Homeless model: New York's hidden homeless

I can't verify it, so I can't say "you have been homeless" or I'd be lying about having evidence of something I don't. So I used the reported speech version, "you say you have been homeless". It was not meant as an attack, nor to be ironic, nor anything like that.

> I disagree with your entire post. It's based on this false assumption, "the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment".

Wrong. You could have argued that you disagree with my being against helping the poor and homeless stay in the city, as that was the only part of the post predicated on the premise that cities are wealth-creation centers. Which they de facto have been historically (regardless of intent or word definitions). In other words, all wealth produced has mostly come from cities as opposed to farms. Therefore, cities are wealth-creation centers, de facto.

> Definition of a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City

Definition of "de facto" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto

"in fact, in reality, in actual existence, force, or possession, as a matter of fact"

> Nothing in there mentioned wealth, or welfare. Remove that personal bias/motive from your proposal and your proposal very quickly falls apart.

And yet all the wealth in the world came overwhelmingly from cities, which makes them de facto wealth-creation centers. And it's a premise, not a "proposal". And the premise is correct, and your definitional refutation is a non-sequitur to it. I am arguing about what cities end up effecting in reality, and you're showing me something someone wrote on a website. If you're not going to address my arguments, you shouldn't reply to me, you should post under your own thread branch.

> That is before one would progress to the more offensive part of your argument: That those with money and wealth have more right to live in a city than those without. That those who work in lower paid industries have less of a right than those in higher paid industries.

Offense is in the eye of the beholder, it is not inherent to topics or arguments. If you hadn't brought your ego to this conversation, you would not have been offended. I haven't, and I'm not. I also never mentioned rights, and I have no idea what you mean by it, since you seem to be using that word in a gradual sense ("more right"... "less of a right") when to me it is a binary thing (you either have a right or you don't). But if you want me to rephrase what I said to use the word "rights", I can do it: everyone has the right to live in a city, but no one has the right to demand that others pay for them to do so.

So if you have the skills it takes to live in a city (a place where you can't grow your own food and have to rely on money to use services to provide you with what would otherwise be free in your plot of farmland) and you want to, you can, because you have that right. But if you want to, and you can't afford to because you don't have the skills to substitute for manual labor, then you still have the right to live in the city, but at the moment you are unable to because you can't support yourself, and you don't have the right to demand others to pay for your expenses. Is this clear enough now?

> It seems horribly convenient as a concept, that you could put the poor and homeless on buses and drive them out of your sight.

The point is not to drive them out of my sight. It seems you are mischaracterizing what I am saying to make me look bad. Don't do that, it's not an argument. Even if the farm is next to my house, the point is to give the poor a way to be independent so they don't have to rely on other people's money to survive. The point is not to "drive them out of my sight", it is to teach them to fish, to be self-sufficient, and not to be dependent on others giving them fish.

Since we're speaking in terms of Austrian Economics, now is the time to say this whole thing is based on property rights. So the ultimate point of this is, that if you don't have money to pay to live in the city, or if you don't have a friend who will spot you or whatever, then you can't just be in the city and homeless, because you'd be trespassing someone else's property. This is the key idea. You can't be homeless because you'd be a trespasser. So you either have to fund your stay yourself, or get voluntary help (from friends, family, etc) in order to be housed.

> Under Austrian economics, how would your plan pan out? If the city removed all the poor people, who would do the work they were doing? Does Austrian economics believe that suddenly the wealthy, or rather the people who can afford to live in the city will suddenly pay increased wages to people wash dished, clean streets, do people's laundry etc.?

The city is not removing poor people. You are misconstruing what I said. If someone is found trespassing private property, and it is found they are doing so because they are destitute, then they will be asked to go back to their farmland, or face punishment for trespassing (which no one would choose). Austrian Economics says that the market will have to find a way to fund what it needs to do while being able to pay its workforce what they need to live within an acceptable distance of where they need to be to do their work. This will be solve in a myriad of ways, too many to count really - each company will find their own solution and some companies might converge to a locally optimal solution. But it's not up to any planner, you or I, to tell the market how they should solve their problem of funding their human resources. They will know that if they don't pay someone enough, they might not be able to live within the area they need to be around to do their job. So you will get a sort of self-fulfilling maintenance of a wage floor automatically from competition.

> I could see it might work if as you say, its illegal to stay in the city unless you make a certain amount, therefore making it illegal to pay less than a living wage. Is 'minimum wage' covered under Austrian economics? Would it be set higher for more expensive cities? Or would the wealthy just keep the status quo by busing in people from the mandatory farms and still paying them shitty wages?

Close. Indeed it would be illegal to trespass, which would mean you either can pay for where you are living, or you are authorized by the owner who pays for that place, to stay there. With regards to minimum wage, I addressed this above. With regards to busing people in for "shitty wages", any offer a city person makes to a farmer is voluntary and the farmer is not compelled to accept it, seeing that they don't need to accept it for them to be able to have food and shelter.

> Also, do you think that people would be able to learn enough from public libraries to become a 'producer' as you say? Not everyone is an autodidact.

Yes, I believe they would. Long-term prisoners learn the law of their cases when they can't afford a lawyer or when no one will pick their case up. Where there is an incentive there will be a drive.

> Lastly, what would you do about someone like me? I was homeless and jobless in Hawaii for 6 months because of bureaucratic reasons (I am a US citizen who lived abroad for all my life, and when I moved to the US I had no Social Security Number, therefore couldn't work legally until one had been assigned to me) I have been homeless a few times, but I have never once had to claim welfare of any type.

If you have authorization from some property owner to stay at their place, you could do that. Otherwise if you have no money to pay for a place to stay, and you know no one who will provide you with a place to stay, then obviously that means that by force of circumstance you can't stay because you can't afford to.

> Would your system have me picked up by the cops for breaking the law and shipped to 40 acres with a mule to til the earth until I have learned the error of my ways, and good work ethics?

Only if you break the law. You don't have to break the law. If you leave as soon as you lose your job and can tell you're not likely to find another, or as soon as you run out of savings, then you won't be trespassing and therefore will be able to willingly return to your farmland by yourself.

> Or would a system that tried to treat the root causes of poverty instead of symptoms be more effective?

Indeed it would, which is why I am proposing one to replace the current system that treats the symptoms of being poor, since all it does is give men fish (welfare benefits) instead of teaching them how to fish (how to work for themselves and not have to rely on other people's money). The symptom of poverty is not having money, and this is all that the State tries to fix, namely by giving poor people money. That is treating the symptoms. The root cause of poverty is not being able to provide for oneself. This system I am proposing would treat the root cause of poverty by giving poor people a way to provide for themselves, namely by giving them a farm. Do you understand it now?

> Instead of small farms and deportation of the poor how about livable minimum wages?

Instead of gas guzzling cars, how about flying unicorns?

Small farms and transportation (no one said "deportation" but you, right now, sneakily trying to build a straw-man) exist in the real world, they can be defined in detail, I can draw small farms and transportations, and even take pictures of them to prove they exist, whereas whatever "livable minimum wages" is or means, it doesn't enjoy the same benefits - it can't be defined in detail, you can't draw it or take a picture of one to show me what this is, and you can't prove they exist. It's just a rhetorical term. It's not something real, like a farm or a bus.

> Instead of good libraries, how about free university education?

Instead of reading books, how about free live narrations?

Well, that's because you can't find a way to convince narrators to work for free without pointing a gun to their heads. Same goes for free university education, there's no way to get professors to work for free without pointing a gun to their heads. Unless you are suggesting pointing a gun to everyone's heads and extorting everyone to pay for those professors, but if I thought you were suggesting that, I'd have to assume you are some sort of psychopath, what with wanting to exert violent influence over so many people.

Books and libraries exist and they are a solved problem - we know how to put books in libraries and make them available to people. What we don't know is how to force someone to provide a service for free without impinging on their rights, and you just showed it.

> Instead of making producers of every human being, what about addressing the people who benefit off the production of tens of thousands of people, yet give little back to the system that allows them to do this?

The system that allows people to benefit so much without giving back is crony capitalism, which is exactly what I am proposing we eliminate. The Federal Reserve themselves has admitted that they have widened the wealth gap. So now you have a named target to hate: Federal Reserve. Join the club.

> I ask this straight forwardly, as I do not know Austrian economics. But while I wait your reply, I shall look it up online and see what it is all about.

Let me know how it goes!

And by free I mean free as in money, not free as in freedom. So free air and free water doesn't count. You can count free hygienic bottled water. And yes there are places where the alternative is sewage.

We don't have rent-control in Boston, but we do have a housing bubble.