Abolishing landlords -- it's well past time

Can we frame the desire behind creating such a system as a belief that there is a basic right to shelter in the same way that proponents of Medicare For All believe that there is a basic right to health care?

I wouldn’t say it is the same. Right to healthcare should apply wherever you are. Right to shelter is more of a right to have a home somewhere not shelter anywhere

Replies are great.

https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1255256408003620864?s=21

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There is definitely a subset of the homeless population that lives that way by choice. Tiny fraction though for sure.

Won’t somebody please think of the empires?!

This isn’t just for @alex . Any one of the liberals are welcome to play too! Like I said above, I can’t imagine we could actually have a coherent ā€˜argument’ as long as the liberals prefer their trolling & Semanikesā„¢ & going round-n-round & all that other monkey business that they’ve spewed the last 15,000,000 posts. So I’m just going to leave this here for them.

In the meantime, let’s chat about history instead…

Activists in South Africa have been fighting this battle for 40 years now. To me, that seems like a big enough ā€œsample sizeā€ to draw at least some conclusions from.

Agreed, tiny %. I’ve got a couple regulars with full military pensions that prefer the lifestyle. Underlying mental illness is a factor for sure.

Homeless shelters are awful. I’d much rather sleep in a tent and I suspect most people here would make the same choice.

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Yep, a tiny%. OTOH a staggering 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in *America*. That’s 1 in 30 children, for those keeping score.

Meanwhile, we have Mr.Econ smarty-pants telling us if we don’t pay for those robo-cops to violently keep all these children homeless… well, it’s a little hard to follow their gibberish… then ZOMG the homeless children’s children’s children will be worse off because the rich people won’t pay construction workers to build houses that none of these children, or their children, or their children will own.

Can’t ā€˜argue’ with ā€œscienceā€ I guess. Those 2.5 million children are just going to have to ā€œtake one for the teamā€. There is no alternative. All hail capitalism !!!1!

Mr.Econ smarty-pants: ZOMG don’t these homeless mom’s understand Econ? WTF are they thinking? Don’t they understand incentives? What a buncha fools. Those homeless moms are setting back the fight to end homelessness catastrophically !!!1!

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Fiction:

  • War is peace
  • Freedom is slavery
  • Ignorance is strength

Fact*:

  • Poverty helps the poor.
  • Homelessness helps those without shelter
  • Violence ā€˜creates’ more housing

ā€˜*’: Or so says Mr.Econ smarty-pants. Can’t ā€˜argue’ with ā€œscienceā€.

I love it how Mr.Econ smarty-pants just ignores all the trade-offs involved in the real world.

Like, they’ll spew that without all that rent-seeking there won’t be any wealth ā€˜creation’. Of course they got things ass-backwards, and once again demonstrate their shocking ignorance of standard economics. But, let’s imagine we were in a bizzaro world. A world where rent-seeking actually did ā€˜create’ wealth. What then?

Well they’d be saying the misery of those 2.5 million homeless children was a small price to pay for more wealth ā€˜creation’. Those kids just gottta understand ECON, and that somebody is going to have to ā€œtake one for the teamā€. Maybe if their parents had learned to code, or didn’t drink Starbucks, or saved some flippin money, someone else’s children would have to ā€œtake one for the teamā€ instead. So it’s not the capitalists fault at all, there is no alternative, and it’s those lazy poor folks own fault like always.

Dude stop playing this dumb-ass game. If you want to argue for banning evictions, fucking argue for banning evictions. The fact that we are in a pandemic does not mean that anything about the system or burden of proof or leverage has fundamentally changed.

1300 posts in and you haven’t bothered to ask a single person itt how they would address homelessness. Fuck you for using homeless children as a prop for your silly game.

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I’m not going to ā€˜argue’ with myself.

Why is it my ā€˜job’ to go around asking peeps anything about anything anyways? I’m not following what you are getting at at all here.

I don’t understand what you mean by ā€œusing… as a propā€. Can you explain what you mean in 25 words or less… without referencing me personally, or anything to do with Mr.Econ smarty-pants? Ignoring this bizarre non-sequoia-ter…

I was merely pointing out an obvious fact: there are real world tradeoffs involved here that Mr.Econ smarty-pants is ignoring. One of these real world tradeoffs is the misery of the 60k families with children that are homeless every night in the US.

How dare you politicize the suffering of homeless people in a discussion on housing policy!

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None of his posts are a good faith discusion though.

It’s all:

Troll post
Troll post
Troll post
Troll post
Won’t someone think of the children!
Troll post

The fact that you become aggravated reading them doesn’t make them ā€˜troll posts’.

LOL. But if that was true, you’d be the pot calling the kettle black.

image

He’s obviously playing a lot of games and trolling, but the post about homeless children was neither of those.

He’s a smart guy with something interesting and quite different to say - you might do well to put up with some trolling and just try harder.

Whether you are right or wrong, your position is a dime-a-dozen. If @Sabo alienates you it’s no big loss for him.