A Boring Dystopia

Fine to blame me for just being honest, as I honestly don’t care what these kids think of me- but I only hope that when they grow up- they’ll come to understand that their ideology has been incredibly flawed and that life exists within the gray area between what they only see as black and white.

I don't think that's necessarily a great mentality to have, you've simultaneously made yourself a victim, and you've also initialized your opposition where you presume yourself to only know the nuance therein. that's kind of not a great position to generally regard these issues from. It's preventing you from steel-manning your opposition.

The rules aren’t there to be agreed with. It’s how it is. If you’re homeless with a pet- that’s not anyone’s problem but yours. No one is obligated to take care of your responsibilities for you.

I’m all for anyone getting help, but not at the expense of people having to bow down and coddle to people who can’t see that they are- wether they are intentionally or not, a burden. And if you’re a burden- you don’t get to pick what rules you’ll follow.

Generally the MO of this ideology you oppose, is that all of this talk of the expense, or people being burdens, is kind of like. Not relevant. It sees homeless relief as purely being for charity, as solely being for the sake of those who give, to probably just make them feel better, out of the goodness of their heart, when that's not necessarily the case. Both, because these services are intentionally gimped, or, are just used for optics, imo, but also because there is a form of self-interest in these services which can lead to mutual benefit. The general idea being that, if you leave people to be homeless, don't help them through, they will accelerate out of that homelessness less efficiently than had you helped them, and this will strain the economy more than had you simply pooled money and got them a house, or a crack pipe and a manual labor job, or what have you. There are also arguments in favor of homelessness, as the homeless are both an easy pool of desperate labor, willing to be underpaid, and an effective threat against existing low-level labor, because they can be replaced at any time. You will get more amazon workers and walmart employees if you do not have a safety net for the homeless. Or, rather, you will get workers willing to tolerate worse positions, if there is no safety net. Needless to say, I'm not really in favor of homelessness, I tend to think that threats and work under duress don't provide the best outcomes, which is important when I get pissed off that my burger has been put together wrong, and when my astrophysicist's calculations are totally wrong and my rocket falls into a black hole because I keep telling him that it will either be done by next week or he's on the street. That's a really stupid set of example but you kind of get the point I expect.

But then, more to the point of these rules. You will end up spending some money enforcing any rule. If it is a broad discriminatory rule, say, curfew, no pets, no drugs (generally in that order), you end up spending in the enforcement of those rules, and that money could've just been spent on more direct outreach, more bang-for-your-buck. There's not really a guarantee the people you have discriminated in favor of will be any better off "making it in society" than the people who are still on the street. And it still doesn't really solve the broad problems of homelessness, you're still gonna get people complaining at the city council meeting, especially as, if you were right, you've only helped out the least destructive of society, and pushed off the most destructive to, at worst, be handled by the police, which rockets up your expenses, because that's not what they're really for, and then the prison system isn't going to end up paying off any better societally for pretty obvious reasons, if the police so choose to just push them into prisons.

If you end up implementing a niche discriminatory rule, like, say, you only will help out the most desperate, people who have been homeless for an extended period of time, those who have drug problems, mental health problems, or, on the flipside, if you just want to provide some sort of stop-gap for people who have just been laid off, you end up, again, spending a lot more, a substantial amount more, in these cases, than had you just spent it on outreach. It is usually a metric fuck ton that is spent on these forms of means-testing, this is usually why federal programs suck. You also get, not logarithmic benefits, from economies of scale, but you do end up spending less to cover everyone, especially in the long term.

So, those are kind of easy reasons as to why if you were to deal with the problems of homelessness really in any form, you would want to do so with a broad-scale housing first kind of policy, because the alternatives all suck ass tend to be pretty bad.

I think also, the idea of, you know, the rules just get to be arbitrary, the rules get to be whatever they are, because that's the rule-maker's choice, as though it's some sort of like, purely ethical right, that doesn't pass the smell test to me. Freedom for the sake of it, as the driving force behind an ethical ideology, or a political ideology, is sort of like solely having power for the sake of it: it still doesn't tell you what freedoms, freedoms to do what, freedoms over what, or what powers, powers to do what, powers over what. That's where the nuance comes in, and then that's where you actually have to do the work of forming a coherent worldview based on the realities of the situation, that's where you pull on the thread.

If any of this is interesting to you at all, shoot me (please I'm begging you please god) and I might try to dig up some sources for all of the claims I've made, probably by way of reference to some huge compilation document I'll have to sort out, and then you can probably (and probably rightly) disparage them on the basis of us not living in a society where everything is totally recorded in a perfect case study with control groups and alternatives, except for when it is, in order to serve us ads. What fun, the internet!

K.