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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services

This is always the justification for socialist-style programs. It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading. What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find yourself with a lot more homeless than you used to have. Your studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we've seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites more homeless.

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Otherwise known as, "If you subsidize something you get more of it."

Which seems to be true. Right now chasing homeless people from place to place is the subsidized action, and they sure seem to get more and more funds to do it.

It’s not universal - libraries exist everywhere and lend books and movies for free and they’re used but not overused.

So there may be some level of housing that is better than nothing for the homeless but still desirable to get out of for those who can.

Can you cite any studies on that?

It's called moral hazard. It persists in any giveaway program.

You want citations for, "if you make something easier to consume, more people will consume it?"

So, "If you make people's life better, more people will want a better life ?"

Isn’t that just a rehash of “tragedy of the commons”?

Tragedy of the commons comes from a lack of regulation. Put all the regulation you want, but make sure to guarantee your people live by a humane standard.

If San Francisco is handing out free homes to all who come, how would that not be a tragedy of the commons situation? “Everyone can come to SF to live by a humane standard” will never work.

So what regulations did you have in mind?

Why does the regulations have to be limited to San Francisco ?

You can't have it both ways, with freedom of travel between states and no federal intervention ever into how social policies are applied.

Ok, I totally agree with that. We will never be able to solve the “how can anyone who wants to live in SF do so humanely” problem but we have a shot of doing it in a region with limited immigration (or humane is applied to legal residents only), like Singapore or Finland.

No, because this formulation assumes we're starting with a fixed number of homeless people whose lives we're only making better. This is erroneous on two grounds: 1) it's not obvious that it makes their lives better in the long run, if it means they're less motivated to personally improve; 2) but second, and more important, the number of people who "need" these services is not fixed and policy can create more of them.

I think you're arguing for a central government taking things in their hand and push a common social policy across all states.

"Government should do its job at the country level" shouldn't be some taboo or undefendable position.

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