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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

Not really at all.

In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. We need a way to pay the people that do the work, buy the buildings, keep the lights on. We call this infrastructure asylums, whatever you want to call it we need it desperately.

If you want to stop things like what you cited from happening, lobby to have rules and regulations surrounding these institutions that get you what you want. But it doesn't mean we don't need the 90% good they will do for fear of the 10% bad they've done in the past

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Or make healthcare accessible. Make housing accessible. Make food accessible. We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it. It’s arbitrary, as much as markets would want us to believe otherwise. As a species we choose to let them have that power, and with it they will kill us all (seriously)

Http and the internet is also a made up concept that has not actual value outside of what we place in it.

Conversations get no where if you're going to talk nonsense.

We don't (feed and house everyone) because the people who grow and distribute food need to get paid.

Australia has public healthcare and public housing. I myself am a beneficiary of that, as my parents were homeless. I got out of the cycle because there's things there that helped me. But I am 1-in-a-1000 case.

It's not "give them more" that's needed, there's many factors in play. Drugs, mental illness, and even the mentality and language around it.

Everyone I knew in homeless shelters as well as my family (except me) were either completely ignorant of how money works, or staunch communists who didn't believe in working for the man, with drugs and illness mixed in.

The point in saying money is a made up construct is that, well, yeah, communism. With infinite possibilities of products and 8 billion players, capitalism, as a way to distribute the collective output of humanity just makes sense. But where there's misery, destitution, and hopelessness, money's just a made up concept and we could make things so much better just by flipping a couple of bits in a database somewhere to create money out of thin air and fund soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Of course we won't and can't actually do that because so many reasons, but if you look past money, and see that its just some system we came up with one day, I fantasize about other solutions to the problem of distribution with the technology we have available to us today, that we didn't have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.

We're well on our way. Look at the data for poverty over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

As long as resources are limited there will be money or an equivalent mechanism for valuing and controlling those resources. Resources can be anything from land, food, knowledge, political power, etc.

We are not short of housing or food. Artificial and market scarcity don’t make it so.

Both of those require resources. Or are you going to grow your own trees and build a log cabin yourself? How much time will that take? Can you build it by yourself or will you need someone elses help? These are all resources that are not unlimited, and there are trade offs whatever way you allocate said resources.

Edit: also power, water, wastewater, internet for a house are services run using limited resources

First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing.

Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the fast food joint because then they’ll just make extra food, so instead you end up tossing tons of perfectly good food. I’d help my dad pick up “old” food from grocery stores for a local shelter and they had to still only take some because the volume of usable food being tossed was too much for one shelter. There’s plenty of food.

Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? If, for instance, every vacant property that has working power/water/sewage/internet was filled, would that be too much strain? Would the system that was planned for that capacity buckle under the weight of what it’s made to bear? I don’t buy it.

> Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble?

Overall you're right, but you also might be surprised at how fragile and insufficient our infrastructure is. There are many documented cases of problems with power delivery when sudden spikes in usage occur. There have been a few articles about it just this summer due to the record breaking heat. Internet services routinely oversell their service on the assumption that most people won't use what they pay for, and any customers who try to use every bit they're paying for will have their service disconnected.

These restrictions are artificial too, people and companies pocketing millions (if not billions) in profits could easily improve their systems to meet higher demand but even though they are swimming in money and have everything they need they won't tolerate earning a penny less, and they act like they're dying when their profit increases if it doesn't also increase at least as much as it did last quarter. They just push all the costs to consumers and taxpayers who are already struggling under the unending greed of countless other people and companies.

That's why the idea of giving people food, housing, and healthcare scares the shit out of some people. They know that somehow, they'll end up paying for it, even when the reality is that often their lives would be much better anyway. The truth is that it shouldn't have to cost the people who can least afford it.

It is fragile and a lot does need to be done to make it more resilient - the incentive isn’t there under the current capitalist model. For example, in the US, power companies can’t make a profit from anything except doing new construction[1]. This is why we had the Camp Fire - a PG&E system had faults with no incentive to get fixed that eventually failed and led to a devastating wildfire. We can do these things, but the people most capable also happen to care the lease.

[1] https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E - Some More News - The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies

All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with. I believe there will come a time where it is no longer necessary, but this will require levels of cooperation, education, and coordination that we are not nearly prepared to handle as a species.

For what it's worth, I worked for a while at a fast food joint that did allow employees to take food home, or to make extra of it and just consume it on premises during lunch break. Leftover food was frozen and donated to a shelter twice a week. This place is still in business and as far as I know still operating with these policies. Cynacism aside, I don't even think the place is that unique. If you look around you will find lots of groups motivated by something more than just the mighty dollar, perhaps even most enterprise. This despite the corrosive effects of capitalism you're fretting over.

I may be fretting over capitalism, but I think I do so with justification. I can’t say which system would be better, but I see the one destroying the planet and creating an arbitrary system of haves and have nots where two of the largest factors in whether you have a comfortable life are who your parents are and where your born - it’s a crapshoot.

> All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with.

My original point was responding to the bemoaning that we don’t have enough resources for everyone. Well we do, they just get wasted. We’d still have those resources or at least the ability to create them under any other system.

I appreciate your viewpoint. I spent many decades believing similarly, that money isn't real and money has no inherent value or purpose, only muddying the waters of production. Over the years, however, I've developed a more nuanced take on the matter. (And on a personal note, in retrospect it was this belief that kept me in poverty, not the children of the wealthy.)

I completely agree that we have "enough" for everyone at this point in time and many of our ills reduce to a distribution problem. I very much do not agree that just any other system could have brought us to this point.

Intuitively if we could snap our fingers and make all money disappear tomorrow life would go on without a hiccup or any noticible change so long as everyone just keeps doing what they're doing now. But that's the rub, would everyone keep doing what they're doing?

Our economic system is the system attempting to solve this distribution problem. The optimist in me still believes we can create a better system, but I have spent years trying to understand what that system looks like and I have yet to find it. (I am still eager to hear your proposal.)

I am increasingly convinced the solution will ultimately need to leverage our modern and novel digital communications networks as well as other recent and perhaps future innovations, so I don't agree that such a system could have just arisen at any point in the past and carried us here.

As an addendum, I believe any system that effectively solves this problem while delivering the same or higher level of resources for humanity will run into the issue of destroying the planet. This is an orthogonal problem that the optimist in me also believes we will eventually find a solution for, but if we don't the discussion will become somewhat moot.

I think you reiterated the above commenter's point: we shouldn't have to rely on such excess and benevolence to make sure every last person is being fed. That should be a baseline human right. The existence of charity itself is an outcome of inequality.

Going back to your original post:

“ We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it.”

Try do anything you are talking about without the involvement of money or barter. It ain’t going to happen.

No one is going to work in a crappy job if they can avoid it.

Who is going build new properties or repair dilapidated buildings without money or some other incentive?

Why would anyone build more than they personally need?

Who is going to build/repair/modify homes for disabled people to live in without financial incentive?

You need money for all of this.

on a global level, no. On a state level, especially a state like Califonia, it's more questionable but still feasible.

Unfortunately, this is more of a city level issue where a disproportionate amount of people are in the large metropolitan cities of San Diego, San Franciso, and Los Angeles. It probably can be handled if we could move them to other counties, but other counties don't want to inherit that burden. Even if a few did they very likely lack the infrastructure and staff to really support something at scale (not necessarily ALL of these homeless, simply enough to start having the population decrease faster than new ones are created.

We are not resource limited. A B2 bomber costs 2 billion and we have 20.

What’s the debt level at now? 30+ trillion?

But that's just a made up number.

The pentagon has failed 5 audits in a row.

Money is not real.

In Canada we have free health care and a similar homelessness situation as in the US.

USA 17.5 per 10K Canada 10 per 10K

Americans like to think that universal health care solves every problem but it really doesn’t. It’s a good system and helps many things but not a panacea.

Your healthcare system doesn’t (from my anecdotal experience knowing someone in Ontario) cover that much mental health. She could effectively see a therapist a few times of year before it became an out of pocket expense. If we want to address homelessness that’s related to mental health we need much better access. We also need housing, food.

We need things that are doable but we don’t do them because capitalism doesn’t allow for it.

There is a strong belief in some circles that outpatient mental health care can cure most people. It cannot, and that is one of the fundamental flaws with the community based treatment model. First, many conditions can only be managed with current therapies. Second, there are many people who are so far gone that they can no longer even effectively treat themselves. Leaving them in the community to slowly die, strangled by their own minds, is not humane. Especially when we know that intensive inpatient mental health treatment can drastically increase quality of life for many of these people.

Do we need more safeguards? Yes. But inpatient mental health treatment needs to be viewed as a first line treatment in some cases, rather than a treatment of absolute last resort.

Mental healthcare coverage in Canada is pretty abysmal. It's barely covered at all unless you're in a crisis situation, which is not very different from many US states.

That’s fair. Though to be clear the following are covered:

* Family doctor or clinic visits for mental health * Psychiatrist visits * In most provinces, medications

Talk therapy through a psychologist is what is generally not covered outside of work insurance. That’s a big gap, but also not quite right to say “not covered at all”.

Yes and then if you are in a crisis they will book you for a specialist psychiatric visit... in 2 weeks time if you're lucky, or maybe 2 years from now

Therapists and psychologists are two incredibly impactful resources when it comes to mental health. No one said it wasn’t covered at all, just that the coverage is missing the most impactful services.

The problem is of intake. Family doctors (if you have one) are ill equipped to deal with mental health issues and may miss them entirely - a lot of the population meanwhile simply don't have a family doctor and can only get 15 minute clinic visits. Often how it works out is that a psychologist or therapist will be the one equipped to refer you to a psychiatrist to begin with if needed.

Additionally, because of artificial constraint in the supply of psychiatrists (and doctors in general to a lesser degree), the wait time to see one can reach ~1 year, which doesn't have anything to do with how healthcare is financed but is still a problem in Canada.

Free health care isn't free housing nor is it free food. Housing and food are the most important things for maintaining health. Healthcare is of very little value if you're routinely sleeping outside in wet and cold weather and have difficulty finding food.

Almost half isn’t what I’d call similar..

That said healthcare isn’t housing, addiction services, or mental health services.

In response to baby formula getting stolen, supermarkets put it at the front under lock and key. Which is an entirely logical conclusion under our current system and culture. But something is clearly wrong with how we distribute resources when helpless infants can't get what they need.

So is the point of clarification around the baby formula thing there was actually an article oh few months ago a while back anyway that pointed out that most of this baby formula that was being stolen wasn't actually by needing mothers but was actually part of a massive international crime syndicate that was stealing it and then reselling the goods.

It turns out that when it's easy to steal things that people need organized crime will get low-level people like drug addicts and petty criminals to steal the goods for them who then give it to an intermediary middleman who then moves it to the person at the top that then resales it online and they're able to have fantastic prices because they have no no unit cos. In fact in many cases a lot of stolen goods tend to end up being part of organized crime not homeless or needy people that need things. People who need things generally we have a robust social safety net that includes things like food stamps and housing assistance in many parts of the country already.

Government SNAP benefits provide poor kids baby formula and other necessities. Mothers do not have to steal it.

It’s easy to fence is the reason it is locked up.

Such 'benefits' are yet another lock and key; another hurdle that people in need must jump over. It's baby formula. You are just reiterating their point.

You're missing the point. For the most part, people stealing baby formula aren't doing so because they need it and can't afford it. Most baby formula theft is conducted by organized shoplifting rings. It can be easily sold or bartered on the street, and police don't focus on such crimes so the risk is low.

And it can be easily sold or bartered on the street because there are people who need it. Without the demand, it wouldn't be profitable. The reason there is such demand is because getting it through the legal market is too expensive and getting it through benefits is too time consuming, confusing, difficult, and gatekeepy.

What are parents going to feed their baby if it is all stolen?

Determining value is the value of money. Without it we might get too busy making paperclips and forget to feed people all the same.

It's a crude system, more ad-hoc evolved than intelligently designed, and definitely historically manipulated at every chance. Nonetheless, anyone who lobbies for the dissolution of our monetary systems can't be taken seriously unless they also are arguing for a suitable replacement of this functionality.

In the past, systems that relied on the opinions of a small group or single individual to determine the value of different types of production to society have failed spectacularly so the solution will need to be more robust than that.

People are starving in the streets. I think this is a more spectacular failure than chandeliers produced by weight.

Fewer people are starving than ever before, all because of capitalism.

What alternative are you proposing? You are always welcome to donate food to the hungry, as many of us do.

Ah yes, when I give food to the poor I’m a good person, when the person who profits off of the sale of food (record profits in 2022!) is morally neutral.

Why do you think healthcare isn’t accessible and to whom do you think it is inaccessible?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not for the reasons you think or the people/places you’re talking about.

It's not or, its and.

and make healthcare accessible.

>In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities.

Your feelings, whatever they are, that lead you to your opinions, political principles, or ethics, are inherently immune to being invalidated by others.

However, it makes me nervous to read comments such as yours, because my first reaction is that I can't tell what motivates you.

Oftentimes deep feelings come from personal connections.

If person A had a loved one who became homeless, and person B spent a week in a mental hospital, then those people might naturally have very different reactions to history or public policy debates.

Neither is right or wrong, but either might learn from the other.

I'm just repeating a commonly held belief, hence the upvotes. It's not as if I came up with this opinion out of thin air.

>Your feelings, whatever they are, that lead you to your opinions, political principles, or ethics, are inherently immune to being invalidated by others.

You don't know me. You can't possibly know something like this from one comment on the internet. It seems that others have said this to you in the past, and you are just parroting it to me.

Best wishes, much love

>I'm just repeating a commonly held belief, hence the upvotes

That possibility ("a commonly held belief") indeed is the reason I thought it worth engaging.

I don't think I can see your upvotes, and discussing voting is against the guidelines.

>It's not as if I came up with this opinion out of thin air.

It would be unreasonable to assume you did. Yet that doesn't give me a hint where your opinions do come from, which is why I was - and am - asking.

>You don't know me.

That was the gist of my whole comment. It's unfortunate if the meaning of the whole thing was somehow inverted.

>You can't possibly know something like this from one comment on the internet

Something like what? You quoted a sentence that tried to communicate, in short, nobody can judge you.

My entire comment was a disclaimer or admission that I know nothing about you nor can I judge you, and a solicitation of information.

>It seems that others have said this to you in the past, and you are just parroting it to me

Every word I wrote was original to me and expressed my thoughts at least for one particular moment.

Do you think repeating beliefs that others hold is bad? I don't think it's good or bad in itself. By the repetition of an idea, you make it your own, and there is always a good reason for doing so...but that reason is unique to you and not made clear unless you choose.

Asking about your reasons may seem intrusive, like asking if you want to open yourself to bullying from all and sundry, but I strongly believe in this principle:

What convinces you of a thing is the best possible argument for convincing other people

Constructive dialogue on anything cannot take place without some willingness to treat discussion as more than a tactical game.

Not participating in constructive dialogue is everyone's right. The benefit to you, the carrot and not the stick, is that you might one day rightly convince someone, somewhere, in the world of something you believe in.

Who knows, you could be the first person to convince anyone of anything on the internet in the last half century.

Homeless shelters still exist too.

It's not about what to call it, it's about whether people are forced to be there.

If homeless shelters are shitholes, neglected, understaffed, with indifferent and uncaring (or abusing) personnel, with no boundaries between the inmates, so that dangerous and unstable people make it hell for the more well adjusted homeless people living there without recourse, then many or most homeless are not going to want to stay there.

And if you have strong boundaries and rules, there's a subpopulation that won't be allowed to stay there.

(Most places have something in-between: policies that exclude a fair number of homeless but still leave enough behavioral issues to produce dangerous and unpleasant places).

Of course, resourcing is part of the problem, but it also just can't be one-size fits all.

It's not just about policies, it's about the layout, affordances, staffing, and so on.

If you're set to be stuffed like canned sardines in small rooms, for example, there are fewer boundaries regardless of "policy".

Yes; I mentioned resourcing.

There's no reason to expect asylums to be any better, the only difference is that people are forced to be there.

If we see that someone in freezing weather prefers sleeping outside to sleeping in a homeless shelter, we're forced to reckon with the fact that homeless shelters must be terrible.

If we lock this person up in an equally terrible asylum, we can ignore that.

It's not nearly so simple, because people aren't so simple.

Yes, in some cases people should be forced to be there. In other cases no way.

It's not about a specific thing like this. It's about setting aside the resources as a society to deal with the problem, pay experts, and then do what they say. It will take time, we will have to course correct along the way, but we have to first agree to take the journey together.

Asylum does not necessarily mean people are forced to be there. You can go out, advocate or hell, even be a part of running one, defining rhe rules. You can make an asylum that doesn't do that.

I'm behind you, when are you starting? We have lots of people that need help, please hurry.

A shelter is generally a place that you go to overnight, where you can't keep your stuff, you have to be out early in the morning and come back at a strict time in the afternoon or evening. Very different than an asylum which provides 24 hour care. Also, there are many homeless families (shelters don't serve them that well), but when it comes to mental illness it's not usually a family thing.

> A shelter is generally a place that you go to overnight, where you can't keep your stuff, you have to be out early in the morning and come back at a strict time in the afternoon or evening.

Of course you could imagine shelters where people are allowed to stay all day. Or housing first programs. The relevant difference is still whether people are forced to be there.

> Also, there are many homeless families (shelters don't serve them that well), but when it comes to mental illness it's not usually a family thing.

I'm not sure I understand this argument. Shelters don't serve families well because they can't stay there together, but this is not a problem for asylums, since asylums would only take those who are mentally ill — so families can't stay there together either, but that's not a problem in this case?

>In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities.

Maybe that's putting the cart before the horse?

How about what is needed is changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture, so that fewer people end up "mentally ill", and those that are environmentally or genetically mentally ill do not get broken and marginalized and have their conditions gravely worsen, as do their "solutions" (from isolation, homelessness and living on the margins, to drug abuse, murders, or even mass shootings)?

(Wow, downvotes. Fixing the cause as opposed to a band-aid is controversial. Well, I guess you get the society you deserve).

But there will still be some mentally ill people right? Not everything and everyone can cured. Just like we will always need jails.

Yes. Far fewer, and with lesser societal impact and harm, for which existing infrastructure would be more than enough.

Kind of how other first world countries (even nominally poorer ones) only have a tiny fraction of the problems with mentally-ill homelessness, crime, shootings, and so on.

"Just like we will always need jails." citation needed

Hitler.

I get what you're saying but Hitler never went to jail; his forces were eliminated by the armies of multiple world superpowers working together. Imagine if such manpower and might were used to eradicate homelessness and hunger.

he did go to jail and wrote his famous Mein Kampf...

Ironically we may have never reached the moon, or have deployed GPS, Starlink, etc without the huge advancements that came about through war R&D.

(Or taken a few additional centuries to get there)

Hitler was the person running jails, camps, and asylums and sending people there.

So this argument kind of backfires...

Would we have been better off putting Hitler in jail before all that? He didn’t just switch a crazy light in his head overnight.

All I’m saying is, there will always be people that need to be inside jail rather than outside jail. The parent asked for a citation. I said Hitler. Because it would have been better if he was inside jail and not running it.

Another one: Charles Manson. He was jailed. I don’t think there is any society where he could have lived and not committed atrocities. Unless you lived in a society that legalised such atrocities but I’m not interested in living somewhere like that.

Advocating for "changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture" is a bit of a moonshot.

And how is not going for that "moonshot" work out for you?

I, for one, am down for this moon shot. Let's do it

A hell of a lot better than in most places that have tried a “moonshot”. Russia in 1917 being the major example.

Don't you remember Apollo? That was more recent, and was successful, and widely considered as a good idea.

It's weird to choose an obscure, older historical reference to suit your point, while the literal best example possible, the example that created the term, is sitting right there.

It’s this belief that engineering and public policy are exactly the same, that keeps getting us in trouble.

I agree, but band-aids at least stop the bleeding while the bigger issues are being taken care of.

Changing those conditions, even if everyone could agree on what needs to be done, and the political will were there, right now, will be a multi-year -- perhaps multi-decade -- process. I don't think we should let people suffer while we wait for that to happen.

I think we should start committing mentally ill homeless people to mental institutions, and force those addicted to drugs/alcohol into rehab programs. They need to be off the street in safer environments for these treatments to be successful. After those problems are dealt with, we can put them in supportive housing and get them into job training and placement programs.

That's not going to be perfect; it may just not work for some people. But it will work for many, and our cities will be safer, healthier, and cleaner as a result. The problem is that there are not enough resources and funding, and the political will to fix that isn't there.

And yes, we need to fix structural problems too:

* Neutralize NIMBYs who fight new housing; once the formerly-homeless get through their treatment programs and are in a position to be back on their feet, we need places to put them that aren't insanely expensive, especially if we expect these new residents to eventually start paying for their own housing.

* Raise minimum wages (somehow also for salaried workers in addition to hourly), with automatic yearly increases indexed to inflation or CPI or whatever. Eliminate the distinction between tipped and non-tipped workers; base wages should be living wages, conforming to the minimum wage laws.

* Either a) put some differential/ratio-based caps on executive compensation, or b) tax the shit out of high income earners to fund fixes to income inequality.

* If we can't get some sort of universal healthcare, at the very least we need to require that health insurers cover mental health and addiction treatment at much better levels than we do now.

But fixing structural problems takes a lot of time. I don't see better mental health & addiction services as putting the cart before the horse; I think both attack vectors are essential.

Higher minimum wages are the last thing those people need. We're talking about the least productive workers. If minimum wage is $20 and their labor is only worth $10 then no one will hire them at all. They will remain dependent on handouts and never have the opportunity to gain real work experience.

Under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) of 2008, medical insurers are already required to cover mental health the same way they cover physical health. The issue is not so much with insurers but availability of providers. It doesn't matter whether your insurer will pay the claim if you can't get an appointment with a local psychiatrist in the first place.

You, nradov, are the problem.

Paying people a living wage is not a handout. Raising the minimum wage is not a handout.

These people are working, hard, harder than you do, for way less. These people are being taken advantage of. It's not just fast food workers, it's bank tellers, it's farm workers, it's orderliness and custodians at hospitals, it's the backbone of our society.

What do you get paid to do? I would argue that what you get paid for what you do is more of a handout than raising the minimum wage of a janitor, which isn't a handout at all.

Why not reduce the cost of living?

Feel free to insult me if that makes you feel better but it won't solve anything. You can't force private employers to hire unproductive, unskilled workers at wages that make them unprofitable.

A better solution would be to eliminate the minimum wage entirely and instead expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. Basically have negative income tax rates for low income workers. This would cut unemployment and allow those people to start gaining some real job skills.

Please don't cross into personal attack. We're trying to avoid that here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Nobody knows what parts of society and culture create more mental illness. Some people will tell you they have the cure for the problems with our culture, but I disagree with most that proclaim to have the answer.

You don't even have the answer, you're just listing the effects and stating they are bad and that we should not have them. No shit, the problem is what to change and what the effect will be.

>Nobody knows what parts of society and culture create more mental illness.

I'd say we have a very good idea. It's just denial when people are pretending we don't.

Where did you come up with the numbers 90% and 10%?

Did you just make them up?

Yes. The point being that asylums had some aspects that we should improve, but it's pretty much unanimously agreed that they were better than what we're doing now

It's not anything close to unanimously agreed upon that they are better than what we're doing now. We have entire advocacy organizations who are opposed to incarcerating the mentally ill.

It's also not out of the blue, or as if I came up with it.

Yes, and those organizations are dumb, and should be ignored. Any organization that somehow thinks that leaving mentally ill people on the streets to live in squalor and danger is better than institutionalization should not have a place in policy decisions.

It is mind-boggling to me that this is at all debatable.

Obviously we need to mandate levels of treatment and care, and constantly audit institutions to ensure conditions are maintained at a high level. But this is not even remotely an unsolved problem. We shouldn't let the failures of the past force us into failures today.

That's a strawman argument. They are not arguing that it's good for people to live on the streets. What they are arguing is that the abuse associated with making it easier to incarcerate mentally ill people is too great of a risk.

Seems to work in civilized countries. The solution is obviously to treat patients well, not abandon them.

Humanity and compassion, it works

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