And just to be clear…
The Left has more than it’s share of hypocritical hacks who blame everything on the Right…
It’s like when welfare gets blamed for doing more harm than good. What? If people were not getting welfare what do you think they would be doing, or not doing? Poor people have had children they can’t afford to feed for probably as long as people have existed. Get rid of welfare and the poor will just be poorer, sicker and less able to break the cycle.
But it is true that welfare doesn’t fix the problems and end poverty; it merely makes it sustainable or livable. However, are we willing to spend even more to actually fix the problems?
Fair enough. We can talk about party politics.
Yes. This is correct. It seems obvious to me, but I can still follow along with the arguments that explain the outcomes away to circumstances and forces that are somehow not related to these very specific policies. I don’t find them particularly convincing, but I can at least listen and try to follow along.
I can give you the conservative answer, or at least my conservative answer. It involves policy changes and a recognition that un-doing decades of bad policy will take time, leadership, salesmanship and most likely not be a source of instant gratification for anyone. I’ve already highlighted several policies I believe create the framework necessary to freeze all action on basic measures like sanitizing and securing public spaces.
It’s hard to argue that’s not the case, as that is what we see happening.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, eliminating or drastically changing polices backed by high levels of emotion and conviction. I can understand why politicians intent on re-election are reluctant to act. That might change if the typhus conditions give way to plague or if the typhus cases go from the hundreds to the thousands. Hopefully it does not.
I find many things about Republican governance problematic as well, chiefly centered around polices that deviate from conservative principles to benefit the few who can feed from the trough. What I don’t find is a seemingly full-throttle race to see who can embrace the worst policies, as I do among modern Democrats.
I think that’s pretty easy to observe, but I realize Trump has sent out some incredibly stupid tweets in the meantime. That’s bad. I also realize people still believe in the power of government to produce outcomes that are equivalent to those produced by participating in the economy. None of this thinking is going away soon, especially in a place like California. Decades of solid economic and social data from across the world will remain unconvincing to many, as do easily observable policy outcomes that are awful.
This is an impossible thing to measure on a person-by-person basis. What isn’t impossible is measuring the outcomes among populations receiving welfare across generations.
Do you think doing less (from a government perspective) might be worth considering? Do you think it’s possible that the outcomes are tied to polices that can either provide incentive or deterrent from any given unlawful behavior?
I don’t have the energy to keep replying to you point-by-point, but I think you’re mis-representing my intent here. Basic economics and even advanced economics should at least provide some guideline for policy. We know what people do when government stays out of the way (which isn’t all virtuous and collectively productive economic activity), and we know what happens when government gets in the way too much. We have decades of data and outcomes spanning hundreds of millions of lives to examine.
For all of the rhetoric about ICE facilities fielding concentration camps where crowded and difficult conditions are still somehow managed in sanitary conditions, you never seem to hear the “concentration camp” term applied to the actual concentration camp conditions we not only allow, but encourage people to live in.
Now we’re getting partisan up in here.
It did. The public had the ability to stop the conversion of parts of CA deeper into NYC-dome. I don’t agree, but only because it’s not in my back yard.
I’d vote to stop from turning into NYC too.
The intent of the locals is for govt to get in the way. That’s the point of them passing the laws limiting the growth you seek to turn them into another NYC.
I wonder how the residents of CA feel outside the immediate area of the camp. Given homeless numbers, NY had a far higher per capital homeless rate, along with a considerably higher density in NYC. NYC drives most of NYs numbers, while we see a similar situation happening in CA.
I wonder how much of the difference is the widely available public sanitation areas in NYC vs a place like CA. How much damage would be saved if they just installed massive public restrooms near the camps. Remove the sanitation issue and you’ve basically consolidated the high risk people you have to watch the whole state of CA for anyways.
I’m not getting partisan at all. The bleeding heart liberal would be the guy wanting to spend a ton of someone else’s money to make a problem that doesn’t impact them go away.
I’ve also been in agreement with you a number of steps along the way, explicitly every time we should tell the local voters/taxpayers to fuck off and deal with it for sanitary reasons. I just don’t know what the perfect answer is.
Probably wouldn’t tell the whole story though. We have no idea what would happen to the number of starving people if you get rid of snap. Of homeless people if you get rid of welfare and government housing. Of the potential rise for crime as people have no assistance in these areas.
Most people aren’t criminals but if you’re starving to death you might become one in a hurry.
I don’t say those things to say government is the be all end all or that reforms in those isn’t needed. But we had plenty of poverty before these programs. Government assistance didn’t create poverty, hunger, and homelessness.
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And I’m thinking this data would say a mixed market economy has had the best results. We had more government involvement in 1999 than 1809 by far. And yet prosperity has tracked upwards for most of our history.
Again this isn’t to say I think government doesn’t screw up or is some magic thing.
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So has technology and product diversity … more people manufacturing commodity items, more food on the shelves at a cheaper price to the consumer due to improvements in transportation and supply chain, improvements in agricultural methods, etc. etc. Most of those improvements were produced and developed due to free market competition and innovation
You could probably produce a couple instances where Government initiated some of those, but for the most part these are due to competitive companies operating in a free market and refining processes and improving methods and technologies … we, by and large, overlook these innovations because most of us just aren’t close enough to the process to see the efficiencies or understand the scalable impact of the improvements…
Subsidies. Cheap labor.
Infrastructure.
Cool words bruh … you got any substance to go with your cherry picking bullshit?
I got some.
Without a strong and stable govt, there exists no examples of the free market flourishing to anywhere near a level that would be enviable.
Mixed economy is the way. Pure free market is equally viable as pure communism. “Only works on paper with zero real life examples”
what’s their role?
That’s fair. But you recognize the free market needs to flourish. Can you point to me where Government improved standard of living for millions of people the way free market has and does?
I’m not arguing against this idea. I think Government’s role should be greatly diminished to allow the free market to flourish more efficiently and let the mechanisms baked into free markets work…
I disagree. Black markets (only thing I can think of that is close to a “pure free market”) are much more efficient at meeting market demands than anything “pure communism” can offer. Free markets allow for much speedier and efficient innovations than anything akin to socialism and communism. Entrepreneurs will always and forever be sought out in any collective system to deliver what people demand that central planning CAN NOT envision.
To hedge against human nature, which will commit various acts that are against the betterment of the public, to varying degrees.
Sure. America. I can think of no better example that a new govt forcefully ejecting the non representative rulers and allowing the planet to flourish (assumably more than without America)
It’s important to remember the impact of scaling populations. The larger your population, the bigger impact we get from the above mentioned human nature.
My comment was such that pure communism and pure free market have a 0% success rate in history. Likewise neither accounts for human nature, and are useless in practice. Competing for which 0.000% success option is better doesn’t really matter to me.
Agreed
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Well, at least your honest… Gotta give you that.
It’s exactly the opposite. It’s the town counsels that want to keep property values up (gov) by not allowing more building, the free market wants to build, build, build, so they can sell, sell, sell, and make huge money.
I prefer it to the new age mentality of ‘publicly supporting’ a concept, only to never actually caring about it.
Not to sound like a dick or anything, I’ve just only got so much bandwidth for shit giving, and there’s already more stuff that directly impacts me that I barely give a shit about.
It is not. Standard development at a standard pace in high demand areas does NOT decrease local property values in any meaningful way. Supply has to outpace demand first for that to happen.
Happy to see a single example in American history. Obviously NYC isn’t a good one.
Agreed. And you don’t make huge money undercutting local prices by 25+% per @twojarslave example
The number of people with access to tens of millions in capital AND zero business sense is very small.
FWIW the only way affordable housing gets built is through massive govt kickbacks and tax breaks. Otherwise those projects are not remotely feasible.
And public restroom either get destroyed on a regular basis, or become drug dens IME. I would assume NYC must spend a pretty penny on maintaining and stocking those public bathroom s.
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That’s not the notion I am talking about. I am talking about the notion that not building in an artificial way as a means to keep property values up is a function of the local governments in these regions and not a bastion of capitalism. There is a huge demand for housing and a tremendous vacuum in the lack of a middle class in these areas which is the opposite of capitalism. If capitalism were functioning in a proper way in these affected areas, building to meet demand would be the prudent way of going about it.
Instead they vote down measures in those communities for building, rather investing in a ‘poop patrol’ rather then allowing people to afford their own place to poop. And the effect is very visible. The erosion the middle class, creating HUGE income disparity in those localities, is an effect caused by the very people who care to lecture the rest of the world about income inequality.
Isn’t it ironic, that the loudest most boisterous noises about income inequality come from the very rich elitists who consistently vote down any chance for reasonably affordable housing near them because they don’t want that ilk in their neighborhoods. And they build walls to keep them out too.
I understand your bandwidth issue. I akin that to be more an issue where I have to be in a good place, before I am any good to anybody else. And it’s not everybody’s job to care about the homeless. You may have other callings no less valuable. And I sure cannot fly to California and fix it for them, they have to do it, because it’s their problem, but our disgust.
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NYC spent a lot on infrastructure. The west is woefully behind. So the government is responsible for the infrastructure, but as far as housing is concerned, the government merely needs to get out of the way. There is a demand, the free market will gladly meet it.
IME developer margins on multifamily are pretty thin. It’s tough to find land that makes a project economically feasible. There is a lot more that goes into making a project work than most folks think, and costs add up.
I guess my question is, how would the freemarket approach drastically increase housing supply and drastically decrease cost in a dense Urban city? Zoning already allows multifamily and short plats in most areas yet I don’t see the supply outpacing demand.
Totally agree on the west being behind on infrastructure. I believe that is because the population out west exploded only “recently”, after the golden age of large scale public works projects.
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