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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

>Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable

It's not at all intractable. Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.

The homeless and jobless serve a function, though - to keep wages and agitation down for the precariously employed and the precariously housed. They're like this mainly for the benefit of corporations like Amazon which farm cheap labor.

Effectively the homeless serve as a form of 'public good' for the owners of capital.

That's why proposals to house or give homeless jobs with government money are met with sheer disgust by the same media that happily endorses spending billions of dollars dropping bombs on brown children.

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It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness. You'd have to treat that first. Some of them might not want to be treated though...

The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them. The state may need to step in with a minimum wage (or basic income), but otherwise the system should work fine.

>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.

Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.

>The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them.

More unemployed + homeless

=> More afraid workers

=> Workers who are willing to take a lower wage

=> Higher profits

The notion that higher production automatically leads to higher profits is pretty comical.

>>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.

>Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.

Achievement unlocked: Trivialized mental illness.

Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person. Some people just cannot function as independent adults. One person I know managed to score Section 8 housing, and she trashed the apartment and threatened the landlord and ended up on the street. Until her condition deteriorated enough for the police to call a 5150 on her.

But she doesn't consider herself crazy. Just stressed out. Modern liberation theory means the institutions consider her to be an adult, so if she says she doesn't want to stay in an asylum, then there's no way for us non-super-rich people to stop her from leaving psychiatric care and ruining her life.

There is no firm boundary between crazy and sane, and even being delusional doesn't prevent one from being a productive member of society. We just don't have enough appropriate services for all the crazy people in this country.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGY6DqB1HX8

>Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person.

Most of them started out not being able to hold down a job, however.

>The state may need to step in with a minimum wage

Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.

Allowing people to work for less would cause a race to the bottom in which nobody would make enough to survive.

We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.

Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.

I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by refusing them the autonomy to make their own decisions.

No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.

Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.

Most chronically homeless people suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, but there's a distinction between the long term homeless and those who are temporarily down on their luck (like one woman mentioned in the article, who moved to Seattle for employment reasons and was thrown off when her state based certification didn't transfer).

I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.

Your theory is essentially Marxist (capital colluding to hold down the workers), and like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.

Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.

>like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.

Some but not all. This one certainly doesn't fall apart.

>Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society

Cohesive power blocs often come together to act as as a unified political agent when they have shared interests.

Two good institutional examples of corporate power blocs in the US are Cato and the AEI. Many of their members compete for market share, but they joined forces to gain political representation together to have their interests as a whole represented.

This is like saying systematic discrimination doesn't exist because the hegemonic group does not have a single organization deliberately applying discrimination.

Actually according to Marxism capital doesn't have to collude, there need not be any conspiracy, holding down the workers is the natural conclusion of capitalism.

>Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.

Can I live in your simple universe?

Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?

Quite so. The term for this is [the reserve army of labour][0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

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