03-04-2020, 12:08 PM
(03-04-2020, 09:35 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Of course the economy can be good when there are "so many" homeless.
1. "So many" is still a tiny number compared to the total population. The economy can be good without reaching impossible perfection for every person.
2. A significant proportion of the homeless choose to live that way over their available options to live in a home. Why should we deny them agency to make their own choices?
1. The situation is worse than it used to be. Maybe one can blame population growth, atomization of American life, weakened labor unions, monopolistic trends in the American economy, or perverse priorities among leaders in both Parties. Maybe most people's expectations are simply too high.
2. Does one live where work is available or where the housing is cheap? Housing is incredibly cheap in much of the Mountain and deep South. Think of how easily one could buy a house in a coal-mining town in West Virginia where the coal seams are worked out. Try making a living in such a place. In contrast, one can easily live in much of the country for the 3000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment apartment in Silicon Valley. If you live in Silicon Valley and work in a store or a fast-food place, then you are damned to live in some crowded conditions ("Twelve in one room in A-MAY-ree-kah!").
3. People have often lived in vans, trailers, and houseboats.
If I am to judge how prosperous a country is I do not look at how well the elites live. Such people will always get paid enough if they have genuine merit to live very well. I ask instead how well does someone with a job fairly similar across national lines (barbers, schoolteachers, carpenters, accountants, mechanics, and of course factory workers) lives. People in the largest job categories not connected to enforcing the rules of the political order (a secret policeman in North Korea is not quite the same as a state trooper in .....) better reflect the quality of life between societies or between times in the same societies. I can remember when it was possible to get factory work in a small Midwestern town and be a breadwinner with a mortgage despite having no more than a high-school diploma. That seems to be over. It is arguable that people with low-level supervisory jobs in high-cost areas are not doing as well as their grandparents were doing as factory workers in Youngstown, Ohio fifty years ago. There is good reason for Youngstown, Ohio hemorrhaging its population.
Something has deteriorated. The proof of the validity of capitalism as an economic order is that one does not have to own the business to prosper. Consider the failure of Commie states -- in many of them, only the Communist Party hacks and their enforcers did well.
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.