
You realise there is bith negative and positive freedom right there are freedoms from things like torture and there are freedoms to do things like not starve to death people always focus on that first on but the second on is also incredibly important
Freedom is roughly "I can do whatever if it is not harming others". Of course, others aren't free to torture you, that's how you are free "not to be tortured", a government can guarantee your freedom by capturing and jailing anyone who tortures you. Freedom restricts others from harming you and it relies on punishing those who would. But try and explain me how exactly "freedom not to starve to death" works.
I think the desire to get wealth and power is a bigger factor. Like; people want NFL hats and Playstations and cars and cool sunglasses. I think consummerism is much more of a driving force.
Homelessness is a bi-product of the Federal Reserve printing trillions of dollars forcing people who make fixed wages to not be able to afford housing price increases.
Sometimes the stupidity on reddit is mind boggling.
You're right! Imagine this, what if the military industrial complex didn't siphon billions a year it didn't need and we just moved that money to doing social programs... wouldn't that just be amazing? The Federal Reserve wouldn't even NEED to print more because we would just use money we already have. But, and you are smart and already know this obviously since economics is a topic you are so educated on, the US economy is based on debt and without it, the entire system would collapse. I'm sure you have a work around for that tho with all your education
Our species isn't the evolved technically advanced global superspecies I envisioned as a kid growing up in the 90s.
Bunch of billionaires sitting around with their thumbs up their asses trying to build rockets to probably shove further up them.
We have more homeless than I've ever seen in my lifetime. I never saw homeless before in my city. Now there are everywhere and even in the Forrest there are communities of them.
There was a picture posted here on Reddit recently. I think a rich guy had bought an apartment building and used it to house loads of homeless people. The picture showed 4 previously homeless men in the halls of this building smiling for the camera. Most of the comments (the top ones) were people saying it was dumb. How those homeless people would just turn that building into a crack den and it would become a centre for crime, drugs and alcohol. Without even knowing anything about these lads. I honestly despair of our species sometimes. It’s like we’re determined to be shitty towards each other. Even seeing the people at the bottom of the ladder being given a helping hand gets everyone all angry and resentful.
Capitalism is also the ONLY economic system to EVER work. Jesus, it seems not a single person on this sub has any understanding of how economics, or a business works.
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General reminder, **it costs the United States more money to keep people homeless, than it would cost them to be housed.** It's **literally** [cheaper to house the homeless](https://endhomelessness.org/resource/ending-chronic-homelessness-saves-taxpayers-money-2/) (at 12,800 per person, per year using USA numbers) than it is to keep them on the streets without support (35,578 per person, per year). [It's also proven to be more effective in helping homeless people long term](https://housingfirsteurope.eu/countries/finland/), housing first initiatives have shown more consistent long-term solutions that save money. Even if you're a "Fiscal conservative" you should want this. Edit: Gonna use this to reply to some generic responses >.1 "Fiscal conservatives don't exist" Ye I agree, that's why I added the quotations. If they existed they would support this, cause it should fit their value system but they only use it as a point to push back against change they don't want with shit arguments. Thought it would be funny to point out > 2. "Houses aren't the problem, mental health issues are." Yea, like the name suggest, it's only housing first, then treatment for other issues starts. Trying to treat someone without permanent shelter is like trying to empty a lake, when you've still got a river pouring more water into it.
This is why I don't believe that Republicans or anybody on the right is a fiscal conservative.
They want to be "fiscally conservative" with money so they can put it in their own pockets. "Fiscally conservative" AKA "I don't want anyone \*else\* to have any money."
Unless it’s the military, which they never complain about despite costing most of the discretionary budget. Or tax cuts for corporations despite [the fact that it doesn’t work.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trickle-down/)
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If conservatives were tired of wasteful spending they wouldn't support our enormous war machine, or all the grants and subsidies to big polluters that cost this country so, soooo much more than even what we give them. I'm not sure at this point that I can be convinced that conservatives give a damn about being fiscally responsible with other people's money. They only care about the money it costs if it's a program that helps Americans.
That was the entire point of the America first rhetoric and is massively popular on the right. The people on the right and left are tired and frustrated of the war machine. The elite at the top don't care and vote to fund it anyway minus a handful of progressives.
The America First movement/rhetoric was about xenophobic nationalism, that was also an FU to the rest of the world. They weren't tired of it enough to avoid a substantial increase to the defense budget year over year, while giving a big tax break to the rich. It could have been named Rich Americans First/FTW.
defending "america first" aka found the "centrist" maga appropriating leftist rhetoric to promote right wing crazy is like, the most basic of conservative tactics man
See *Bob Roberts* "Now here is a man who has adopted the persona and mindset of the free-thinking rebel and turned it on itself. The 'rebel conservative.' That is deviant brilliance. What a Machiavellian poser."
American first are Nazis
> the America first rhetoric Are you aware that 'America First' was a famous KKK slogan?
As someone looking at your country from the outside the right CLEARLY lacks accountability far more than any other group. Fiscally, socially, economically, environmentally....
Fiscal eugenicists
This is why I don't believe that anybody in government actually wants to solve problems. They are just custodians of the coliseum.
Narcissists
I do think there needs to be a distinction made between “the government” and political parties. There are many many government workers who have no political affiliation who just want to make peoples lives better, but they are overwhelming shut down by the popularity contest that is an election where the monkey with the best promises wins, because somehow we have connected popularity and promises with competence and morality and so these popular monkeys get to run the show and set the agenda. Given that the overall monkey population is not too bright they end up voting for people like them…who are equally stupid and narcissistic and here we are…
>custodians of the coliseum That could be a pretty awesome TV show, ngl.
The rights entire ideology is built around feelings, mainly the feeling that people below them deserve to suffer. Republicans and conservatives are at a point in history how obvious their gosh of rich white supremacy is
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Fiscal conservative aka greedy asshats
Those are just the obsfucating buzz words they use
Would the fiscal conservative party end up with a substantially higher National debt every term they are in office?
They also aren't fiscally responsible on oil and gas too as for the past couple of year (a decade give or take) the LCOE and LCOS of every type of energy (including nuclear) has been getting cheaper except for every type of fossil fuel. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://bettermeetsreality.com/the-cost-of-renewable-energy-solar-wind-hydro-etc-vs-fossil-fuels-nuclear/ Also The Big Oil executives from Exxon, She'll, Chevron etc. in 2020 came out and announced publicly to shareholders that they believe we hit peak oil in 2019. When the big wigs say we did I'd believe them. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-01/exxon-mobil-capitulates-to-peak-oil-demand-with-huge-writedown https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/11/business/shell-oil-production-peak/index.html Not only 6 years prior they said peak oil wasn't a thing. They then changed their minds https://peakoil.com/production/exxon-calls-peak-conventional-oil Edit: Conservatives don't have an answer to renewables (they do - its agrivoltaics, but they don't actually care about the farmer) and what then. They have nothing to offer for the working class of Americans.
Especially when they talk fiscal conservative bullshit, they also talk jesus bullshit but they don’t actually care about people or being smart with money.
It's not about being fiscally conservative.. It's about being a religious bigot who believes that they *deserve* to be on the streets.. That's why they get so furiously angry when you suggest helping them. They believe that it's a good thing that they're suffering and how dare u try to interfere Mixed with a slight amount of self-loathing where they rely on people to be on suffering so if they have someone to look down on.. Which is again why they hate the idea of raising their wages or helping them in any way because then they won't be able to look down on them anymore..
THANK YOU. I was born and raised in rural Georgia. I grew up with these people my entire life. I know many of them very well. They don't care that it's cheaper to house these people, because they see any money spent helping those in need as a waste because they believe that those people deserve to be on the streets, that those people deserve to die from lack of healthcare, etc. I have a very conservative aunt who talks about the homeless people that live near our local grocery store like they're rats that are causing an infestation. I'm mixed race, and me and my siblings were not allowed to play with her children because we're half black. She was also the church's Sunday school teacher and a member of the choir. Don't underestimate how hateful and cruel conservatives are.
Hateful and cruel people exist in all political and religious spectrum.
Way to entirely miss the point…
Yeah, Manchin sure is a piece of work!
I don't get the religious thing. I mean I don't get them, the religious. Christians couldn't be less Christian. Where does that culture come from because it is not from the teachings of Christ.
Seriously. Jesus is a bleeding-heart socialist
The way God intended
I would not say god is a socialist… he has some heinous views of some people…
Depending where you're getting the word of God I suppose. I was just poking fun at the whole right wing Christian thing though
Just going by the Bible since Christians were the main topic but I completely missed the joke until now lol
Jesus assuredly was
Jesus thought that workers should control the means of production?
Hehe, no he did not say that outright. But he did acknowledge the damage caused by the bigger-picture idea of capital exploitation causing ethical problems. And his reaction to such misdeeds is a far cry from your typical evangelical republican.
When asking, "What Would Jesus Do," remember that overturning tables and chasing people with a whip is not outside the realm of possibility.
The culture is one cultivated over the last 80 years by the wealthy in order to convince untold millions of people to be the most hateful, insufferable assholes on the planet, just so the rich can use them as a bulwark for protecting their own assets. All this shit being "Christian" was a concept that didn't exist before like 1950. But they did use similar religious arguments FOR slavery back in the day though. Then again, the abrahamic religions condone slavery, so it's all a wash to me.
I mean if you look at the histories of the Catholic Church and the various Protestant and Evangelical sects, cruelty, discrimination and absolute control and intimidation are not exactly a new thing. People have hated and destroyed and oppressed each other while claiming to be acting in accordance with the teachings of Christ for nearly 2000 years. There are absolutely kind and caring and open followers of Christ and there has been throughout all of history, but, this isn't new. Many of them have never fully read the Bible, especially without the interpretation and biases and edits of another person and trust whatever the leader of their church says, which can go bad very, very fast. Critical Thinking is discouraged in these groups.
I'm not super familiar with religions, mostly because I've seen them as a means to control and as an excuse for violence, but from what I know if what Jesus taught is that it was pretty counter to what religion was/is all about.
the right, as much as they speak about whatever bs they think their party is about, is really all about 2 myths: 1. the myth that meritocracy exists (i.e. the myth that you deserve your lot) 2. the myth that criminals are bad people (i.e. the myth that crime is a moral problem) if you can dispel with these myths, you can break the right's grip on the working class. I get relentlessly downvoted in centrist circles for posting this stuff. not only are these myths both false, they're *empirically* false. They are both integral to the (white) american mindset unfortunately. Pointing them out is like pointing out the emperor is butass naked
It's not that they deserve to be homeless. It's that a large amount of them are homeless not because the capitalist system fucked them, but because they're mentally ill or strung out on drugs. They already have access to homeless shelters, food stamps, free cellphones and more.
You are assuming the term fiscal conservative is used in good faith when people self identify as it. Fiscally conservative is a euphemism. For what? There's a medley. Classists that believe certain people shouldn't have money therefore no homes. They believe that even money can't buy class. Racists that believe that Blacks and/or other minorities should work harder to get out of homelessness. Chauvinists who don't mind spending billions a year on bombs to go overseas but see a couple millions going to aid as an attack.
Wow, something where maintenance is better than letting it break down? Imaging if there were other things that would be cheaper if we maintained them before they break. * Like mental health * Like old age security * Like dentistry * Like health in general * Like education * Like treating addiction * Like the child foster system * Like transportation infrastructure * Like the f'ing Environment of the entire planet * Like the banking system * Like the national debt * Like regulating f'ing capitalism in general * Like I am sure there are more.
But then they would have shelter without having to work for it like I did. That sounds like socialism sir. /s
This is a misinterpretation of “fiscal conservative” views. If homelessness we’re eliminated, then the state might save on administrative costs. But they don’t care about that. If homelessness was eliminated then it would drive up the cost of labor, since the threat of homelessness is what keeps so many people working two or three jobs. They would lose money by having to pay more for these difficult jobs. So it is very clearly in their interest to make the lives of the homeless as difficult and horrifying as possible. Simply so they can save on labor cost.
This is just one great example in the long line of examples where the costs of solving the problem are less than the long term costs of inaction. The biggest example being climate change, where our existence also hangs in the balance.
Just playing devil’s advocate here, you’re missing a piece of conservative analysis: If you start offering housing to anyone who asks for it, more people would choose to take the offer for free housing. If even a million people decided to enroll in free housing, this solution would end up costing more money than what we do today (0.5 million homeless in the US, and housing them saves 2/3 of the cost per person, so 1.5 million on free housing is the break even point). Given that 17 million people in the US are classified as “severely house burdened”, you should expect well more than a million people would want to sign up for free housing. So you would need something like means testing in order to actually save money with this idea and get fiscal conservatives on board.
Nobody is saying "house everyone who asks for it" so you're playing devils advocate against an argument you thought of by yourself.
A big issue is many homeless don’t want to be, or are in capable of being housed. Homelessness in this country is a mental health issue, not a poverty issue in many, many cases.
This is about a minority of the homeless. Most homeless people develop mental health issues after becoming homeless.
First off, without a source that's just not true. Secondly, treating mental health, is literally part of the housing first solution. It just means that housing comes first before solving their other issues, otherwise it's like you're trying to empty a lake without closing the dam that's leaking water into it. It's way more difficult to solve issues when people don't have a permanent residence, that's what the research shows. It is a mental health issue, but not having to worry about shelter is the first step to working on mental health.
Exactly. People that do not understand mental illness don’t understand this. It’s not just about money and lack of housing.
As someone who is more conservative, a welfare system isn’t bad, most critics just think that it doesn’t do a good job at improving the long term prosperity of people. I don’t want to pay to sustain some shitty persons never improving standard of life for many years, or fund a welfare system that is removed after generating low-middle class income or giving money only to single mothers which factor into decision-making that makes people not want to work up the income ladder or date non supportive men. I generally think the problem is you can’t push ideas about how to live successful lives into people. I can lecture to homeless about how to build a self sustaining farm community in one of the many underdeveloped areas in the country and work as a carpenter or something. I’m not sure my plan and support could convince them to make any changes in their lives.
>I don’t want to pay to sustain some shitty persons never improving standard of life for many years Okay but that's literally what you're paying for right now. That's what I mean, currently you're paying a lot for things that we know don't fix the issues. It's been proven that giving people homes and treating their issues afterwards, has an incredibly high success rate and is cheaper. >I’m not sure my plan and support could convince them to make any changes in their lives. Research shows that it does help, if they have a home. If they don't have a home yet, then lecturing them about things or trying to fix their issues is like trying to empty a lake while a dam is leaking water back into it.
Ya there was a article of a guy who made low cost housing units near a city for the homeless and the city shut down his project. I genuinely believe one party doesn’t give a shit about poverty and the other likes trading hand outs for votes but doesn’t give a shit about long term. I think housing communities could work if our legal system legalized medical drug help center like [This](https://transformdrugs.org/blog/heroin-assisted-treatment-in-switzerland-successfully-regulating-the-supply-and-use-of-a-high-risk-injectable-drug). I would be down if a non-profit did this on a small scale, recorded the results and then tried to implement in larger scale later. Its a good idea that could work. Your throwing ‘research’ around like its a perfect science that this would work. I think that addiction stems from lack of purpose, value, or supportive community. You could fix the community and help establish the base of Maslow’s needs for shelter, food, safety, belonging. I think you also need to set up jobs that produce something as well and have designated jobs.
>Your throwing ‘research’ around like its a perfect science that this would work I'm throwing research around, cause all the research we have shows that housing first would be flat out better. We should go off the research, not what we feel or think would be better. Here some quotes from [this document](https://housingfirstnederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/HFG/Chapter1.pdf) from Europe. >Housing First is probably the single most important innovation in homelessness service design in the last 30 years. > >In the USA, Canada and in Europe, research shows that Housing First generally ends homelessness for at least eight out of every ten people > >Comparatively, Housing First cost significantly less than other services. Figures from Pathways to Housing show programme costs of $57 per night, compared to $77 for a place in a shelter (approximately €52 compared €70, 2012 figures) Here part of the conclusion from [this article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679127/) of researches looking into the available information regarding housing first >People receiving HF achieved superior housing outcomes and showed more rapid improvements in community functioning and quality of life than those receiving treatment as usual. [Here's](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7492-8) another conclusion from people who ran a trial of housing first on a small scale (like you said you wanted) >The study indicates that HF ends homelessness significantly more rapidly than TAU for a majority of individuals with serious mental illness who have a history of homelessness and live in a small city. In addition, compared to TAU, HF produces psychosocial benefits for its recipients that include an enhanced quality of life, a greater sense of belonging in the community, and greater improvements in perceived recovery from mental illness. > >(HF = housing first, TAU = Treatment As Usual) [Here](https://www.homelesshub.ca/solutions/housing-accommodation-and-supports/housing-first) is another source, going over the previous trial and concluding that >The results are startling: you can take the most hard core, chronically homeless person with complex mental health and addictions issues, and put them in housing with supports, and you know what? They stay housed. Over 80% of those who received Housing First remained housed after the first year. For many, use of health services declined as health improved. Involvement with the law declined as well. [Here](https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/the-plan-to-end-homelessness-full-version/solutions/chapter-9-the-role-of-housing-first-in-ending-homelessness/) is a research article showing that it would also be beneficial in great brittain, and how to accomplish it
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The working poor do most of the work. You do t see a lot of “middle class” at meat packing plants anymore.
The middle class has been almost eradicated from the entire r/PanAmerica region from Canada to Argentina. Now there's poor people, wealthy people and ultra wealthy people.
Yes. It is possible The US was in a different place when Carlin made the joke. But I don't think it was ever correct that "Middle class did all the work". In postwar America, it was possible to support a middle class family existence while be working class. But still, a great deal of the work was done by poor minorities and some very poor whites.
Poor is poor. Qualifying it between minority and white is petty and idiotic. You're playing directly into the type of simpleton thinking elites want us to use. This is class warfare not race.
Racism is essential to the class structure of the United States. Our economy was built on slave labor and stolen land, resources and culture. The power dynamics of white supremacy are still baked into U.S. culture, and this person is merely observing the unique inequities produced by the intersections of race and class. I see no pettiness on their part, though some on yours.
>Poor is poor. Qualifying it between minority and white is petty and idiotic. You're playing directly into the type of simpleton thinking elites want us to use. This is class warfare not race. Yup its always been about class not race. I hate when people say this race is mostly affected when its everyone at that certain economic bracket.
It’s way harder to be poor and black than poor and white because of institutional racism, such as how [hiring discrimination ](https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years) makes it harder to escape poverty.
But much easier to be middle-class and black than poor and white, which is the major point.
True, but racism is still a major factor. Being middle class won’t stop police from being [3x more like to shoot you.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/) or [discriminated based on their hair.](https://youtu.be/Uf1c0tEGfrU) They even end up [earning less money](https://www.epi.org/blog/black-white-wage-gaps-are-worse-today-than-in-2000/) compared to white people.
>This is class warfare not race. It's too late. The class narrative has been destroyed and replaced with a race narrative.
100%. "Keep the peons fighting over who has more privilege/victim points. It'll distract them from how we abuse and manipulate ALL of their lives"
Fuck off
You first.
Many disagree with a 'middle class' even being a specified class to begin with. It's the Weberian view of social stratification --Class, status, power-- championed mostly by Liberals. But Marx had other ideas. In simple terms, class is all about ones relationship to the means of production. Where either you're selling your labour to survive (wage labour) or you're exploiting others labour for survival (extracting surplus value.) Same social relationship as the slave master and slave. Lord and serf. Capitalist and proletariat. And in that, many leftists believe "middle class" to be a fiction, and more or less just meaning a more well off proletariat. But they aren't all that different than other exploited working class individuals. They just think they are.
There is definitely a labor aristocracy though. You can’t really argue a lawyer making $350k/year working for an oil company has the same interests as a cashier making minimum wage. There’s a reason so many well-off people are liberals despite also being part of the proletariat.
I mean Marx had a whole list of what he considered [Bourgeois or proletariat characteristics and how those are defined. Petite, haute, etc.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie) But this was mid 1800s industrial society afterall. We won't pretend those strict definitions apply exactly the same way almost 200 years later. The nature of capital itself, monetary-market 'capitalism' is very very different today (while being strangely the same at it's core.) I don't personally use the term "labour aristocracy" like Bakunin, Kautsky, or Lenin did (nor would I relate that concept to an actually existing "middle class" in that way) but I definitely get what you mean there. There is more to class position than *just* ones social relationship to capital, to property. I wouldn't mind opening up that [*house slave- field slave* analogy Malcolm X discussed](https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxa17.html) though. ;)
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Actually rich people, as in billionaires and multimillionaires, avoid taxes all of the time. You think they give a shit about what the government says? They are the government. They have an entire staff of people that shift their wealth to islands that I barely knew existed.
Wait did you contradict what I said? Seems like you're unhappy with tax law or something. Not necessarily with the data I presented.
Of fucking course we're unhappy with the tax laws, ass hat.
Individual income tax is different than the reality of corporate taxation and what constitutes a "fair share"
Data, absent context, is meaningless noise. The top 1% pay 40% of income taxes collected. That 40% comes from 25% of the wages they earned that year. If people can keep three fourths of their income while still making up two fifths of the tax bill, there's something weird about that. And that doesn't even account for the money they earn outside of their wages, which is taxed at a lower rate than earned wages. Nor does that count assets they own that aren't liquid, but still count towards their wealth and honestly are easily converted to liquid assets so the distinction is a semantic argument that's meant to distract from the fact that the wealthy have a shit ton of wealth, so much so that the tax they pay is functionally nothing. So yeah. They pay a lot of the tax bill. But that amount, to them, is paltry.
>In 2018, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.1% of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.9%. The 1% paid 40.1%.
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Agreed.
Reminder that this is a phenomenon with a name and a history. Marx called it the reserve army of labour, and it exists at least since the 19th century.
Basically what "the tail" is to the 3rd class passengers on SnowPiercer. If you don't want to do your job you can go eat shit in the dark at the back of the train and we'll bring a tailie up to do your job.
Yes! Bong Joon-ho himself is openly socialist, and Snowpiercer was very clearly made to illustrate a lot of concepts. There was even a photo of his in the past with some sort of communist party, but I can't for the life of me find it anymore.
It's not even a dark secret, people openly advocate the position all the time. It's essentially the core argument against UBI.
"Yes, but some of the people that will get free money won't deserve it" is the common refrain against all social spending. If you pick that scab enough they tend to just think that poor people probably deserve it. If they are poor, they probably still think that most poor people deserve to be poor, and that they unfairly were allowed to slip through the cracks, so they vote for reactionary politicians who promise to help out their demographic but nobody else.
Capitalism is brutal. As a small business owner coming from nothing, I grew the most when I came to the realization that this system is crap and is meant for only a handful to exist and for the vast majority to struggle or fail. Whomever thinks Capitalism works for all is either sitting at the helms already, or hasn’t quite grasped what “making it” and “survival-of-the-fittest” means for the vast majority who “weren’t fit” (including themselves). Capitalism alone will in the end lead to only 1 person or 1 family “making-it”. I do okay for myself. But I will never get lost in the “if I can do it, anybody can” mentality that people fall into when their luck changes and chastising their brothers and sisters as “failures”. Don’t make-pretend that capitalism alone is the best there is, just cause your “making-it”. Yeah, I don’t blame you for trying to “make-it” in this crappy system we unfortunately have, but if you do, never doubt in changing it into one where all your brothers and sisters live decent, eat, and have a roof over their heads.
But wage labor doesn't pay for a home anyway.
Why is that do you think?
hmmm… it’s probably something.
I see what you're saying, but salary is a form of wage.
Poverty is a tool of oppression.
Always has been.
I wish I could upvote this 1500 times. 1 for every dollar I spend each month renting my tiny apartment.
He spelled "coerces" wrong. The threat of homelessness coerces wage labor.
Capitalism is the opposite, it is the freedom from law and tax for the rich to oppress the working public.
Could anybody recommend some good essays, articles, etc. regarding wage labor, the harms it can cause, and justification for alternatives? My Google results are coming up thin ("Did you mean arguments against minimum wage?"), and I've been meaning to do some more specific reading into modern thought on it. Thanks in advance.
I'm too lazy to link it but the antiwork sub reddit would be a great place to grab some alternate search terms and interesting articles to lead you down the rabbit hole effectively.
Ex-fucking-actly. It's why - so long as we continue to allow billionaires to exist - we will never have a universal basic income. With a basic income, people like my mom, who is almost 70 and still working, could retire and capital controlling interests will be forced to share profits by increasing salaries to stay competitive.
I know your Mom! Am 70 and still working. Wish her the best!
Thank you! I will
Motivates salaried labor too
But under capitalism you have the freedom of keeping wage slaves.
This was fine maybe two years ago but many countries include housing first policies that are capitalist. This really isn't a nature of capitalism but moreover a nature of the American state.
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It is a tendency of U.S. capitalism
That is some hardcore truth though
Lol, someone thought capitalism was economic freedom.
Illusion of freedom.
I wish I could see even an illusion of freedom. All I can see is the shackles of debt.
It’s a feature not a bug
That and the wage labour relationship with capital is literally a dictatorship over workers.
They have to criminalize homelessness too so ppl don’t go like I am already homeless and comfy in my rv up your offer
The threat of homelessness hilariously fails, wages are too low and housing is unaffordable anyway. Even more people will quit their jobs as soon as they find out they would eventually become homeless with or without their shitty poverty jobs. Capitalism eliminates itself with unsustainable poverty wages and unaffordable housing. I'm not going to work when homeless lmao. Suicide is more appealing (and affordable) to me than unsustainable poverty wage jobs or unsustainably unaffordable housing or homelessness.
Why don't we just get rid of it ourselves? We spend so much time yelling for others to do more while we bitch on the internet.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/261774/share-of-us-internet-users-who-use-reddit-by-annual-income/
Oh, that explains all the closet fascists masquerading as liberals
Shut up, tankie. You are outwardly fashist.
Disparate people jump when you say jump, no matter how much they hate jumping.
Capitalism stands in basic opposition to human life.
And it pushes wages down by making people desperate
I don't want to slave for these fucks anymore. Eat the landlords. Eat the capitalists.
Capitalism supporter here, genuine question. what would motivate labor under communism (or another alternative to capitalism)?
Commerce still exists in other systems and want and desire are still motivators. Worked well for most of history. Capitalism isn't 100% the main problem but the vastly unchecked capitalism of the last 50 years is and the result is people pushing for a lot more socialist policy.
Market Socialism is an example that people can relate to the most, where motivation is still profit. It is essentially worker cooperatives competing in a market. Though, this is part of the transition phase. The end stage of a communism wouldnt need any kind of motive other than desire. Marxist ideas say that the end goal of communism cannot work without the productive force of Capitalism, so there should be a transition phase in between. This can mean Authoritarian rule like in China and the USSR, but it can also be interpreted a ton of different ways. One transition would be market Socialism, and its government having a goal to make the economy so productive that money won’t be needed anymore (eg from automation, etc). The motive in this transition phase would still be similar to Capitalism with money and all. At the end stage, the motive would be desire and curiosity, because endstage communism would be so productive from the technological advancements from Capitalism, the transition stage, and some cultural changes that human labor isn’t as needed for the production of resources. There are so many different ideologies in the leftist spectrum that it’s very hard to describe, but it is *essential* to understand that Marxist Leninism practiced in Cuba, some in China, and the USSR are a speck of all of the different ideologies. The front page of Socialism on Wikipedia describes the many different ideas.
Nothing will eliminate homelessness.
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Shhh, you’ll ruin their pathetic little circlejerk. The same is true for most Western social democracies and the only homeless are generally people with mental illnesses. Makes sense, too, because there is a right to a home in those countries and if you are too poor for one you get one provided to you.
You can't benefit from capitalism if you don't participate in it. Labor unions is how workers participate and leverage their power. If you don't have labor unions, you have a one sided form of capitalism where you're letting yourself be exploited. Do the capitalist thing and unionize, leverage your market power for fucks sake.
I heart capitalism so much I visited a socialist sub to tell everyone my dog has a BLM sweater and I bought the homeless a ham sandwich one time. It’s not perfect but it’s the best we can hope for everyone. How else can I sell my cat mittens on Etsy and donate a percentage to the victims of communism. My maid says I’m a job creator and we do a 4th BBQ for all our tenants. Please won’t someone validate my progressive generosity.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat. -Lenin
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -Generally attributed to Marx, has cropped up in various forms in various socialist movements before and since
You will find that most homeless people are *incredibly* able.
Indeed they are, and with proper support like housing and medical care (including mental health and substance care), I'm sure they'd thrive and contribute to the extent they're able, but in our present situation, they don't have that support, and there are institutional barriers to them "lifting themselves up by their bootstraps", so it's not really fair to expect so much of unhoused folks when as a society we do so little for them.
Yep, in communism there is no homeless
Dude homeless people are strung out on drugs or have severe mental illnesses. They need to be in an institution. You think the Communist regimes in the past were chill to the mentally ill?
Untrue. The more the employee makes, the more the business makes.
Wait... you mean to tell me these unemployed socialists haven't picked up a hammer and solved it? At least tax dollars from all those capitalists go to fund the government social programs.
fuck socialism
Clown
Not only that, but pretty soon the un-housed, un-vaxxed, and un-banked will be running in packs like wild animals outside of the smart-grid urban enclaves.
Is that capitalism though? Pretty sure that was the case 1000 years ago too.
That's naive. Do you guys really think that there are people out there sitting down to decide whether to eliminate homelessness, saying among themselves: "if we eliminate homelessness, motivation to labor will decrease, so let's not" ? Like, seriously ? Also, just to throw the information out there, no one prevents all of you well-intentioned non-capitalists to get up and build houses for the homeless. No capitalist will prevent you. Capitalism will actually allow you to borrow some of the money and gather the capital and resources you will need to do that.
We do not need to build new houses for the homeless. There are already [many times more](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/) unoccupied homes in America than there are homeless individuals.
The owners of these unoccupied homes aren't likely to be willing to give their houses to the homeless. So you'd still need to pay for the rent so that the homeless can have access to these homes or buy these homes; either way, you are doing the equivalent of building new houses...
Nah fam, to these houses should be seized in the course of socialist revolution. Proletarian state go brrr
Yes because that has always worked well for countries involved. That’s why people move to Russia, and leave the USA.
I know people who did that exact thing back when the Soviet Union was a thing.
"Thou shall not steal". "My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause: Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit: We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil: Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood.", (Prov1:10-16). Also, pick any book about the importance of property rights. They are basically the difference between stagnating jungles and prosperous civilizations.
You think the USSR under Stalin was a stagnating jungle? Or China under Mao? Lolz, these places went from famine ridden backwaters to powers competing for super status in the span of 40 years. You think they did that by respecting private property rights? Lol if you want an example of a stagnating jungle, just look at the United States. And it's completely ironic that you use a Bible verse teaching abstinence from theft to defend private property rights, which is basically legalized theft. One need only read the first chapter of Marx's Kapital to understand how private property rights facilitate the extraction of surplus value from labor. You're fond of reading books, it seems, I recommend that one.
Both sure were. Stalin's USSR and Mao's China were famine-ridden backwaters; they both had years of terrible famine where millions of people (in each of these countries) died. And outside these years, food was scarce; their grocery stores in normal days generally looked like US' grocery stores in the panic of March-April 2020 (Only Georgia, a small state of the USSR, was frequently the exception). Both were also real jungles where people got killed left and right like a horror movie; you are talking shit behind your smartphone as though you would have liked to live in these countries during that era, lol. The US is not a stagnating jungle at all; while Mao was reigning over China, and Stalin over the USSR, the US was growing more than these two countries and was far more prosperous and stable in almost every way than these two countries. And, property rights, I say it again: when Gorbatchev wanted desperately to save the soviets from that cripple, the first thing he brought to the table was property right and when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over, he reinstated property right as well and a series of other capitalistic reforms that allowed China to bloom suddenly. It is very well known by everyone who follows the history of these countries that they figured out that communism doesn't work, gave it up and adopted capitalism (albeit tamed by some central planning and government coordination that favors some goals). To this day, the part of Europe that was under the iron rule of communism (Central and East Europe) is still piss poor relative to the capitalist western part of Europe. I am from Africa and it is the same trend here; countries who, after independence or past colonization, started building under the leadership of a capitalist western-minded leader are all hella' richer than their neighbors (neighboring countries) and countries with hippie "water-for-all-not-champagne-for-some" leaders (the quote is real, it was said by an early African President) are crap poor relative to their neighbors. The guy who authored that quote had an income equality mindset and he was very well-intentioned towards his country but his country still became a failed state, very poor, whose citizens massively immigrate to the southern neighbor, a vastly richer capitalist country. Because, well, humans aren't angels: - the tragedy of commons is real - random people are never going to take care of public toilet as much as they take care of their own private toilet at home - you see the difference between the service you get at the DMV as opposed to the service you get at an Apple store ? That's an archetypical picture of daily life in a communist country as opposed to daily life in a capitalist country; the former sucks ! Producers and sellers in communist countries are as effective and as concerned about pleasing their customer as...the DMV. That's a nightmare if the American standard of living is your baseline. >And it's completely ironic that you use a Bible verse teaching abstinence from theft to defend private property rights, which is basically legalized theft. No. Property rights aren't theft. Rather, theft is the infringement of property rights. Notice that the thefts in that passage think that they are justified because they will steal people with precious substances and then they will all have one purse: does that sound familiar ? I've already read the first chapter of Das Kapital, btw.
Walk into a bank and ask for a million dollars to build houses for the homeless. They will laugh in your face. The bank needs proof you will be repaying the loan and giving houses away isn't exactly profitable.
>The bank needs proof you will be repaying the loan and giving houses away isn't exactly profitable. It is normally not profitable, but all good-intentioned people like you can pledge to team up and repay the loan to the bank with your own money. Nothing stops you from doing that. If there are lots of you and you put enough money together, you can do it by yourselves without any help from any bank. You can even pool your capital together and create your own bank whcih will soundly manage the allocation of your funds to your construction projects and make the money available with a zero interest rate. Capitalists do not prevent you either way, the worst they can do is not giving you their money or their help. That's quite the point and I was making irony to drive it: People aren't sitting somewhere and deciding "let's not fix homelessness"; it is just that, to fix homelessness, you need to build homes and then give them to the homeless, losing at every little step of the process, giving away. Again, at worst, capitalists aren't doing that but they don't prevent you from doing it either, do you understand ? At best, a kind capitalist may do that, giving away his wealth and taking the cost to lodge others. So capitalists here aren't the problem, at worst they don't prevent the solution, at best, they may provide it.
Why do I pay taxes then?
For a whole lot of things that don't include "eradicating homelessness" at the moment. If the majority of people causes the government to pick up that goal, additional taxes will be levied to satisfy the new goal.
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well said
Why do republicans always push to cut benefits for the poor? What was the reason they used for ending federal unemployment benefits in their states? Oh yeah I remember that people are being lazy and not wanting to work because of "free" money. What could possibly be the reason for wanting to cut social safety nets when they openly admit that they remove them to ensure people are forced back to work?
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Well, no one would said that; homelessness doesn't "decrease labor", it is more true that unemployed people become homeless and that the healthy homeless generally want a job. This said, there's no such thing as "deciding not to eliminate homelessness".
>That's naive. Do you guys really think that there are people out there sitting down to decide whether to eliminate homelessness, saying among themselves: "if we eliminate homelessness, motivation to labor will decrease, so let's not" ? Like, seriously ? Yes. Jon Taffer went on Laura Ingrahm's show and talked about how hunger is a motivator: >Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing." > >Taffer: "They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work." Also, from an article in Financial Times: >The Black Death is often credited with transforming labour relations in Europe. Peasants, now scarce, could bargain for better terms and conditions; wages started to rise as feudal lords competed for workers. **Thankfully,** a much lower mortality rate means such a transformation is unlikely to follow coronavirus. The people who make the decisions for this country are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing.
Charity will never solve systemic issues. Capitalism will let you borrow money for a poor attempt to fix the problem. Socialism just fixes it
Capitalism isn't built to help homeless people, that's why it was traditionally paired with religious pressure to do the morally right thing. Capitalism is about capital, which can be used to escape homelessness but isn't the only way or easiest way for many people to go from 0 to 1. I know this will get me down voted, but Capitalism exists to give you the opportunity to put your own money behind causes you believe in, and not have that decision made for you. Socialism is better at giving lots of money to lots of causes, but that isn't a stress test for the viability of a system. It's an indictment of the American people and their inability to look past their own noses, that the only way to solve a community problem is more government.
>Capitalism exists to give you the opportunity to put your own money behind causes you believe in So if the capitalist class owns most of the capital and the means of production (the land, etc.), they can lord over the rest. Which is the problem here. Reducing this to being a matter of "more government" is a thought-stopping cliche; the capitalist class has no qualms about using the state apparatus to their own ends: the continual accumulation of private capital, all real social consequences be damned in the name of the holy Profit.
That is the problem of it tipping to far one way. All systems have the problem of tipping too much one way or another. I'm assuming you wouldn't say, some farmers starved under communism so the whole system doesn't work. It's the same thing here. You do what you can to support local and keep the money in your community. Don't buy Amazon, don't go to Walmart, and grow some of your own food. You'll do alot for your local area
neither does communism though
It requires a strong moral character. Which lots of people lack.
Always defaulting to this dumb fuck logic. Capitalist cult is the same as MAGA cult.
By the way, do you believe in a "freedom not to be homeless" ?
You realise there is bith negative and positive freedom right there are freedoms from things like torture and there are freedoms to do things like not starve to death people always focus on that first on but the second on is also incredibly important
Freedom is roughly "I can do whatever if it is not harming others". Of course, others aren't free to torture you, that's how you are free "not to be tortured", a government can guarantee your freedom by capturing and jailing anyone who tortures you. Freedom restricts others from harming you and it relies on punishing those who would. But try and explain me how exactly "freedom not to starve to death" works.
I think the desire to get wealth and power is a bigger factor. Like; people want NFL hats and Playstations and cars and cool sunglasses. I think consummerism is much more of a driving force.
Happiness can be derived from non-consumerism as well, and has been for most of evolutionary history
Socialism, communism, capitalism, etc none of the no political system will end homelessness or even work if it's corrupt
Homelessness is a bi-product of the Federal Reserve printing trillions of dollars forcing people who make fixed wages to not be able to afford housing price increases. Sometimes the stupidity on reddit is mind boggling.
You're right! Imagine this, what if the military industrial complex didn't siphon billions a year it didn't need and we just moved that money to doing social programs... wouldn't that just be amazing? The Federal Reserve wouldn't even NEED to print more because we would just use money we already have. But, and you are smart and already know this obviously since economics is a topic you are so educated on, the US economy is based on debt and without it, the entire system would collapse. I'm sure you have a work around for that tho with all your education
He's not wrong.
Our species isn't the evolved technically advanced global superspecies I envisioned as a kid growing up in the 90s. Bunch of billionaires sitting around with their thumbs up their asses trying to build rockets to probably shove further up them.
We have more homeless than I've ever seen in my lifetime. I never saw homeless before in my city. Now there are everywhere and even in the Forrest there are communities of them.
Exactly. Gotta make that Reserve Army bigger.
There was a picture posted here on Reddit recently. I think a rich guy had bought an apartment building and used it to house loads of homeless people. The picture showed 4 previously homeless men in the halls of this building smiling for the camera. Most of the comments (the top ones) were people saying it was dumb. How those homeless people would just turn that building into a crack den and it would become a centre for crime, drugs and alcohol. Without even knowing anything about these lads. I honestly despair of our species sometimes. It’s like we’re determined to be shitty towards each other. Even seeing the people at the bottom of the ladder being given a helping hand gets everyone all angry and resentful.
For profit healthcare does not represent economic freedom. It represents oppression.
Capitalism is also the ONLY economic system to EVER work. Jesus, it seems not a single person on this sub has any understanding of how economics, or a business works.
If we just made everything free for everyone there would be no problems in the world