25967 replies to this topic

[Rorschach]

You are free to aid them voluntarily. I am free to let nature take its course. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, he has to support his life by his own effort. It's not wrong or evil for me to believe this.

I have no issue with our medical system addressing medical problems. The problem is a medical one and should be solved that way. As Canadians, we all consented to this.

The Times Colonist's first article is a good example of the lack of clear thinking that perpetuates the problem. The symptoms are the cause? That's illogical.

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The material is the whole of the universe with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by his own effort by his own choice by his own mind. He is not exempt from the laws of reality.

Illness and poverty are part of the normal risks of existance. If a man is temporarily helpless one may bring him food and medicine if one can afford it as an act of good will, not of duty. You can raise a fund among neighbors to help him out too, but it does not mean that one must support him from then on, nor must one spend their life looking for starving men to feed.

[Holden West]

The homeless survey data claims that only five percent of homeless people don't want a job.

Your philosophy seems to say "tough luck" to those that fall through the cracks.

Society is obligated to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. This is not merely a philosophy, it's a hallmark of civilized society. In short, it's what separates us from animals.

[Rorschach]

Why is it an obligation? What is uncivilized about my ideas? Why should the collective goals of society trump logic and reason? I'm only saying that I have no duty to aid those who fall through the cracks and I do not object to anyone who wants to help such persons voluntarily.

I'm likewise saying that those who do help the derelicts create nothing of value. Their efforts have not changed a thing and will never change a thing and that it is against their own best interests and mine to do so. A tough luck approach will solve the problem.

What a man requires to survive is set by his nature and not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

My point is essentially that if you want to help them, you won't be stopped. If you cannot obtain everybody's voluntary participation, your goals should remain unachieved. My life and my efforts and my work and any value I create are not yours to dispose of.

It is medically possible to take the corneas of a man's eyes immediately after his death and transplant them to the eyes of a living man who is blind, thus restoring his sight in certain types of blindness. Now, according to your view of a civilized society this poses a social problem. Should we regard everybody's eyes as public property and devise a fair method of distribution? Would you advocate cutting out a living man's eye and giving it to a blind man so as to equalize them? No? Then don't struggle any further with questions about public obligations in a free society. You know the answer. The principle is the same.

[G-Man]

Wow,

Your philosophy is a bit at odds with living in a social democracy. I mean your beliefs go against an extremely large part of our legislation both provincially and federally. These laws were created by politicians elected by the people and in most cases reflect the wishes of large portions of our society.

Ciao

[Holden West]

Rorschach, I'm not talking about that minority that choose to "stick it to the man" and live the hobo lifestyle, and it doesn't help your argument to keep steering this conversation in that direction. If some dude wants to opt out of the system, I say "good luck, pal" and if you can't contribute to society, then for god's sake at least try not to make it any worse.

I'm more interested in talking about those who have fallen through the cracks and are willing to help themselves out of the whole. Charities serve a good function as donors can target specific causes and amounts. Unfortunately, there are often gaps, especially when the cause is not popular or well known (The research money directed to breast cancer vs. colo-rectal cancer is one that comes to mind).

The cornea story is a textbook-definition straw man argument.

[m0nkyman]

I agree that we have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate. That is different from saying that they have a right to our help.

[Ms. B. Havin]

There has to be balance, and I feel that a "social Darwinian" approach (which is what you seem to be proposing, Rorschach) throws the baby out with the bath water. The reason we don't do that anymore (social darwinism) is because we've learned that it is more expensive to do over the long run than applying social democratic principles. I get really fed up by the discourse around social problems -- for example, not differentiating between different kinds of homelessness, or being too willing to embrace the idea that we're all just victims (which I think is insulting) -- and I sometimes suspect that there's a whole industry out there that provides good jobs for people who develop a vested interest in maintaining a perverse kind of status quo (the "helping" and "therapy" industry, and all their little wizards), but that doesn't mean that we should let society revert to a jungle.

I think Malcolm Gladwell's "Million Dollar Murray" article (New Yorker, Feb.13, 2006) has disappeared behind a pay-per firewall, but I've got some key excerpts to share. Gladwell illustrates that providing people with supportive housing is actually cheaper than letting them fall down again and again and again. But, to repeat: this is for the hard-core cases who really can't do it on their own. People who "choose" homelessness or the street as a "lifestyle"... well, those folks can just get out of my face, because I don't buy that anymore, even if various Times Colonist articles try to convince me that they're all entitled to be accomodated. It's a really BAD idea to keep enabling that ideology, not least because it hurts the people who really can't pull themselves up anymore since we start to lump the "choosers" together with the "losers." If this is what you've chosen, then you should know that you're hurting people who really are helpless. As for the helpless, for pete's sake, get them off the streets and into supportive housing.

Here're some excerpts from Gladwell's article ("Million-Dollar Murray: Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage"). They don't necessarily hang together, just some key bits I have on my computer; so everytime you see (...), it means there's a gap:

In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren’t an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. “One morning, I’m listening to one of the talk shows, and they’re just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is,” O’Bryan said. “And I thought, Wow, I’ve never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies.” O’Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald’s fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren’t the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a “One down” call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.

(...)

Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

“It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan said.

(...)

The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.

(...)

If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a “power law” distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.

(...)

If you made the mistake of assuming that the department’s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you’d propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle—like better training or better hiring—when the middle didn’t need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn’t be nearly strong enough.

(...)

In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress.

(...)

Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution.

(...)

They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind.

Note: this suggests that 80% pull themselves up and out of homelessness; 10% are "episodic users" (often young, drug users, too); and the final 10% are the chronically homeless, the wrecks who eat up all the money and who should be in supportive housing permanently...

this group [i.e., the 10%] costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.

(...)

it’s the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars
...all we’re doing is making them capable of walking down the block.

(...)

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard.

(...)

The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the past two years, he has crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it’s a problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reëvaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.

Note: Philip Mangano is making the rounds in Canada, too, which one hopes gets off its hoity-toity anti-American parochialist horse and listens. He was in Abbotsford on Wednesday, May 9. See [url=http://www.civicinfo.bc.ca/302n.asp?newsid=2157:26b66]Homelessness Expert Shares Success of US Program[/url:26b66] (city of Abbotsford press release on CivicInfo BC)

Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. “I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

(...)

C.C.H. went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness.

(...)

The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: Would you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at the Y.M.C.A. or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program.

(...)

An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street.

(...)

The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that the very sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. Some of them plainly won’t be able to get there: these are, after all, hard cases. “We’ve got one man, he’s in his twenties,” Post said. “Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver. One time he blew a blood alcohol of .49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place we had he brought over all his friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window. Then we gave him another apartment, and he did the same thing.”

Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could relapse at some point and perhaps trash another apartment, and they’d have to figure out what to do with him next. Post had just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who run a similar program, and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply encourages them to behave irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the alternative?

(...)

Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A.

(...)

From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair.
It’s simply about efficiency.

(...)

There isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit—to observe the principle of universality—isn’t as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don’t solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

Note: at this point, Gladwell switches to the problem of smog and car exhaust emissions. He shows that the power law curve or distribution applies here, too, and then goes on to make more observations that pretty much fit the debates we have here:

Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and—presto—the air gets better. But Stedman doesn’t much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn’t so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It’s a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?

(...)

The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that’s not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know better. It’s that we didn’t want to know better. It was easier the old way.

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.

[Caramia]

Our social structure depends on a network of agreements and covenants - all of which have been negotiated by history. At different points in history, and in different places other social covenants have held sway - such as the idea of the "commons" which belonged to no one and everyone, where all people were free to graze their goats etc. Or the idea of "squatters" rights, by which if you stay on, and improve a piece of land, it becomes yours. Or the idea of nobless oblige, where the position of relative priviledge incured certain duties to the poor. There are many other examples - but the point is that what a person's "rights" and "duties" are is wholely a matter of social contract.

Within our current social contract we do have provisions for our obligation towards derelicts - in short, those for whom the system works will try to provide a base standard of living for those for whom it doesn't - (many of whom are mentally ill, or grew up with abuse, or were in some other way damaged and unable to provide for themselves within our society.) In return, we expect and enforce their compliance with the laws and rules that keep it together for those of us for whom it does work.

For instance, when a group of 30 derelicts came up with money to lease a building downtown in which they intended to provide themselves with shelter and security, the City shut it down - because our rules require a certain number of bathrooms per person. In another example, when a group of derelicts squatted Sombrio Beach and lived there in a stable community for 30 years in cabins they constructed themselves, the government was able to evict them - because our rules do not provide for the right to squat unused land and to build yourself a home that does not fit into any building code.

These are examples of times when the "right" to provide for ourselves was compromised by the social contract that ensures property rights and standards of housing. Did it work for those people? No. Having enforced our laws upon them, what then are our duties towards them? None?

In developing nations around the world, human rights agents have worked with politicians to legalise and legitimise the shanty town squatter settlements that ring almost every major urban center. In Victoria, these settlements would never be allowed to be constructed in the first place. In parts of the world where poverty is endemic, the concept of refusing people the right to provide for themselves or their relatives by say... building a shack in their backyard, or on some unused bit of ground is inconceivable. Only our relative wealth allows us the luxury of making such things illegal.

Morally, in my opinion, the choice is to either relax all restrictions against providing for yourself in all the ways I have listed above OR to keep our social contract intact by continuing to allow only such shelter as fits within our laws and bylaws while making provisions for those who are unable to meet those standards.

[Holden West]

I agree that we have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate. That is different from saying that they have a right to our help.

You need to specify what you mean by "less fortunate". Harry the hobo? Sure, I agree with you. But for those truly unable to care for themselves your argument is false. Those unable to help themselves have a right to our help.

Lumping together both groups is evading the question. Turning this into an issue of personal ethics makes our society resemble that of ancient Sparta where disabled children were often put to death on recommendation from a council of elders because they were a drain on society.

[m0nkyman]

Those unable to help themselves have a right to our help

No. They don't. There are no rights in existence that force another to act. There are moral obligations, but nobody has a right to my help.

[Rorschach]

Your philosophy is a bit at odds with living in a social democracy. I mean your beliefs go against an extremely large part of our legislation both provincially and federally. These laws were created by politicians elected by the people and in most cases reflect the wishes of large portions of our society.

What laws are those? We have a legal obligation to negate the consequences freely chosen by these derilicts? Can you be specific? With such a large body of legislation both provincial and federal, it should be a very simple matter for you to be specific. There is no such thing as social democracy by force. I support democracy and I am willing to defer to it completely. I vote and I have my say. I think the law does provide that they receive medical treatment. It does not say I have to pay for their housing and a lifetime income. No one has a legal right to the unearned. There is no such law.

How old is the saying, "Give a man a fish and you make him a slave. Teach him to fish and you set him free."?

The alleged goals of socialism were the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure -- terrifying that is, if one's motive is man's welfare. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.

It is not society's obligation to support parasites. The truly needy and infirm are not the problem and they get public assistance and don't cause a problem or a drain on everyone else. The drunks, the drug addicts, the lazy and shiftless - screw them. I'm not going to be guilted into propping them up and the government should not force me to. Why reward bad behavior? Why reward it as public policy or as a public obligation?

Your philosophy defies logic and reason.

[Rorschach]

The cornea story is a textbook-definition straw man argument.

The issue is the same. You want to take something of value from me by force as a social obligation. It's no straw-man.

[G-Man]

In BC, off the top of my head there are:

Employment and Assistance Act
Health Act

[Icebergalley]

When did this "issue" get moved to the member's only forum?

[G-Man]

I moved it because it was having less and less to do with our built form. If you look at the def. for Urban Issues this really didn't fit the bill anymore.

This could go into politics to if there is consensus that it should not be here...

[Icebergalley]

It's really into politics or political philosophy...

Or impacts on the regional economy..

It's your call if it's debated in public or behind the "members's only curtain..

[Rorschach]

How can I get a lifetime of income for no work and a free house? After all, that's what society decided was best when they passed the Employment and Assistance Act and the Health Act. Don't the laws apply to everyone? Why can't I get the same benefit as a bum sleeping in the doorway of Chintz? Since when is a free choice to be a bum a disability? I've already stated they should be treated medically under the Health Act.

Your claim is absurd on its face G-Man.

[G-Man]

I'll move it into Politics. Hopefully you will never have to use the EA Act but most that do do it only because they have no other choice.

Just so everyone is aware I didn't move this here to hide it

[Rorschach]

I just can't fathom how it is that the EA act which provides assistance to the disabled is exploited by derelicts. They get the money for a medical disability but refuse treatment or can't get treatment for the disability under the health act -- and yet they can still keep the money and demand even more and demand a home on the government teat too? And the majority of Canadians believe this is the right thing to do? And I'm being silly for having a harsh opinion on the matter and expressing incredulity at all of this?

[Rorschach]

I'm more interested in talking about those who have fallen through the cracks and are willing to help themselves out of the whole.

Who are those guys? I never see any of them anywhere and I don't see them causing any problems downtown. If they are willing to help themselves, what exactly are they waiting for? They should get to it. With so many do-gooders out there, why don't they simply help these types and quit trying to force me to help them?