But that is what people tell me, so how am I responsible for it? Believe it or not, yes, many people have told me that they have no individual values or ideas about how to live. They do “whatever” to get by.
It would be more honest to say that I refute it, not that I am ignorant. I have been homeless and improvised shelter, and there was no “income” required. What was required was a little knowledge and a fair amount of effort. It was in no way “theoretical”. Shelter can be made to last for years, or only a single day. What is pragmatic about dormitories is that it can reduce the costs to such an extent that sheltering all of the people who need it is already covered by the costs spent now in waste, administrative overhead, and other more costly outreach/rescue programs there are now. The money is already there, but is being funnelled in a roundabout way to make busywork for people instead of directly towards the problem.
If you think that it is more important that people do some arbitrary task to get an income to exchange for hugely inflated shelter, then perhaps you should convince me of how that is supposedly pragmatic. What is the moral or ethical basis of me petitioning for the right to be employed so that I can live in some solitary box somewhere? Why should anybody value that? Well, guess what - many homeless people do not value that, which is why it is less of a hassle for them to be homeless. Work is great, when it has a social function. But earning a right to survive is callous and uncivilized, and it creates power imbalances between people. Maybe trying to shoehorn a protestant work ethic into an information-based economy is a utopian and misguided ideal.
There’s your “cause”. The homeless are not willing participants of the system you are outlining. What is the “cause” of having a home? Does living in a home have a specific cause?
Here’s an exercise in equity - try to help homeless people to be homeless on their own terms, instead of forcing them to fit into a system they have rejected, or which has rejected them. If you recognize their agency and choice as citizens this shouldn’t be too hard. Let them do work which benefits the community without them being “hired” and live normal lives outside of your transactional economy, instead of harassing them to live a certain way. Work, money, shelter, food etc are great - but not always at any price, people have their limits of what they are willing to do to fit in. And if people honestly wanted to know “why”, they could always ask and listen. The reasoning is not especially mysterious or difficult to understand. Are the homeless “willing people”? Who is working with them to make their ideas real?
Creating commerce and jobs is hardly a plan, either. In fact, if you ask the people responsible, they often say explicitly that they do it this way so that they do not have to plan. Because markets naturally solve all of their own problems magically.
Instead, invest in infrastructure first. For what people actually need to survive. It might not be much, but it is more of a plan and timeline than “let the market fix it”. Income IS a theoretical abstraction, food and shelter are not. Why invest your money and labor into a system which demonstrates such poor priorities? FFS, everybody in the US could have been housed already just with the money we wasted only last year. People keep asking “where’s the money going to come from” when if you follow the money, you’ll see that it has already been paid for thousands of times over. What a deal!
