The Ghost of RubangB said:
Haha, I was drunk when I posted that last night. I know you're not nuts or evil. I had a roommate over the summer who was a free market guy though, and he said that if you offered any homeless person a job, they would turn it down, because they like to be homeless, and they're homeless because they want to be. He didn't believe that homeless people die in the streets, until my wife told him she worked at a bar in New York and she clocked out at 4 am and had to step over frozen bums on the way home, and saw people picking them up when they were dead. Regarding the homeless, the vast majority of them get back on their feet in a few weeks or a few months. The "homeless population" or the "chronic homeless" are almost all mentally handicapped and/or drug addicts and/or victims of sex abuse and/or war veterans. They're not exactly going to get jobs any time soon. Do we give them enough change so they can have fast food and beer until they die, or do we try to give them shelters, or should we put them in hospitals or something?
My opinion is that we should legalize drugs, which would empty half our prisons, and then convert them into homeless shelters. We'd cut spending on prison security, public defense attorneys for possession of drugs, and other legal red tape, and we'd stop tearing families apart and have more healthy people on the streets working, instead of in jail, and the unhealthy people would have a place to sleep. I think it's a win/win situation for liberals like me and libertarians like you. We just gotta get the anti-drug people on board. |
I do agree with you on all of that. I think it's the governments moral responsibility to take care of those who can't take care of themselves. Where Liberals and Libertarians disagree, is on how to treat those that won't take care of themselves.