I had a friend say (nearly 25 years ago) that homelessness is a necessity of capitalism. There will always be a portion of the population kept in that position so the rest of us wage slaves have something to motivate us to keep eating shit from our ruling class.
If we were shown a path to safety and security without sacrificing our bodies and minds to a paycheck, we just might rebel.
Preach. I rant about the same thing all the time.
Capitalism is decentralized tyranny. If a dictator said "if you refuse to work where I send you I will starve you to death on the streets" most Americans would recoil. But capitalism says "if you do not provide enough value for the upper class, they will not give you enough tokens to exchange for food and housing, and you will starve to death on the streets". And we just shrug and say it's the workers' fault for not working hard enough - because "no one is forcing you" - there's no specific individual we can blame for starving the unwanted population to death, it's the insensate grinding of the gears of a machine, and don't be silly, we can't turn off the machine, what are you, traitor?
And even with the open dictator model, many Americans would say "that just makes sense, if you don't work you don't eat" and cheer the dictator for putting lazy useless people to work. Just look how many people support slave labor in private, for profit prisons, and how many people want unhoused people to be enslaved in those exact same prisons. Hell, at the height of the Qanon craze something like 20% of Americans believed that Donald Trump would enact martial law and put millions of liberals in concentration camps and wanted it to happen. We're addicted to the taste of boot.
There's no need to attack conservatives here. I'm just as concerned about the safety and prosperity of my unhoused neighbors as you are.
This is a bad and anticonservative law. Everyone who loves liberty should be fighting it.
I agree, everyone who loves liberty should oppose this law.
Unfortunately, if you are conservative and you oppose this law, in my experience you are damn near a unicorn. I'm in California and these kind of brutal crackdowns are wildly popular among conservatives - and moderates, and even wealthy white liberals. Like the article says, blaming the victims of homelessness for the homeless crisis has been incredibly effective. And most people don't understand how corrupt the homeless industrial complex is, how little government funding actually gets to the homeless to help them, and how incompetent, abusive, and poorly run those aid programs actually are, so it's easy to look at all the money and programs that exist on paper and blame homeless people for "refusing help".
You can call this 'anticonservative' all you want, but the hard truth is the ruling was only made possible because of who conservatives voted for in the first place.
The current Republican Party is anti conservative in a lot of ways, but those terms have become roughly synonymous
I wholeheartedly agree with the first part and must reluctantly concede the second.
Conservatism isn't what you think it is. Conservatives not only are, in fact, the enemies of liberty, they always have been.
Anything worth saying is worth saying in plaintext.
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