The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
The basis of your premise is correct. If people are sufficiently deprived, some non-trivial portion of them will become highly anti-social, often violent, often criminal, and otherwise just disruptive to society. Even if it’s entirely their own fault for ending up that way. But you’re missing a couple of things.
Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.
Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.
> Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
This just seems like a completely insane take to me. Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.
> Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
> You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.
> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach
Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.
I have a pet theory which says wealth and political stability over long periods of time and cultural homogeneity together lead to lower crime rates and this doesn't indicate anything about how law-abiding these countries citizens are or how big their social safety net is. And those countries still remain higher crime rate than countries who are both hard on crime, have an effective police force and have citizens who believe someone is watching them and will severely punish them even when they are out of the FOV of a CCTV camera (God in Islam. Christianity doesn't count, you won't be punished cause Jesus died for your sins).
Cultural, religious and ethnic homogeny are all obviously very beneficial for social stability, and I think the homogeny of Scandinavia is one of the main reasons that its social approach to managing crime has been so successful up until now. With the other major difference being that involuntary institutionalisation is rather high in those countries, where a lot of the anglo-sphere has instead opted to just release those people to live on the streets. These are however massively controversial ideas to a lot of people.
Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.
I haven't seen anybody in this thread suggesting that there are only two variables involved in managing crime rates. This discussion is about two different general approaches to the problem, each of which have their own complex set of variable to manage.
It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.
> The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets.
At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.
I think we already allocate enough money to solve the problem. Spending more will likely just reinforce the industrial homelessness complex. We need to change how the money is spent.
But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.
The government cleans the streets regularly, so relocating unclean people into places the city doesn't clean isn't going to make the city any cleaner. You probably haven't had much experience being around people who can't take of themselves and haven't got anyone caring for them. Whatever properties they inhabit will become blighted and swarms of insects like cockroaches will infest everything nearby.
You'd first need to help them live with dignity. For the genuinely homeless the only social environment that's equipped to care for them are mental hospitals. Secondly you'd have to recalibrate your expectations for what productivity means. A person who isn't functional enough to to work with a manager to help a corporation achieve its goals, can still make meaningful contributions to society. Even if it's simply by helping their own self and then telling their story. Like the stories of the people with encephalitis lethargica who came back to life by taking the drug l-dopa. It didn't exactly help them rejoin the workforce, but it brought hope to humanity.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.