What government does
Have a homeless problem? Ban homelessness. I’ve been saying for years we should ban cancer and heart disease.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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December 7th, 2011 at 10:01 am
Sounds like what davidson county did…
December 7th, 2011 at 10:06 am
Stalin Banned Unemployment. The penalty for repeat offense was a shallow mass-grave.
It’s what governments do!
December 7th, 2011 at 11:04 am
We had laws like that — vagrancy, loitering, no visible means of support, etc. — well into the 1970s, but those bleeding-heart Supreme Court Justices said it was unconstitutional.
Seriously. Look it up, if you care. How would you like to go to jail for being unemployed? And I do mean in America, less than 40 years ago.
December 7th, 2011 at 11:52 am
Hey, don’t give ’em any more ideas.
Right now, in South Africa, the world’s governments are meeting to ban natural global temperature variation, i.e., “climate change”. When governments claim the ability to control the planet’s thermostat, what could possibly be outside the bounds of their deranged minds?
December 7th, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Can we make pi equal to 3 while we’re at it?
December 7th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Well, to the extent that “homelessness” is encouraged by government subsidy, banning it actually will help.
(E.g. here in Portland, the city simply allows panhandling, at least in practice.
Thus we have a fair number of people who do it for a living, not because “they’re really homeless or can’t find work” (since the numbers don’t appear changed since the Internet Boom), but because it’s more efficient for them than paid labor; no actual “work”, no taxes, and a decent take from suckers who think they’re really just “down on their luck”.
The “real” homeless are almost all addicts or mentally ill, and arguably banning homelessness would be an effective way go force treatment on them.
Whether or not forced treatment is good, evil, or a deeply grey area is a much thornier question, which I can’t come to a clear and consistent easy answer for, even from libertarian grounds.
[“You have the right to die of exposure because you’re crazy but it’d violate your rights even worse to make you take your pills” is… not the most convincing argument, even though the counter-arguments are also powerful.])
December 7th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Er, so I seem to have left off a closing italic tag. Mea Culpa. Please fix, thanks.
December 7th, 2011 at 11:54 pm
Isn’t this the exact plot to Rambo?
December 10th, 2011 at 1:20 pm
We had similar things happen in Colorado Springs. The city and county ignored the tent cites the homeless put up along the river. Finally passed ordinances making them punishable and it was amazing how many of the “homeless” ended up getting living space in some of the shelters and programs (they had been resisting because the one requirement to getting into the programs was that they had to be clean and sober) instead of just perpetual camping out. It was odd to see one of the directors of one of the homeless non-profits advocating for an ordinance that intuitively seemed to harm his target group by passing the prohibition. The reality turned out much differently than the intuition and, funny thing, the guy that deals with the homeless as his profession knew the right answer all along, don’t.