this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Socialism
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Don't like seeing homeless people shitting on your streets or camping in your parks?
Build them homes.
Police sweeps are like stirring up a still pond. Sediment goes everywhere and the water gets cloudy but sediment is never removed.
Dredge the pond: build the homeless homes.
Build everyone homes. Oregon needs millions of units.
It is the same way in Washington. They keep sweeping encampments and the people living there just have to go somewhere else. It doesn't solve homelessness. Homes do, though.
But there’s no point in reintegrating homeless people back into society because the billionaires already finished extracting wealth from them.
Don't worry, they will bring back vagrancy laws and debtor's prisons, and let states fine people for being homeless, imprison them, and force them to work for free! New value-extraction plan for Capitalism to exploit!
From wikipedia:
As much as it’s tempting to call everything you hate “capitalism”, slave labor is not capitalism. Capitalism is based on free markets, and keeping people in a cage and forcing them to work for you is not in any way a free market.
And a stateless, classless society is a central characteristic of Marxist-Leninism...
Capitalism intrinsically leads to market capture and monopolization, and the destruction of any free markets. Regulation to prevent that is inherently a control to prevent Capitalism's actual intrinsic characteristics from manifesting. Furthermore, slavery literally was the foundation of our Capitalist economy in the US, so no, they're not in any way inimical to each other.
Free Market refers to the ability of the private entities who own the means of production (i.e. companies) to compete with each other. Even if those means of production are in fact people. Free market has never been suggested to refer to individual workers having to be competitive in the market.
"Now it is time to state the conditions under which private property and free contract will lead to an optimal allocation of resources.... The institution of private property and free contract as we know it is modified to permit individuals to sell or mortgage their persons in return for present and/or future benefits" -- Economist Carl Christ in US congressional testimony
"whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would" -- Robert Nozick
@socialism
too expensive. Just put them in jail and then you get free labor
Too expensive, put them in jail and then bill them for the privilege, and garnish their forced labor wages.
All the government has to do is nothing. Just stop actively repressing new housing construction, and market feedback will solve the housing crisis.
People want homes. Markets respond to what people want. The mechanism that’s creating the diff between those two is heavy-handed zoning that artificially suppresses new construction.
The most profitable thing is serving the most people. People produce value, and if you can serve them you can get them to trade that value to you, and get rich. That profit is being denied by zoning rules which specify how many dwellings can be on an acre, for example.
It’s okay to prevent highly polluting industries from existing next to playgrounds. It’s not okay to tell someone they can only build single family homes in a place where it would be more profitable to them to build an apartment building.
That is so naive I thought you were being sarcastic. The markets don't give a single slimy shit about what houseless people want. There are still enough people they can exploit that they don't have to pay attention to those they've already discarded. Density is great, and we need more of it in most cities. Density is not going to help a houseless person magically be able to afford rent in those new buildings. It is not going to stop the building owner from charging exorbitant rents with the exception of just enough units to comply with equal housing laws. Or not offering any lower cost units at all and just paying the fine because it will make them more money in the long run. Sure zoning laws need to be changed, but that alone won't help houseless folks.
Unfortunately, Tina Kotek would rather allow citys to annex farmland to build more suburbs, defeating our urban growth boundary laws, which are a big part of what makes Oregon great.