Group of homeless moms and families are taking over a house – this time in L.A | Hacker News Reader

Group of homeless moms and families are taking over a house – this time in L.A

latimes.com

12 pointsericdanielski35 comments

This is basically theft. I bought a home in my home country and still working in foreign land to pay for it, so the home stands there empty, but i would kill if somebody would just "occupy" it while i am landlocked in a different country because corona.

This is wrong on so many levels.

First; no, it's not basically theft. Theft is when you take away something without permission. They are not taking away the house, they are using it. So, it's basically not theft.

Second; this is a vacant house, it's not currently used. By not renting out houses to an affordable prices, the landlords are creating artificial scarcity. Desperate people make desperate choices, if you don't offer them any other options.

So I'm all good with that.

It is illegal use then, what will envolve to theft as soon as they decide to stay indefinitely, what they actually already did, and will realised as somebody try to push them out with or without police force. I don't care if it state or private owned property is: "occupying" homes is theft in my eyes, as it fundamentally shaking the work and merrit based society.

You make the assumption that we have a work and merit based society at all. I don't agree with that, but for the sake of argument, let's run with it.

Even if you have a work and merit based society, you still have to provide the necessities of life to those that are unable to provide for themselves; the sick, the elderly, the unable. This includes those that do not have any abilities your society values. If you have a society that makes good use of it's people and is able to provide everyone with a position of merit, you're fine.

But as soon as you have mass of people that are not able to work and provide merit, you've got a problem. Because you have to somehow stop them from taking what they need anyway. You can do that with police and the military, but in the long run this is not stable.

Given that I don't think that we have a work and merit based society, my conclusion is that we have even more of a responsibility towards those left behind.

They are taking away the ability to use the house. They have not received permission to do so. This is theft.

And of course you’re good with that because you’re a communist and communism is an extended apology for organized crime.

What is “an affordable price”? Who determines this? You? The attraction of communism is that every communist thinks they are the one philosopher-prince who will arrange everything just right yet it never works that way.

I submit to you the free market as dumb and blind and imperfectly realized as it is, is the best embodiment of what “society” actually wants. It is ironically, the closest we’ll get to the ideals of communism.

EDIT: I guess I can’t reply to @esarbe because this comment has been downvoted but for the record, I described @esarbe’ ideas as communism because that’s what they are. Yes communism is objectively evil. It has been responsible for the deaths of millions and the misery of millions more. The free market isn’t perfect — no political philosophy is — but comparatively it is light years ahead of its rivals.

[edit] The tone of the reply was a bit snarky, I admit.

What makes you think I subscribe to the ideology of communism? What makes you think it was responsible for millions of deaths (as opposed to say, tyrannical dictatorship?) What are your proofs that is - as you say - objectively evil?

Saying “Property is theft” is a good sign of being a communist. I have no wish to relitigate “True communism” (another hallmark of a communist confronted with reality.) but I will say “tyrannical dictatorship” far from being opposed to communism is a requirement.

Sure, the USSR was a communist regime, no "True Scotsman" discussion required here.

Although I'd say "tyrannical dictatorship" is a necessary and sufficient condition to get to mass murders and atrocities. No need to further involve communism.

Well, property /is/ theft. You can take up a stick and say it's yours because you made it pointy. That doesn't mean it's not theft on everyone else no longer able to use the stick. Before it was a stick for everyone to use. Maybe someone decided to not make it sticky for a certain purpose. After you take it and make it yours, no one else can take it and make it theirs anymore. So, property is theft (of the common good).

I don't usually downvote. But when I do, I add a comment explaining my action.

Please tell us where your car is parked--I'm sure that you're frequently not using it.

I do think we as a society should ensure that all can be housed. But random squatting is not the answer.

(Also, for those who have never dealt with it, squatters tend to be intensely destructive of property.)

> I do think we as a society should ensure that all can be housed.

That's a good point. That we should indeed.

I don't think anyone on this thread read the article. They are taking over houses bought for the 710 extension that will never be built. I say, if moving into a house helps keep it nice, let them. This sounds cheaper than housing subsidies the county pays. Furthermore, if the kids are being taken care of that's a good thing. Those kids are less likely to grow up and rob and end up in prison @50k per year in cost to the taxpayer.

"<thing> is a human right" == "please spend time, money, and effort so as I can have it without paying, sucker"

Now replace it with housing, healthcare, and any other thing du jour.

As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone.

Property is theft on the common good. If you steal from the common good, you have to deal with the consequences. If you deprive people from making their own living, you have to accept that these people will find ways and means.

You didn't build that.

As a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion.

As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun.

The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.

Your counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival.

Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?

Yes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)

I'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland.

Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden.

Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.

The Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.

The Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.

Waste as used in e.g. the Domesday Book literally means “land not under [human] cultivation.”

That's an interesting definition I knew not about. Thanks for sharing!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wasteland

In the previous discussion, I was mainly focused on the 'barren' and 'barely inhabitable' aspects. If your sentiment was about cultivation; yeah, you're probably right. Hunter/gatherer societies usually do very little cultivation.

(There's some indication that the Amazonas river fronts were heavily cultivated in pre-columbian times, as the presence of terra preta implies, though)

In that case however we'll run into the discussion about 'improving the land', since arguably cutting down woods to make room for agriculturalists is not improving the land for hunter/gatherers.

At the most you’ve established that homeless moms need to live somewhere. It is not necessary to live in a particular house in L.A. for survival.

If I've established that, I'm already very happy we've had this exchange.

Now we can bicker about the details. :D

Sure. It is possible to be against theft and for compassion at the same time.

However I am not in CA and it seems “society” over there has decided its not interested in housing homeless moms.

If society is unwilling to take responsibility, then society has no right to expect obedience.

Just a while ago weren’t you arguing that social needs trump individual rights. (I.e. the right to property.) If society through its chosen spokesmen decides homeless moms don’t need to be provided housing (they are still free to find it in some legal way.) why can it not compel their obedience?

I don't think I argue from social needs. I solely argue from individual needs and rights; the need of the individual to food and shelter; the right to existence; the appropriation of the common good for individual property. Please let me know if I diverge from that at any point, since "social needs" are highly subjective, whereas the individual needs usually aren't.

https://i.imgur.com/322zDhK.jpg

Addendum;

Sure, society can always compel and force somebody to obedience. That's why a society usually tries to monopolize the exertion of power through law enforcement. That might even give society the power to expel a homeless mother along with her children from a house that's been empty for 35 years.

My argument is not about ability but about morality.

Spot on!

You sound like someone who isn’t aware of the wonderful events where tens of millions of people suffered and died of starvation and political prosecution where such schemes were plentiful.

Perhaps living in the USSR was indeed the golden years for you?

You sound like someone ... [insert boring and repetitive, possible derogatorive epithet that doesn't provide anything useful to the conversation and end with a snarky, rhetorical question].

> "Property is theft on the common good."

Who are you? George Orwell?

Indeed, I am. How did you figure it out?

Seriously; where does any property come from?

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