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Comment by alvalentini | Hacker News Reader

There have been, and continue to be, social experiments proving that giving homeless people a house ends up being less expensive to communities and way more humane.

Maybe it's lack of understanding. Maybe lack of knowledge. Maybe selfishness. But it's doable, more efficient and decent.

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Or maybe not even a house but just money:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-...

(I also submitted that as an own thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19705704 )

Unfortunately the "but I worked for my money, so you can't give people money for free"-attitude prevents these sort of pilot programs from moving forward. Never mind that you're actually saving money, giving the homeless a better quality of life, and reduce nuisance for the rest of us.

One unintended consequence that you run into is that people for whom the program was not designed for and targeted to will actively try to consume it (e.g. an able-bodied person instead of a homeless individual with mental health issues). This, by the way, occurs today. There was a social worker from LA (I think) that talked about how big of a problem this is and how much drain on time, and resources it is in practice.

Because we live in a finite world, you're always going to be resource constrained, what happens is that you have to necessarily create a massive bureaucracy to triage and control who should and shouldn't get access to this program - which explodes the cost, and incentivizes cheating by those that don't get access. It also sets up an arms race, where you keep increasing the bureaucracy in order to control for new inventive ways that the program is abused, leading to more costs. I'm not sure if you're suggesting that property rights be given to the individual, or if staying in social housing is dependent on certain criteria being continually met. Either way, you're looking at more bureaucracy, and corresponding cheating, that again, explodes costs and creates new unintended consequences (for example, preventing able-bodied people from moving around to seek better opportunities, in the same way that rent-control does).

In other words, you'll merely recreate our present system. Writing a check is easy and if that was all that was needed, we'd have solved every societal problem a long time ago. There is no free lunch.

Do they get them of the streets, permanently? How about the neighbors?

Or how about we collectively got our shit together and realized that it is _not_ wrong to require certain things of people, and to enforce consequences when they don't obey them.

It's the idea that making someone else's life too easy is somehow immoral, especially if they obtain something valuable without the hard work.

People don’t usually see it as “making life easy is immoral” but as “making their life easier than mine is unfair”

You can always make their life easier by giving them YOUR money. Heck, you could even adopt them and house them in your own home. I would respect that. But I don't want one cent of my money to go to these kind of programs, and I think that my stand on this issue should be respected.

Do you want one cent of your money to go to farm subsidies, corporate welfare, or making defense contractors rich?

>I think that my stand on this issue should be respected.

But I don't think it's remotely worthy of respect. You want to live in a society like that, go somewhere with no public schools or roads or firefighters.

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