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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.
No man, no problem.
Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.
The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?
Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.
A modest proposal, then?
At the risk of taking the bait, and against my better judgment... This is a hideously lazy solution for a society that has moved beyond sustenance farming. You're making a cynical presumption of intentional apathy to justify unreasonable measures, when in reality, there but for the grace of God do you go. In a society where your friends and family reflect your attitude, you're one TBI away from being labeled an inconvenience and put to death. Without a hint of introspection or irony, you condemn the homeless because your tiny slice of the collective burden of housing them is too costly and inconvenient for you? Have we considered, perhaps, making the burden less burdensome? Maybe eliminating legislative barriers to affordable housing erected by the economically privileged would be a better place to start than getting out your guns and going postal on a tent city? As it stands, you want society to grant you a license to kill those who inconvenience you - and this is exactly the sort of small-minded, impulsive criminality that society is constructed to curtail.
While we're unseriously venting our spleens, here's a modest counter-proposal: you can have your license to kill the homeless, but you only get to kill as many people as for whom you voluntarily provide housing, and if you ever stop providing that housing for any reason, and anyone you housed is killed by this policy, you too are put to death. This is at least marginally less lazy than your proposal, because it forces you to exercise discriminating judgment as to who is worth helping and who is a lost cause, and it guarantees that you can't take someone in for a day just to execute them the following day. You get to slake your bloodthirst and prove that you aren't just a lazy sociopath who wants society to give you a free pass for murder; I get you to rehabilitate or hospice someone who doesn't deserve to die, because your skin is in the game; some people get a better life than they currently have; and we get to eliminate the truly hopeless cases. And if no one agrees to house someone for their license to kill, we're no worse-off than we started.
I'd personally prefer if we don't openly advocate for killing groups of people over inconveniences and unproductivity, but if we must, let's at least try to address the obvious, foreseeable objections to our modest proposals with our own well-reasoned conclusions, and not just show our whole ass to the world?
Your response is just unbounded sympathy without a real solution. Indeed, the failure mode of every unsuccessful homeless "solution" appears to be the assumption that we are failing them, rather than that they are failing us.
I met a call for indiscriminate mass murder with a self-regulating incentive system that simultaneously brings out the best in people, offers a second chance to those truly down on their luck, and condones the death of the undeserving - I'd hardly call that "unbounded sympathy".
On a serious note, I totally agree that there has to be a limit to society's generosity for recalcitrant insanity and unrepentant antisocial behaviors. I also think that, as far as solutions, "kill them and everyone that roughly matches that description" is a lazy edgelord hot take; the ridiculous cost of food and shelter lately is probably responsible for a considerable fraction of the "roughly matches that description" class; and there's an important distinction between criminal and personal nuisances.
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