And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.

And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.

In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)

Other people have a demand to dump garbage in the ocean because it's cheaper than disposing of their trash properly.

How does the free market solve this? Will someone be buying the ocean any time soon?

The supply and demand model only applies to analysis of microeconomic systems with perfect competition, namely of systems that lack monopoly and monopsony; that have perfect information; that lack an ability of a single economic actor to affect the price in the market; that lack externalities[0]; that lack transaction costs; that lack unknowable probability distributions of outcomes; that lack economic actors that change their behaviors based on what they expect other actors to do; and that lack non-market rules or structures that restrict prices, quantities, or entry. These assumptions are all-or-nothing, and there are a lot of them. It's also an equilibrium model, and we aren't guaranteed to have equilibrium.

For macroeconomic analysis (i.e., analysis of multiple sectors of an economy or multiple economies), it's problematic because of a theorem from the 1970's due to Sonnenschein, Mantel, and Debreu. I've stated it elsewhere, but it also has the implication that the behaviors of the actors in a microeconomic system do not carry over to the macroeconomic context. This tends to violate many of the assumptions above. (Though, if it isn't obvious how or why, please ask.) Furthermore, in the macro context, I don't think we'll ever have equilibrium; at least, I'm having a hard time thinking of an example when it exists.

Let's bring in a physics analogy. While we can look at mechanics through the lens of elementary algebra, those tools really only give us the ability to look at static force-balance problems for springs and pulleys in equilibrium. To model such a system more closely to how it behaves in the universe, with damping, inertia, and feedback (and whatever other time-dependent behaviors I may be forgetting), we are best served moving to differential equations.

Economics is no different; the supply and demand model is a lot like Hooke's law in its simplicity and its applicability. (In fact, in my modeling, I very heavily used numerical solutions of PDEs.)

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0: When the retail price of kerosene tanked by 70% between 1860 and 1880, this resulted in millions more kerosene lamps and lamps broadly being lit for longer periods of time. This had externalities in the form of more soot and particulate matter (and probably also respiratory illness, but I couldn't seem to find anything with observations from the time period).

If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.

The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.

Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here.

The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud.

Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.