03-12-2020, 04:14 PM
Homelessness is damaging. The homeless are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They are at particular risk from meteorological hazards.
Homeless youth are often dragooned into the sex trade. You do not want to be in that business; it is not good for a happy life. The suicide rate is astronomical in the pornography business, so just think of how tough life could be for a street hooker. Prostitutes are the most common prey for serial killers, and for some it is only a matter of time.
Many of the homeless have troubles far worse than a lack of housing, including mental illness and addiction. Many are violent people. When families get consigned to it, the absence of walls makes raising a child extremely difficult. Privacy works two ways -- in protecting intimacy and protecting children from things inappropriate for them.
We have gone nearly as far as we can with a paradigm that says that economic inequality and brutal management create wealth. Consequences include poverty and economic insecurity. The only way for things to get worse is if we resort to fascist or Stalinist labor camps even more destructive of the human spirit as well as of the precious virtue of liberty. We are in a saecular Crisis, one that requires basic changes in institutions if only to prevent a domestic apocalypse. We have enough wealth and productivity with which to solve all human needs.
We need to revitalize "flyover country" so that people think twice about leaving Cleveland for Los Angeles on the knowledge that Los Angeles at least has milder winters. Maybe if people weren't so broke in "flyover country"...
Life without dignity? That is how we rightly treat criminals as a deterrent to dealing drugs, doing armed robberies, and starting bar brawls. But such can also be a consequence of an economic ideology whose fundamental underpinning is an ethos asserting that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it creates, enhances, or enforces class privilege for the elites of ownership and administration.
Should I get the now-unlikely opportunity to see castles and palaces of central Europe, I will remind myself of the Eszterhazy family (Hungarian-Viennese aristocracy) so rich that they could keep the most pivotal composer of Western musical history (Franz Josef Haydn) as a retainer. OK, so we have a great volume excellent music as a legacy... but how was life for the peasants? A feudal lord taking all the surplus above a starvation level could, if he had enough peasants under him, could live in a way that a more modern Rothschild or Rockefeller can. At least Rothschild financing relies upon the principle that the deal must be good for the borrower, and the oil companies that derive from John Davison Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company seem to pay well enough.
Much is wrong in America, and it is going to take solutions not of a political nature to solve some of those. Solid families will themselves solve many problems better than any welfare programs. Changing the tax laws to favor small business instead of vertically-integrated, bureaucratized behemoths will make prosperity more widespread due to the dispersal of economic and administrative power. Small business? What could better suit and reward the current and potential workaholics that we now have?
Homeless youth are often dragooned into the sex trade. You do not want to be in that business; it is not good for a happy life. The suicide rate is astronomical in the pornography business, so just think of how tough life could be for a street hooker. Prostitutes are the most common prey for serial killers, and for some it is only a matter of time.
Many of the homeless have troubles far worse than a lack of housing, including mental illness and addiction. Many are violent people. When families get consigned to it, the absence of walls makes raising a child extremely difficult. Privacy works two ways -- in protecting intimacy and protecting children from things inappropriate for them.
We have gone nearly as far as we can with a paradigm that says that economic inequality and brutal management create wealth. Consequences include poverty and economic insecurity. The only way for things to get worse is if we resort to fascist or Stalinist labor camps even more destructive of the human spirit as well as of the precious virtue of liberty. We are in a saecular Crisis, one that requires basic changes in institutions if only to prevent a domestic apocalypse. We have enough wealth and productivity with which to solve all human needs.
We need to revitalize "flyover country" so that people think twice about leaving Cleveland for Los Angeles on the knowledge that Los Angeles at least has milder winters. Maybe if people weren't so broke in "flyover country"...
Life without dignity? That is how we rightly treat criminals as a deterrent to dealing drugs, doing armed robberies, and starting bar brawls. But such can also be a consequence of an economic ideology whose fundamental underpinning is an ethos asserting that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it creates, enhances, or enforces class privilege for the elites of ownership and administration.
Should I get the now-unlikely opportunity to see castles and palaces of central Europe, I will remind myself of the Eszterhazy family (Hungarian-Viennese aristocracy) so rich that they could keep the most pivotal composer of Western musical history (Franz Josef Haydn) as a retainer. OK, so we have a great volume excellent music as a legacy... but how was life for the peasants? A feudal lord taking all the surplus above a starvation level could, if he had enough peasants under him, could live in a way that a more modern Rothschild or Rockefeller can. At least Rothschild financing relies upon the principle that the deal must be good for the borrower, and the oil companies that derive from John Davison Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company seem to pay well enough.
Much is wrong in America, and it is going to take solutions not of a political nature to solve some of those. Solid families will themselves solve many problems better than any welfare programs. Changing the tax laws to favor small business instead of vertically-integrated, bureaucratized behemoths will make prosperity more widespread due to the dispersal of economic and administrative power. Small business? What could better suit and reward the current and potential workaholics that we now have?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.