If someone wants to end their life over poverty, you preventing them is about making you feel better as "we don't want to be that kind of country" rather than them. It is not about their desires at all.
If I see someone in poverty or homeless, I want them to live the same life I have been lucky to have. So my thoughts are how can I help lift them out of their situation, not put an end to them.
Homelessness is terrible, but allowing people to kill themselves when falling on rough times is a terrible idea. It sweeps the problem under the carpet and tries to allow it to solve itself, in the worst way possible.
I don't want people to take their life because society made their future prospects bleak. But I certainly don't want to force them to keep living because it might improve society in the long term.
The little moral grandstand you describe when passing a homeless person does nothing for them.
You abhorr the idea of someone in abject poverty wanting a way out so you hold up a utopic idea as to how things should be - but no solution to get there.
UBI? Immediate huge drop in economic input from working people who won't have to work anymore. And within a couple of years, not enough productive people left for UBI. Don't bother linking those studies on UBI boosting the economy, I've read them, and I think they're typical soft-science nonsense. I have a lifetime of observed experiences that tell me what happens when people don't have to make any effort to get by: from children, to friends, to animals, to entire populations like Kuwait (where anyone with a job is gifted $3000/month by the government on top of their salary. This resulted in the laziest, least competent people I have met, who just hire foreigners to do their jobs for them. It reminded me of Wall-E.)
Communism? It has never and never will work. As soon as you remove private wealth, whoever is in charge becomes a perpetual dictator within months, since any objectors depend on him for their survival. Nearly instant dystopia.
I'm really curious, is there ANY scenario where someone like yourself will demand that a homeless person become a productive citizen? Let's say you offer them magical housing and a magical job. They trash the house, don't go to work, and stay at home taking drugs. What then? Do you continue supporting them? Endless counseling? Let's say it doesn't work, no matter how patient you are, they refuse to work. Is there any breaking point where you are able to tell them "if you don't clean up and get to work, I'm not paying for your house and meals anymore"? Or are productive people expected to foot the bill for them forever, even in a fantasy scenario?
Also it does nothing to social, cultural and symbolic inheritance, so rich heir will probably still be rich at the end of the day, but at least they would have to work for it.
Now you're saying I can't leave my kids anything, not even our family home? Because it has to be shared asset with the other 100 million people (or 7 billion, if you're one of those open border types)? That's completely unacceptable to me. It also removes my incentive to work hard. Are my children to become equal to everyone else (which given overpopulation drives them down to a bad comfort and safety level) if I get hit by a car?
You don't seem to think anyone would mind, "Oh, you'll be dead, why would you care" , right? What you're missing is that I care more about my children and their future than about myself. Every good parent thinks like this. A suggestion like yours likely comes from the moralism of detached, childless, too-online rationalists. To put it as a trolley problem, if I have to choose between my kid and 5 other kids, the other 5 kids are getting a train in their face without a moment's hesitation. I'm saving my kid even if 50k other kids are on the other end.
Seriously, talk about this to your parents (as I'm certain you have no children of your own), see what they think.
The life expectancy of men is 79.4 yo, and while he's a woodworker, he actually is healthy for someone in his 50 (and he's doing a lot more painting and tapestry now, which is easier on the body), so i hope he won't die until his late 80s, but let's say he only last until 80.
At 60 year old, i would expect to retire two years later (might be 4, but let's wait and see). Anything that he leaves me, i wouldn't really need. I would rent his house (maybe, i think i would just lend it to a non-market housing coop), but hopefully i would have one at that age. My child at 30 would hopefully have found his path, since i have enough resources for him to fail a dozen time.
Even if i die at 60, i really hope my child doesn't need my money, because that would mean i had failed him a dozen time over, don't you agree?
But let's say we just put a small limit, let's say 20k in 1970s dollars (to adjust for inflation), that would still remove the need for income and housing taxes in my country. tax collection would be more efficient, that would pay for the most basic social nets + free education (and police, and military), and the only taxes you would pay on income wouldn't be taxes but cotisations (health, unemployment).
Also, not only education basically free, i have family that is nice and helpful, and even if i die tomorrow i don't care if all my money had to go to the state.
And for those who do not have this family, i would hope that if inheritance tax is the only tax, each orphan would get the same treatment as nations'pupils (orphan from military or police, i worked with them 3 summers a lifetime ago) and taken care of better than they are right now.
[edit] And because i don't want to be too obtuse (i honestly didn't understand you until now): of course if you live in a low-trust society, it's a bad idea. If i were Indian or from an emmerging country, i wouldn't think this. To me, capitalism and the pursuit of individual wealth is the best vessel to reach a high-trust society (basically what marx said), and once we're there, we can shed id, we do not need it anymore. That also mean that, unlike Marx's Internationale, i do not believe each society can get there at the same time, and high-trust societies have to enforce immigration quotas from low-trust ones (to respond to your "no border" comment).
There are many solutions to getting out of it, but being homeless is starting with the least bit of opportunity possible.
The moral grandstand we all have, is enough drive for some people to build homeless shelters, provide food and shelter as well as provide programs to help the homeless get jobs.
I am allowed to be abhor a particular idea, without offering a solution to it.
1. Waiting for a lottery ticket essentially to somehow get them rebooted.
2. Waiting for society to figure out a broader plan to deal with them.
Sure, many solutions come out of think tanks or are proposed, but if they are not implemented, what use are they to these people?
We can have all the great wishes we want for the homeless, but at present, we have nothing concrete to offer many of them.
> It sweeps the problem under the carpet and tries to allow it to solve itself, in the worst way possible.
It is currently at the point of on the carpet and largely ignored.
As long as you exist, you need to keep sustaining yourself, taking care of yourself, and that requires incredible reserves of the ability to function. Ability that you can end up losing for any number of resson, potentially irreversibly. And once you can't take care of yourself, you just sink like a stone, except this ocean has no bottom.
If you're lucky enough to be all of born into a wealthy country, healthy, into a functional family, to meet the right people, if all the stars align you might be able to live a decent life until you're old, but... what if they don't? As long as you exist, you're not safe from that eventuality.
Above all, you lose nothing by being dead, as you're not there to experience it. But you gain the safety from suffering.