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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Places like Helsinki never had a large community of homeless people to begin with (natural selection). But it has plenty of social issues of course. Alcoholism is a big problem for example and there probably are lots of issues with drug usage and mental health as well. However, it's not a country with a lot of illegal immigration, or a lot refugees with ambiguous legal status. I.e. the vast majority of problematic people are all citizens that have full coverage under the excellent social system. So, they are insured and probably are entitled to some form of income.

And the locals are very pragmatic about it not being desirable to have drunk homeless people passing out and freezing to death in the winter. So, they never had a huge problem with homeless people to begin with and what little homeless people they had were take care off via shelters and other solutions already.

The "innovation" in Finland was realizing that simply providing proper housing to these people is a pragmatic alternative that actually improves their situation while lowering overall cost at the same time. Shelters cost money and they have to be staffed and when they fill up you need to spend money on emergency shelters, which costs more money. And shelters perpetuate the problem. So, providing housing lowers cost and you get a meaningful percentage of people to a level where they stop being a problem. Which frees up more resources to deal with the remaining people more effectively. And it's nice to see people get out of such a situation. Win win.

That's definitely something other countries can learn from.

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This is a nuanced issue and I agree with what you wrote. I live in Finland. Some additional thoughts:

- The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions.

- The state vs government system in the US means it's every state for themselves when solving social issues. This is seen in states actively shipping homeless people to warmer climate states in order to make their problems go away.

- As you point out, homeless people die in the winter. It's also cold in many places in the US, and hot in others - so people die all the time there too.

- As a society Finland has a robust social security system, the society is built on it - and the idea of equality (Hint: its not, but it's not bad at all either compared to other countries). The amount of Americans I've seen arguing against free healthcare as they don't want to pay for it just blows my mind, I would imagine you'd go into a similar situation if the government raised taxes to "fix the homeless problem". "Well i'm not homeless, why should i pay for these people's problems" etc. (Not my view, just predicting how it will go).

> The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions

Problems get big if they are ignored for long enough. Fix the root causes first: https://www.retireguide.com/retirement-planning/risks/medica...

Whatever remains can be solved with social housing.

>> The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level.

True. Just for some comparison, if Finland was a metropolitan in US, it would be ranked 10th. Above Phoenix metro and Below Atlanta Metro. I understand the good intentions of people trying to show case 'Scandinavian countries' as a model. They miss many things including Scale.

yes, so economies of scale

> They miss many things including Scale.

Yes, it's very easy to completely miss scale, as well as missing sensible priorities, etc, and embrace a mantra of exceptionalism as a convenience.

Apropos ranking, the United States spends more on military / defense than the next 10 countries combined.

Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free.

We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.

No, you pay to continue having hegemony over multiple continents. Don't call American military spending in any sense some kind of altruism, it's done to keep the USA power and money floating around.

The early reasoning was to not repeat the mistake of the two world wars -- where American kids had to bleed in a European conflict. Of course, US got involved because so much money was lent to allies etc. There is a reason -- why Algeria is not there in "North Atlantic" treaty Organization but Estonia is. Let us not pretend here, America treats Europe differently and with in Europe, UK differently.

There are cultural and institutional bonds -- of course layers of Geopolitical and strategic interests.

But the boys, who are dreaming Americans picking their marbles and going home should really be careful what they wish for, because it might actually come true.

> No, you pay to continue having hegemony over multiple continents.

Sure, it's that too. It's both.

Regardless, it should stop.

> Regardless, it should stop.

I don't see how that could happen after the US pushed for globalism, globalism inherently requires keeping trade routes protected from interference, the moment the US pulls out from providing protection is the moment where these routes start to erode. If you are ok with all the impacts that will have in your life, go for it, I'm all in for less American interference around the globe.

You just need to be aware that the life you are used to (if you live in the USA) will be vastly different after this.

> Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free.

If 'we' is the USA, then I'd suggest the USA pays to maintain a very lucrative industry, and as far as anyone can tell, they pay way over the going rate, and have very poor book-keeping.

The idea that some older equipment, rather than being retired or disposed of, is being sent to Ukraine, as somehow being exclusively a defence of a distant place, and 'for free' feels asymmetrical to reality.

The USA has some serious risk / concerns coming out of this conflict - not so much petroleum products, but certainly iron ore, argon, neon, cobalt, etc. That's the practical resource based risks, and then there's the whole regional stability, opportunity to assist in the downfall of an enemy empire, etc etc.

> We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.

If 'we' is the USA, then I suggest you won't stop doing the former, and you won't start doing the latter.

In the past twelve months the USA's sent US$30B (list price) of equipment to Ukraine.

That's out of an annual budget of around 1,900B (or 845B) depending if you're looking at resources or obligations, but either way, 30 is a small component of that.

For context, the most recent US DoD audit identified at least 220B worth of equipment that they simply can't determine the whereabouts of.

So, yeah, I reckon the USA could look after its own interests by sending some equipment to Ukraine and address homelessness within its own borders, if it really wanted to.

Helping an impoverished country that has been actively invaded is one thing.

Providing decades of national defense as a service is quite a different thing. Especially when the beneficiaries are some of the richest nations in the world.

You do it for...free?

OMG, you can't actually believe that?

I live in the UK. We have an independent nuclear deterrent that we buy off the US for billions. We have plastic fighter jets we buy from the US at over $100m a pop. We have every credit card payment taxed by Visa and Mastercard. We allow US companies to operate here tax free, destroying local business.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to pay the US for selling us WW2. The US took our gold and the rights built military bases on a bunch of strategic islands. They left us as a vassal state.

The US base their front line in the UK against Russia so we get wiped out first. We are a buffer zone for the US defence of itself against Russia.

The US protects Europe 'for free' in the same way that the UK 'protected' India 'for free'.

Your (rather common) attitude will be the eventual downfall of the US empire. Every time the US acts as the world's arsehole (like by electing a protectionist moron as president) it loses legitimaticy. You also find Europe starts buying gas from Russia and turning a blind eye to its military adventures. When it starts looking bad for the US they turn up like 'Team America', blow up our gas connections to Russia and magically find cheap gas to sell us instead.

> When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to pay the US for selling us WW2. The US took our gold and the rights built military bases on a bunch of strategic islands. They left us as a vassal state.

I find this attitude ironic. If you didn’t engage in this trade there is high likelihood you would not have survived the air battle waged by the German Air Force.

Also the debt wasn’t repaid until 2006.

And the implied threat that you’ll buy Russian gas (and become dependent on it) because we elected a shit-talker? Lol. Salty tears all around, except without a valid reason.

Yeah, you (as in the US) should do that, and please take every US soldier in europe with you. We (as in central europe) either have nuclear weapons (France, Britain) or could easily build them (Germany)

I hope we do. But there is a powerful military-industrial complex fighting against this outcome.

Scale... Isn't the USA supposedly federalised states? So each state has a small enough scale to solve its issues, with an added benefit that countries in the EU don't have as easily: a federal government that can work to provide funding, coordination and national-level programs to solve the issues. The closest to that coordination is at the EU level itself which is much more complex and less powerful than the federal government of the USA.

I really dislike when American exceptionalism gets to the point of brushing away any kind of role model that could be used as an inspiration to be adapted to American needs as "it won't work because we are different". Guess what, every nation and society is different. Learn from others what worked, adapt to your local needs, that's how progress works.

The USA has the largest economy in the world, there's plenty of money that other countries lack for solving social issues. The main issue is allocation, American society does not think that solving social issues is worthy enough so you don't invest in it. After experiencing all the side-effects of such negligence them comes the exceptionalism excuse, that the scale is different, that X, Y or Z are hard because of A, B, C, so on and so forth.

It's just an excuse, a lame one at that. Yeah, Nordic countries don't have a large population, as a whole there's around 28 million people across the Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland), with around US$ 1.8T of GDP. Texas in the USA has 29 million people with US$1.8T GDP in a much smaller area than all the Nordics combined, with better weather, why the fuck can't Texas be like the Nordics then?

I’m not supporting the idea of USA exceptionalism, but scale /absolutely/ does matter. I’ve lived on most continents, and currently in the EU, I can see when even small increases in load on services leads to total breakdown. There’s a reason they are unable to sustain amidst immigration.

Of course it matters, that's why I brought up the point that each state in the USA is supposedly small enough to have local governance, that they have enough state-level freedoms to solve localised problems and exactly why I compare the scale of Texas to all of the Nordics as they are very similar in GDP and population.

I think you're arguing against your own point - a single US State is the size of 4 countries. Sure it's a smaller scale than the nearly-continent sized US as a whole, but it's still a substantially larger scale. On top of this, individual US states do not have the same freedom to act that independent nation states do, nor the same budget levels. For example, Texas doesn't have an income tax, and its tax revenue in 2022 was only 3.5 times that of Finland, despite having 5.5 times the population. Most projects need federal funding which does have to work at the immensely larger scale of the whole country.

It's a state less vast in area than 4 small countries, with similar population and economy. 28 million people is not a large country population so the scale should be comparable, it's 10 million more than the Netherlands.

> For example, Texas doesn't have an income tax, and its tax revenue in 2022 was only 3.5 times that of Finland, despite having 5.5 times the population.

That's exactly my point, it's a failure of policy, not an issue of scale. The policy is to have low taxes, small government, whatever, and from that failure a US state comparable in terms of economy and population to the Nordics is not even close to these countries in social development.

>So each state has a small enough scale to solve its issues

The problem is that states are choosing to address this problem by bussing homeless to other states.

This is the primary issue with federalized states, solutions are crafted in the interest of each state, negative externalities be damned.

The federal government doesn't have the ability under the constitution to address this problem in any real way. Until it can, it'll be cheaper and more politically expedient for those in charge to maintain the status quo than to actually work towards a solution.

> The problem is that states are choosing to address this problem by bussing homeless to other states.

What is stopping EU members from doing the same thing between each other? Why are US states exceptional in this case?

I don't know that EU members aren't doing the same thing. I'm sure the US isn't the only place this happens.

Do you mean that Phoenix Metro and every other place smaller should have fixed their homelessness as well as Finland or better already?

Not the op, but yes why not?

That is not the point. But I will assume good faith here, Alaska is the one state that has similarities with Scandinavia. In terms of both weather and resource extraction. Is Alaska doing worse than Scandinavia when dealing homeless?

> also cold in many places in the US ... so people die all the time there too.

The cold climate locations in the US does not have homeless during the winter, because they move away to warmer climates.

There's no warmer climate to be in for Finland.

Helsinki winter isn’t much colder than DC or New York, both of which have large year-round homeless populations.

This got me curious, so I compared [0]. To summarize, Helsinki's high tracks NYC's low. Helsinki is 6 -- 8 C (10 -- 14 F) colder than NYC in January -- February.

[0] https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/91632~23912/Comparison-of...

I agree, it is definitely colder in Helsinki. But heavy snowfall and -12C (the NYC mean minimum coldest day temperature in January) is still extremely uncomfortable to sleep rough in. Yet many homeless people stay in New York year round.

So the difference is really that Finland is further along the path of civilisation?

I used to see homeless sleeping in the doorway/building entrances in DC in the evenings while it was snowing outside. It terrified me. They had a few blankets and would huddle up.

I was in Chicago on a pretty very cold night one time (it was sitting around 0F that evening) and it was horrifying to see how many homeless people were still outside despite that cold.

Hi just chiming in from lovely Boston Massachusetts to let you know you're wrong. Source: my own two eyes.

>>The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions.

Bigger country also has far more available resources.

From TFA: >>So, more than a decade after the launch of the “Housing First” policy, 80 per cent of Finland’s homeless are doing well, still living in the housing they’d been provided with — but now paying the rent on their own.

>>This not only helps the homeless, it turns out to be cheaper.

That bears repeating: it turns out to be cheaper

The solution can be found in the common refrain of conservative ideologues fighting against social programs —— it isn't the government that knows how to best spend the money, it is the people.

The really simple solution to homelessness and poverty is: Literally house the homeless and give UBI to everyone at a poverty level.

It turns out that the individual people really often do know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as long as they have bootstraps.

A tiny house with a fixed address, bed, toilet, shower, and cooktop eliminates enormous classes of problems both for the unfortunate people, and the rest of society. A basic income is most commonly used by people to improve themselves. Yes, there will always be sad examples of people who fail and use it to drink/drug themselves to death, but every actual study I've read shows that these are vastly outnumbered by those who use the minimal resources to get out of their personal hell; this is just another in those long series of studies.

And to those who scream "moral hazard - you're rewarding bad behavior! Welfare queens!!" — bullsh^t. The richest societies in the world can afford to provide basic housing, food, and medical care to all their residents (but not the entire world, immigration controls are needed). No one wants to be in the dregs of homelessness and poverty. And, the objective results are better outcomes, more people overcoming their problems and becoming self-supporting.

> It turns out that the individual people really often do know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as long as they have bootstraps.

The Finnish case study finds that most of these people never really recover, just that with housing and state support, they still require fewer resources than if they remained unhoused. So this is more like: these people are never going to solve their problems, but at least with housing and a on site social work (to prevent the housing from being destroyed), they won’t burden society more otherwise.

> - As you point out, homeless people die in the winter. It's also cold in many places in the US, and hot in others - so people die all the time there too.

I don't think this point is true. You'll find plenty of homeless people in Seattle from Great Falls Montana, for example. Bus tickets are easy enough to purchase, you don't even have to be shipped. People will migrate where they can survive at least, they aren't stuck in Spokane, Great Falls, or Bismarck. It is always possible to get to LA, some will even get to Honolulu.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Montana to Seattle is 640 miles. That's almost the size of Finland (north to south), while very few people live in the far north. Spokane to LA is 1,200 miles, that's two Finlands worth of travel. 1,200 miles from the population centers of Finland gets you to Ukraine!

There is no part of Finland where you easily survive outside in the winter (without a tent with stove and plenty of firewood). Leaving the country means losing access to the social safety net.

I find it fascinating how the higher-cost and therefore counter-intuitive alternative, can sometimes be the better choice, due to long-term secondary effects that doesn't show up on said paper.

Reminds me of the value of developing your own advanced projects, which is a huge cost (and risk) for a country or a company, but which can pay off big time in the long run through developing advanced marketable industry, exportable competence and just creating lots of jobs.

In a similar sense EU has mandated that wastewater is to be treated in even very small villages. For those same second-order improvements, a sewer system may sound like a luxury but it does avoid a lot of shit.

In a similar sense EU has mandated that wastewater is to be treated in even very small villages.

There are also second-order costs. I know people who live half the year in a 'very small village' (30-40 houses, no shops, no cars, no sewage system, water comes from wells) and these well meaning, but very inflexible, rules can make it very expensive to do even the most basic of renovations.

I also spoke to a couple of people in a very rural village in Italy and asking about why so many houses were in such disrepair. Turns our the people living there could not afford to repair them in a way that complied with all the regulations about preserving 'historic' buildings. These where largely poorer people who's family had owned the house for generations. They couldn't afford to repair their homes, but they also couldn't move since their houses where in such a state that they where effectively worthless.

I think you're confusing homeless with rough sleeping. Rough sleeping is sleeping outside, while homeless can include couch surfing (staying with friends for a few days at a time) or sleeping in shelters. Shelters provide beds but no privacy/no security from other residents and no space to build up possessions.

In the article, Toronto provides shelters and Finland provides homes.

> ... no security from other residents and no space to build up possessions.

This seems a basic requirement for anyone trying to get to a better life. Are there no more enlightened shelters that provide some secure locker or parcel-checkin system?

"simply providing proper housing to these people is a pragmatic alternative"

Did this "proper housing" come with any rules? What is the bar that keeps the homeless from being evicted? I know where I am these places quickly become severe crime hubs.

It definitely requires a lot of support, especially initially, to be successful; indeed, just providing the residence isn't enough. And of course not all homeless people are the same. Some are simply having a rough time and really do just need that leg up. Others are struggling with substance abuse, mental illness, or mental or physical disability, and will at a minimum need support to transition to a stable living situation, but may become self-sufficient (or at least more-so) over time with that support. Others will need significant ongoing support lifelong, and so independent living won't be a viable option. Lumping all these people together exacerbates problems.

'And of course not all homeless people are the same.'

Although obvious, it's not something one hears that often. There is a perception here in the UK that a homeless person is someone who sits on a corner begging all day.

Ironically, a lot of these people are not actually homeless since they are where all the resources are targeted towards. Many real homeless people do not stand out from the crowd because, well why would you?

[Speaking from experience]

The houses which are given to homeless are mostly concentrated in certain area's. So if they cause problems, which of course they do, they don't bother 'normal' families.

Those area's are pretty bad, but they're not as dangerous as e.g. in the US. I guess it's because the addicts are mostly alcoholics and they get just enough government money to buy their daily booze.

I’m Finnish and this is not my understanding. Finland has a specific policy that every time a new neighbourhood is constructed, a percentage of those houses are allocated for the municipal government, who then rent them for these less fortunate folk. This means that the problems aren’t concentrated but distributed. It’s part of the larger ideology of equality in Finland, which is that the extremes in both good and bad are softened.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm not Finnish but have stayed in the Helsinki area a lot. There were certain area's in e.g. Tikkurila and Jakomaeki which were pretty bad, and Finnish people told me it was because many alcoholics lived there in state housing. So I supposed that state housing was concentrated in certain area's.

That is a different matter.

Municipalities own a significant amount of housing available for rent. These are available for anyone but there are societal reasons why someone might be preferred (e.g. single mother), while others are in the queue.

These are not the housing units given to the homeless. They are run by organizations and charities together in collaboration with municipal social workers. There are two or three houses like this in Helsinki.

> There are two or three houses like this in Helsinki.

So are you saying that two or three houses were enough to solve homelessness in Helsinki?

That's two or three apartment blocks, so maybe 200-500 apartments? Don't have exact figures at hand.

The municipally owned rental housing (available to anyone) which you talk about, together with different forms of social support help people from falling into homelessness in the first place.

Those few apartment blocks used for the "housing first" scheme are the help people out of homelessness. These houses are not normal rental apartments, and have social workers present, etc. These are not available for rent for anyone, and no-one would voluntarily choose to live in one of these if given alternatives. They are somewhere between a shelter and a normal apartment.

This segregation of people based on social class (as well as ethnicity and/or native/immigrant divide) is a big social problem that was unfortunately exacerbated by poor policy choices made in past decades. Today it is recognized that developments should mix people from different backgrounds and income levels in order to not create neglected "problem neighborhoods".

This is incorrect.

There are only a few houses for this purpose in the Helsinki Area, and they are actually in quite nice locations and far from each other.

No-one in their right mind would live in these houses if they have an alternative, but the problems don't affect the wider area. Some restlessness in the immediate vicinity, but not that bad.

According to https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le..., there were 3000 houses in 2022 for this purpose in the Helsinki Area.

> and they are actually in quite nice locations and far from each other.

The area's near Helsinki were I've been and where I was told by Finnish people were a lot of state houses, were certainly not nice locations. There were alcoholics everywhere and the area was visibly poor. But it's true, they were not as bad as in many other countries.

The source you refer to is talking about municipal housing, which is just normal rental housing owned by municipalities. There is indeed a lot of those and it sure helps keeping the homelessness down together with social support.

There are areas with high concentrations of municipal housing built in 1970s and 1980s, and this is generally considered a mistake in urban planning as there are concentrations of low-income, low-education residents, which isn't a positive for the area.

But I reiterate: this is normal housing available to everyone. You gotta pay your rent and behave or you get evicted. The municipality is just the landlord here.

The supported housing for the homeless is just a few housing units (apartment blocks), and they aren't normal housing. Examples of this kind of housing is Sininauhasäätiö (org), Ruusulankatu (address) and Diakonissalaitos, Helsinginkatu.

There's a really fun section in the amazing Norwegian comedy/drama "Dag". The premise is that you can't both have a good and fair society and good weather because the need to take care of everyone isn't serious enough if you have good weather.

Spain also has relatively few homeless, at least compared to some other European countries. They have made it "de facto" legal to break in to an empty, unused home. If you squat a home, proceedings can take years to get you out of there. The only way to get an express eviction is if the owner reports it in the first 72 hours of people moving in. So no wonder you see bars on every single house window and alarms.

> They have made it "de facto" legal to break in to an empty, unused home. If you squat a home, proceedings can take years to get you out of there.

Same for France

Not at all the same in Germany, but even as a property owner, I see some justification for effectively legalizing squatting in unused buildings. It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Ideally this would be formalized and matched with a proper framework, i.e. municipalities can easily buy unused properties at a nominal cost, property owners can "convert" squatters into renters (who actually own rent) by bringing the property up to a minimum standard (which in turn the squatter would have to accept or move out), etc.

> It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply.

Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one".

Also, rent controls, aren't they a thing in some parts of Germany like Berlin? That's what leads to poor usage of apartments, because if you own several places and the rent imposed by the authorities is too low for you to turn a profit, then it's not worth renting either.

Property and property rights are defined by the society. It's not a natural law or something. If society agrees that property works in a "use it or lose it" manner, so it is.

to my sibling comment, so what you're saying is, mob rule? this is probably defacto how it is, but it does not make it right. Nobody else has any rights to what I own, and I dont have rights to them. this kind of thinking that the "society" can just set rules that violates other people is a sick and disgusting development, this form of communist cancer has to be destroyed.

See my sibling comment: property in most societies is something that not only confers rights to the owner, but also responsibilities. If you own an apartment in a city where there is great demand for housing, but (for whatever reason) you decide against making that apartment available for someone to use, society (through creating laws and regulations) can decide that you forfeit your rights to that property.

It is the same logic that is behind laws and regulations that force people to improve their property in some way, i.e. by removing lead paint, installing more efficient heating, etc. This logic is well accepted throughout the world. "Property obligates" is the historical and present norm (except maybe in the U.S.) and the extreme libertarian view of "absolute rights" to property is probably what is a "sick and disgusting" development.

Look, there are two possible definitions of "ownership" and "property". One is, you own whatever you can physically keep. If you have a pretty stone, and I come to you, and bash your head in, and take your stone, guess what, it's mine now. If I scoop your brains out of your half-broken skull, I'll have a new ashtray too, so I profit off this exchange!

The second definition is, whatever set of rules the society enforces to prevent the scenario described above, which define what I can keep, and under what conditions. You could say these rules "violate other people" and is "communist cancer", and you're right in a way - my natural right of coming over to you and bashing your head in is surely being violated now! But I prefer this anyway, because it also protects me from getting my head bashed in by someone stronger than me.

your right ends where it takes away others. Forcing taxes on people is not that. I cannot violate others, and anyone who would give themselves the rights to do so, are bandits, oftentimes having formed a gang

> your right ends where it takes away others.

This is exactly Proudhon's argument for his infamous "property is theft" - property rights limits the freedom of others by restricting them from e.g. making use of the land you arbitrarily fence off - and why Dejacque, the father of libertarianism [1], and a firm anarcho-communist, agreed with him.

The right-libertarian property fetishism is founded on ignoring the restrictions property rights places on the rights of others; something every legal system on the planet recognises to various degrees. As such, while none go as far as Proudhon and Dejacque wanted in stripping away property rights, the default of human society is to see property rights as inherently and necessarily limited for the protection of the rights of others.

(I'd be all for giving you the opportunity of opting out of taxes, as long as society gains the freedom to refuse to deal with you if you opt out, up to and including freedom to deny you the use of everything funded by said society; freedom is a two-way street)

[1] On the Human Being, Male and Female, Joseph Déjacque, is the first use of "libertarianism" as a political ideology. Dejacque accuses Proudhon of being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian". Dejacque went on to publish "Le Libertaire" (The Libertarian), the first libertarian periodical.

On the Human Being, Male and Female, can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...

Technically, you can probably opt out of taxes in return for opting out of using tax-funded services and infrastructure, especially in the U.S. and other countries with vast tracts of wilderness: just hike a few days into the woods/mountains, vanish into public lands and do not interact with society anymore. Of course, no libertarians actually go that far, because if they admit to it or not, they are pretty happy to accept the benefits of taxation (roads, police, emergency medical attention, the military, courts, etc.) even if they publicly decry any attempt at funding it. My impression is that libertarianism is basically an attempt by pretty well-off people to create a pseudo-scientific reason for them to free ride on the contributions of others to society.

Yeah, this is why I find bringing it up as a two way street to be the most productive way of dealing with right-libertarians, because the problem is not that they want to be free to do as they please per se, I have every sympathy with that, but how quick they are to gloss over that the rest of society has rights too, and if they are made as expansive as they want their own property rights to be, they'll find themselves without rights of access to all kinds of things they just presume they'll retain access to very quickly - incidentally a large part of the reason why the rejection of property rights is such a large part of left-libertarianism.

> Nobody else has any rights to what I own

Nobody else, except perhaps your local HOA [1]. So much about your "property". /s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os

no gang has ever considered themselves to be doing things that shouldnt be done, whether it be the mafia, government, or HOA. They are all illegitimate

"This form of communist cancer" of limitations on property rights is little different to how property rights have been curtailed by law in different ways in pretty much every society since many hundreds of years before Marx was born.

That is a very extreme view of property that is not shared by vast sections of global society. The German constitution has a very explicit article that states "Property obligates. Its use should simultaneously contribute to the wellbeing of the general public" (my translation) for example.

Similarly, EU jurisprudence has confirmed that laws and regulations can limit the absolute control over individual property, if that contributes to an overall more important social good. Many countries around the world actually do not have permanent private ownership of land/buildings or limit it in significant ways. Historically, basically all societies and legal systems have limited individual property rights in certain, sometimes very extreme ways. The Uber-liberal definition of property that you cite is something of an outlier.

Regarding your question on rent control in Germany: There are several layers:

- Some housing is government/municipality owned (unfortunately not a lot). The rent for those usually covers the cost of providing that housing but not more so it is quite cheap.

- Some private property has been built with government subsidies. This is bound for a certain time (I think 20 years or so) to a government-set rent and tenants usually profit from this even afterwards, because it is very hard in Germany to increase rent on existing tenants.

- Since 2015 there has been a national law on rent control. It covers municipalities which have been specifically designated by state governments. Landlords covered by the law can not increase the rent for a new tenant by more than 10% over the local average, but there are a lot of exceptions: buildings built or substantially improved after 1st October 2014, properties that already had a higher rent prior to the law, etc. It also relies on the tenants for enforcement and their willingness to engage in a protracted legal battle.

- Berlin tried to introduce much harsher rent controls. These were declared illegal by the courts, because state governments (in the view of the courts) do not have the competency to introduce certain types of rent control.

> if you own several places and the rent imposed by the authorities is too low for you to turn a profit, then it's not worth renting either.

This may be the case for new construction. But most existing properties are paid off, ongoing investment is limited (I can say this with some authority, as I own a couple of properties in two different German cities). The huge rent increases in German cities do not come from long-term tenants (because they are protected against steep increases by law). It comes from landlords taking advantage of huge demand by increasing the rent dramatically for new tenants. This is pure profit for the landlord, as the property has been profitable even before the rent increase. This is what most attempts at rent control in Germany are targeted at.

Spain just did a very strict rent control, in "high stress" areas rent can't be raised more than 3% yearly. And if someone is in demonstrable financial distress, the rental contract is automatically protected for a year.

There's actually quite a lot of restrictions on what I can and can't do with my car. For example, if I don't get my car inspected, I can't drive it on public roads. And even if I want to drive it on private land, it must be within a fenced off area that is inaccessible to third parties.

I also can't just erect whatever buildings I want on my plot of land, but rather I need to get a planning permission. Turning my land into a garbage dump is also gonna get me into shit.

I do prefer this level-headed approach especially when it comes to a basic need, like housing. High rents are partially caused by low available inventory so if they can fix it by increasing taxes of unused properties, that's a great way of doing that. The other ways I've seen, like banning foreigners from owning properties are kind of bad, that's a net negative outcome (I think).

> Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one".

Property laws aren't law of physics. The natural state is, you own what you can keep. If I come to you, and bash your head in, and take your all possessions - well, it's mine now, as you weren't able to keep any of it (or your life).

A rule-based society is what lets you cry foul when someone "infringes" on your "property rights", and for that to mean anything. A civilization is what lets you forget, day to day, that all the deeds and leases and contracts are just thin abstractions, mutual self-delusions keeping the knives sheathed and the guns holstered. But we're not a post-scarcity civilization yet.

Happy society giveth, an unhappy society taketh away. If you're at the point that over half of your society is worried about keeping roof over their heads, a substantial chunk of it haven't one, and a noticeable part of that group is happy to break in to temporary empty housing - don't turn your back on your society, lest property again stops meaning anything, and your own life may be forfeit too.

There is not a single jurisdiction in the world where "property is property" in your sense of people being free to do what you want with it, because allowing that would be a massive attack on society and others ability to enjoy their property, and so every jurisdiction on the planet recognises that for a functioning society, property rights must be limited.

Most countries have long lists of exceptions, ranging from limiting your ability to be a nuisance, to limiting your ability to deny others access to various resources, and up to and including guaranteeing public access to some types of property in some countries (e.g. in Norway you have a legal right to cross, forage in and camp on most undeveloped rural land, irrespective of the wishes of the landowner) because it is seen to increase liberty. In Norway, this freedom to roam was seen as so obvious that it was one of the last parts of Norwegian law to be codified, because courts just took it into account despite Norwegian law generally not having any common-law component or system of precedent binding courts.

That's exactly what they are trying to do. With the new law signed recently, they are increasing the yearly tax heavily on unused properties.

That is of course the way to redistribute idle personal property to socially positive ends that does not involve imposing misery upon entire neighborhoods.

It's some comment on the perversity of legislative processes that such taxes are not the norm everywhere. Admittedly, enforcement efforts will surely be challenged.

> if the owner reports it in the first 72 hours

So I could literally go away for a long weekend and come back and be homeless? That's _way_ too short!

Talking about France that has a similar law: no, that only works for unused homes.

Let's say you have an empty secondary home that you don't use, don't rent, etc. Maybe you're trying to sell it, or maybe you just don't care because you have the money and you're sitting on it until you maybe take the time to renovate it or put it on the market.

That's where a squatter can be considered "living" there even if it's unlawful. That doesn't mean he owns the house now, or that he can't be evicted - just that the police won't kick him out without a court order. The court order can take some time and in any case nobody can be evicted during winter.

No.

The key word was "Empty and unused" - if you are living in a house (i.e. it is your primary residence) and take a vacation, it's not empty and unused.

It is a problem for landlords with empty properties, or for little used vacation homes. Although apparently there are alarms which will automatically call the police when someone breaks into your property which is apparently enough to trigger the 'within 72h' deadline.

That's why in the Netherlands owners of unused buildings often use anti-squad tactics. They let in a legitimate renter in a type of anti-squat deal: rent is low but you can be kicked out at anytime (about 1 month notice).

> Shelters cost money and they have to be staffed and when they fill up you need to spend money on emergency shelters, which costs more money

Yes but shelters can be privately run and then a corporation can make a profit from that, because private companies are more efficient than state-driven things.

That a company makes profits more important than perpetuating the homeless problem, or waking up to frozen cadavers. Think of the poor stakeholders.

Thats kind of why homelessness exists in the first place though, and is getting worse.

Providing enough housing to eliminate housing would bring rents down. That's bad for profits.

Taking away the fear of homelessness gives low end workers more negotiating muscle. This means hence higher wages and less incentive to work as hard. Again, really bad for profits.

This is why western governments feign the willingness to do something about it by half heartedly attacking the symptoms (e.g. drugs) rather than fixing the actual cause (lack of homes).

It's also why the media fights so hard to misrepresent the causality between drugs and homelessness.

Besides NYC, which is an outlier in all the wrong ways in this sort of space, I've never heard of private shelters. That's not to say people aren't getting rich of nonprofit shelters.

> because private companies are more efficient than state-driven things.

Yeah, right.

Should I had put sarcasm indicators? :)

> I.e. the vast majority of problematic people are all citizens that have full coverage under the excellent social system.

The same is true in the USA; illegal immigrants have enough problems without being homeless, and almost always their point for being in the USA is to work. The "excellent social system" however, is not true for the USA.

> Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning

The article is from a Canadian newspaper. It is from Toronto, which, for Canada, has relatively mild winters. But it’s still Canada.

that country refers to Finland from the GP's previous sentence.

root comment was saying that Finland have to have this policy otherwise people would literally die on the streets due to the extreme cold weather. the child commenter reminds root that the article is written by a Toronto paper, which is also a very cold place any yet does not have quite the same policy (I think Canada do have homeless shelters?)

> I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple.

Unfortunately there are any number of people who would be happy with option B in this scenario.

'Unfortunately there are any number of people who would be happy with option B in this scenario.'

Since we are going on personal beliefs rather than hard facts, I suspect is number is very low.

In western Europe, yes. In America, no.

you do not have to be happy with something to not want to personally be responsibility. and to everyone here who thinks otherwise.

there are millions of malnutritioned people, including children, in many parts of the world. And i put fourth that you are happy they starve and get sick and die. After all, you arent spending all your money and effort trying to fix it? is it not your problem?

I would prefer that nobody is homeless, nobody starves, but at the same time, it is not my responsibility to do anything about it. Stealing my money via taxes and doing something(which to make it even worse, is a BAD something), is an attack on me

It is your responsibility, which is part of the reason why you pay taxes in the first place. The fact that so much of your money is misappropriated is another story though.

I pay taxes because a regime with guns says I have to or they will take me away and put me behind bars. This is a crime against me

I would encourage you to wade into commentary on the man strangled to death on the NYC subway if you think it’s outlandish that some people see the lives of the homeless as essentially disposable. Or you could just scroll down to the person in this very discussion thread who more or less argues for deaths from exposure. Or we could look at preferences revealed by policy demands, which often take more of an "out of sight, out of mind" approach.

The guy who was threatening people on the train? That's a dishonest comparison along with a dishonest assertion. First you are asserting that a lot of people supported his death,which is not the case. They supported someone doing something to stop him threatening others on the train, with his death being an unfortunate consequence of his own actions. Then you falsely use this violent individual to represent all homeless people in order to incorrectly assume there exists a large number of people who support the death of the homeless.

All this “violent individual” did was yell. Choking him to death is an extreme escalation. And I assure you it’s quite easy to log on to Twitter and read many comments that either outright cheer for the death or, more commonly, treat it with the same indifference you’d treat accidentally stepping on some ants.

> That's definitely something other countries can learn from.

Other countries with totally different problems and different reasons for homelessness will learn what from that exactly?

That the first step of resolving someone's homelessness is to provide them with a home (and then obviously don't stop there but provide additional support where needed). Who would have thought?

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