Mr. Moderate

If we are going to ground our economic system in free market capitalism, and we should, then socialist principles need to take over at the margins to prevent bad things from happening. That principle is explained more on the Capitalistic Socialism page.

Competition means that some will succeed and some will fail. While most people will have jobs, “full employment” is generally defined as having unemployment be at or below 4% (which is one person in 25 unemployed). But the definition of “unemployed” used to get to that number excludes anybody who has been unsuccessful in obtaining a new job for a certain period of time. Those people are called “discouraged workers” and are excluded from the count of “unemployed workers.” But we should never forget that those people exist at the margins of our economic system.

Presumably, most such people have ways of continuing to survive without state aid. The middle-age person who is living with their elderly parents would be an example of this. But some people have no fall-back plan if they lose both their job and their unemployment benefits. And at the outer margins of this group are the addicted or mentally-ill unemployable people we call “homeless.”

The right-wing advocates of pure capitalism like to refer to these marginal members of our society as “lazy” or “bums” or any of a number of other epithets that remove their dignity and cast unfair aspersions on people who have just lost out at the game of life. The current social safety net system we have is clearly structured to create life-long dependency on the government. (See this blog story: Welfare Incentives Thrive.) A humane and socialist safety net would do anything within reason to move people out of the bottom layer of society and back into the productive mainstream of society. And for those individuals who cannot or will not make the effort to move out, there should be at least three tax-supported institutions which will take care of them:

1. Jail or Prison
2. Mental Hospitals
3. Homeless Shelters

Jail and prison should be used to incarcerate criminals. Mental hospitals should be used to house the mentally ill. Anybody who is neither a criminal nor mentally ill should have a right to the use of any available homeless shelter.

And by the words “homeless shelter” I mean far more than the typical bunk bed, hot meal, and dose of religion shelters we see in our inner cities. I mean a place which is state-supported (eliminating the “dose of religion” element), and which is so structured to rehabilitate homeless people and reintegrate them back into society. Among the many services that any such shelter ought to offer are:

• Job Training
• Job Placement
• Public Service Jobs
• Mail and Phone Services
• Transportation Services
• Night School
• Banking Services
• Counseling Services

The above need not be an exclusive list; many other services can be offered, and in fact, ought to be offered. Remember that our goal should be to rehabilitate the downtrodden and to reintegrate them into society. So, while they may well start out in a bunk bed with a bowl of soup for an evening meal, we provide a logical path for them to get job training, find a job, earn their way into a subsidized apartment, and gradually move up and out of the ranks of those needing “social services” from the state.

Obviously, not everybody is going to do well if this sort of opportunity is presented to them. For those people who are mentally ill, criminals, or drug addicts, they need to be diverted into either mental hospitals, jails, or prisons, as might be appropriate to their particular circumstances. And for those people who simply have a will-to-fail, we can keep them in the bunk bed and hot meal portion of our “homeless shelter” indefinitely. Maybe that is just their idea of a vacation from life, and they will get back to earning their keep eventually. The ready availability of a tax-supported institution of this sort, coupled with a strong advertising program, should eliminate donations to homeless people on the street, and that will gradually force homeless people into shelters, jails, prisons, or mental hospitals, again as might be appropriate to their own individual circumstances.

A properly-structured safety net program of this sort will always reward people for moving up and out of the welfare system and not penalize people for trying to improve themselves. Incarcerating dedicated drug addicts will remove most of the incorrigible homeless from the streets in any case. Those people who are so mentally ill that they cannot function in even the lowest of the lower classes should be hospitalized and treated as might be needed. My guess is that far more than 90% of the people who are left over after eliminating addicts and mentally ill people will not only be able to be reintegrated into society, they will actually greatly desire it and be willing to work hard to achieve it. We just need to give these people a hand through a program with proper incentives to move up and out into a normal life.