Why is the homeless population exploding?
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Vknid.
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- November 11, 2023 at 1:25 pm #309446
Today I was thinking about the appearance of so many homeless in the last 10+ years especially in some of the areas of California. I have heard many thoughts on this and I think most of them are correct to some degree in the micro. Drug addiction, mental illness, the economy, housing costs and inflation.
One major component to this though is something I am not sure most of us realize. The governments have a general power that in the micro you don’t see but zoom out a little and you do. Government can do a number of things that either encourage or discourage behavior. And what you encourage you get more of. But encourage can mean appearing to do good and saying you are but the action ends up harmful in the long run.
I think this is one of the situations where politicians via bad policy cause a problem or make it massively worse. And then generally those same politicians will promise to solve what they caused they just need more of your money and or freedom. From there the cycle just repeats.
I have heard numbers that California spend as much 70k PER homeless person in homeless benefits. My own numbers make it seems more like 20k but still. That is crazy, but it demonstrates that government’s typical answer of throwing tax payer money at an issue does not solve it. I think in most cases it makes it worse. We also see this same pattern in schooling. More and more money thrown at it but it only gets worse.
Many people are ambitious and strive to do well for themselves and their families and those around them. But some people are not. And I believe once a human’s basic needs are fulfilled, even in a rudimentary way, they have little motivation to really do very much. So when the government provides shelter, food, safety and such, some people have no need to do but just exist. Some people are built this way, that in itself is fine. But prior to modern circumstances that person had to go to work or go hungry and be cold in the winter. Those are very powerful motivators.
These are not new ideas. Benjamín Franklin pointed this out over 200 years ago.
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“I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
― Benjamin FranklinNovember 13, 2023 at 5:03 am #309497Biggest contributor to poverty is gotta be the breakdown of the family, which gov’t at various levels has encouraged. As a society gets more secular and affluent, decay of this sort can be expected. The US in particular seems to be in an “end of empire” sort of spiral.
November 13, 2023 at 6:41 am #309499I think those things are all true. But that’s also a possible chicken or the eff conundrum. I say that because I think it is the government who either intentionally or unintentionally (at that time, today it’s all intentional) encouraged the breakdown of that unit as well as pushed removing God from everything. But I agree that decadence and comfort lull people into laziness, self obsession and God and his morality are left behind. That combination of things leads to ruin which is what we are seeing now.
November 13, 2023 at 10:15 pm #309539You will own nothing, and be happy.
The “only solution” is more government control/influence, with less personal rights/freedoms.
Men are being divorce-raped by the courts.
The number of veterans whom the military industrial complex chewed up and spat out, with no thought of their well being after serving their nation.
Places where rent is so high/available spaces is so low, even with a good paying job, employees are forced to sleep in their vans.
Lack of affordable housing options for your income level.
Government is more concerned with illegal migrants, giving them food and clothing and shelter, while spitting on their nation’s citizens. (ie. replacement work force and voter base.)
November 14, 2023 at 6:20 am #309543This issue is a complex one but I agree: the primary driver is probably the breakdown of the family.
Life comes with difficulties and you need the skills necessary to cope with and push though those difficulties in order to achieve your goals.
The thing is it is in people’s nature to follow the path of least resistance. Children are no different. They’d put off chores and play all day if they could. That’s why it’s the parents job to help them develop the discipline to do the things they’d rather not.
I’m from the “spare the rod and spoil the child” generation and have received several doses of “motivation” when I refused to do what I was told. Did I find it unfair at the time? — Yes. And do I see the value of it now? — You bet.
The problem nowadays is that many parents would rather be friends with their children than discipline them; then are flabbergasted when they become uncontrollable.
The Government probably has contributed to the problem by incentivizing the breakdown of the nuclear family (e.g. through financial assistance, no-fault divorce etc). However it is instructive that people would succumb so easily to these State provided enticements.
In my opinion this points to a shift in values on an individual level which in turn points to some failure of the family unit because generally that is where such values are instilled and developed.
November 14, 2023 at 9:13 am #309550“Government is more concerned with illegal migrants, giving them food and clothing and shelter, while spitting on their nation’s citizens. (ie. replacement work force and voter base.)”
Right now that is all they care about and that is all over the west. I do think the initial thrust of that was to suppress wages and to have a pool of slave labor. However this is no longer the main motivation. They are flooding the west with immigrants to dissolve the the west from within and cause borders to vanish. That is a WEF goal. When you bring in a large number of something else into a culture, you dilute the existing culture and at some point it ceases to exist. This is already going on in parts of Europe. This will happen in the US as well. It already has started and I believe enough people are already here to finish the job unless we close borders and deport.
“The Government probably has contributed to the problem by incentivizing the breakdown of the nuclear family (e.g. through financial assistance, no-fault divorce etc). However it is instructive that people would succumb so easily to these State provided enticements.”
The government has caused the problem. This has been going on since the 60’s. What you see is not new, it’s the result of 60+ years of moral and family decay.
“In my opinion this points to a shift in values on an individual level which in turn points to some failure of the family unit because generally that is where such values are instilled and developed.”
True but you have to consider what happened first. I would assert that government and some groups pushed out God, family and convinced people morality was relative. This again started in the 60’s. And at some point the family began to fade and then everything else followed. And now even having a family is frowned upon. None of that decay was organic.
In the 60’s prior to abolishing things like segregation and before all the government “assistance” programs, black folks had a higher percentage of 2 parent households than white folks and were joining the middle-class as a much higher rate than now. Fast forward through decades of government “assistance” and now 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. In 2018 (I think it was that year) in New York City , more black children were murdered through abortion than were actually born.
My point is, government has for decades fostered the death of the family, once that process got underway everything else downstream of family began to deteriorate rapidly. Morality has followed a similar path for similar root reasons. Combine that and in present day you have large swaths of people who hate themselves, hate everyone around them and don’t know why they are here.
“You don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you want and you don’t know what’s going on”–Ghost of Christmas Past – Scrooged
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