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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

So here the things that stand out to me between what you linked and what the other person said...

From your link:

"at one-eighth of the standard cost of development...Each bedroom unit has its own bathroom and shower to allow for isolation during the pandemic". So there are special pandemic isolation considerations factored in, which surely increases costs. That doesn't sound terrible if real shelter is being provided.

Do we think that California can just ship homeless people off somewhere else that won't then try to ship them back? Or do we think that the cost of building new infrastructure for them all in the middle of nowhere will be lower than the cost of building housing in already established infrastructure? I mean, it's obviously not as cheap as dumping them in the ocean, but that's not our target standard.

Between your link and the other person:

300 people sounds very different than "them all".

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If it wasn't completely illegal, I'd argue to give each homeless person $10,000 and to exile them for life from the state of California.

I guess if you get arrested in California after that maybe you get exiled to Siberia or something

It's not illegal to pay people to leave. But if your thought is that $10k is enough to get them back on their feet so that they won't be homeless anymore, why not just give them the $10k without the other part? It would both be cheaper to implement and also keep the money circulating inside the state instead of going somewhere else.

Why give them anything at all? That's even cheaper. These people aren't coming to the state to escape homelessness they're coming to the state for the free perks. Leave convincing people to change to the charities and quit wasting public money on bottomless pits.

> Why give them anything at all? That's even cheaper.

Because morality isn't measured by how much money you can save watching your neighbors rot. Well...to some people anyway. We start with the desire to benefit others as the first principle and then determine how to do it. That's called being prosocial rather than antisocial.

Yes. Clearly it’s measured by how much money you take by force from other people and give maybe 10% to anybody that ‘needs’ it.

It is called the price of admission. Don't like it? Leave. Last time I checked no one was preventing you from making a run for Nevada.

The point is that there is nothing morally positive about forcing other people to pay for your ideas, even if you think that they are morally positive ideas.

The poster was responding to somebody that was being forced to do something that they didn’t want to, and the response was something along the lines of moral obligation. This is obviously not the shared opinion, and has no objective basis to it, so that argument could be, and has been, abused to justify any kind of force.

It would be more honest to just admit that the situation has a lot more to do with power than morals, which I think is what you are getting at: there is no voice, only exit.

Well, if you favor watching your neighbors rot instead of contributing to raise them up, if you consider taxes paid for social welfare to be theft, you don't have to stay in California. Nobody forces you to live in a society.

You know, the taxes they force you to pay are only a minimum requirement. Government is like any other service or charity out there. You don’t have to vote to force other people to buy the product; you can purchase as much as you want yourself!

But actually you are wrong about that. I paid California taxes for several years spent overseas. The only tie I had was a bank account.

Side note: there are some other jurisdictions around the world that have some innovative public funding models based on payer choice with minimum contribution set by vote. This is sort of like the Marilyn Vos Savant “you cut I choose” model, and it seems to me that such a market model would vastly outcompete the command contribution model for delivering social benefit.

$10,000 is enough to get you back on your feet assuming you leave California, in many places you could actually rent an apartment for $800 a month or so. 10K gets you in your place for three or four months, gets some furniture ,gives you more than enough time to get your life together.

A significant amount of the homeless, really do just need a bit of help. But they also need to get out of California, it's by far the worst state in America for working-class people.

I don't disagree with most of what you said, though I do disagree that one needs to leave California to thrive for the timeframe you've given on $10k. I still don't see where forced exile for life comes into play though.

The idea is this $10,000 is the last bit of money the state of California will spend on you. If you want to take that $10,000 spend it all on anime, and then camp in the woods in Colorado cool just don't become California's problem again.

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