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It depends what type of "correct" solution you're talking about.
A maximally "nice" solution, like free housing maintained by Government employees and unlimited free drugs, implemented in one city, would indeed probably draw all the homeless from the whole nearby area, thus exhausting the budget. Though honestly this would probably bust the budget of any city just dealing with the ones already there.
A maximally "mean" solution, like summary execution of all homeless, vagrants, beggars, etc, implemented in one city, would also solve the the problem of ordinary people not being able to walk the streets without being harassed, but would probably have the opposite effect, pushing all the homeless out of that city into other nearby cities with more average policies.
@anti_dan and @MotteInTheEye bring up a similar point.
I think my main point still stands, because there still is a selection effect as long as local policies differ, and as long as you can convince / trick / force the homeless to take a bus ride.
Lets say there are the two cities again. city A and city B. City A is maximally nice and "solves" the homelessness problem. City B is maximally mean and "solves" the homelessness problem. Both cities have to deal with side effects of their solution. Maybe city A has severe budgetary problems. Maybe city B is a totalitarian state where the presumption of innocence is gone and lots of people get thrown in prison or executed on flimsy grounds.
Now lets say there are two other cities. One city kinda likes the policies of city A, but doesn't have the budget resources to do it. One city kinda likes the policies of city B, but has too strong of a legal system and constitutional protections to carry it out. But they both have the budget / legal allowance to export the homeless. The solution for both of these new cities is straightforward, just send the homeless on to their preferred "solution" city.
Whether you think the solution is to be nice or mean to the homeless, the same problem exists with localities trying to implement it. The problem is certainly worse if places are trying to be nice, but its still there if you want meanness.
I had been thinking more about the opposite effects of the different solution types. One city doing the nice way draws in more homeless, and so places a substantially higher burden on itself while only having a minor positive effect on nearby cities that homeless move there from. So your point of it being unsustainable on a small scale applies. However, one city doing the mean way expels out homeless (anyone sufficiently with it to try to avoid near-certain death is going to leave), so having a minor negative effect on nearby cities. That means that way is sustainable and so is possible to start and grow without an all-at-once national initiative.
I hadn't thought of other cities aligned with the mean city but not going quite so far wanting to send their homeless to that city. I'm not sure that changes things though. The problem of getting more homeless that you plan to treat the nice way is that the cost of every extra one is high, but the cost of treating them the mean way can be quite low, presuming we're dispensing with legal protections. Especially when they've been conveniently gathered onto a bus for you.
I've never seen the cost of the mean solution as monetary. I think other people in the thread have pointed out the problems of being mean to homeless people. To sum up some of the points:
Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions. For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them. I'm not saying this entirely to admonish them. I had some homeless encampments near my neighborhood, and I have two young girls. I only found out about the encampments because one of my other neighbors had politely packed up their tents and left them a handwritten note of "dont camp here". He is an Afghanistan war veteran and has shot at people and been shot at. I had a lot of admiration for my neighbor in that moment, mainly for his restraint. I would have been tempted to at least trash the person's stuff.
I understand the tendency and desire to be tough and mean to the homeless. I feel it all the time. I just have a very premonition about acting on those feelings.
I'm having trouble phrasing my last point. To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one. I see human society as a multi-generational project to try and use less violence and more trading to get what we want. Its a really difficult problem, because often the only way to stop violence is to use violence in response. If you have ever known some military or police families ... they can be a bit violent. The parents think corporal punishment is normal and fine. The kids think bullying is normal and correct as long as they have more physical power. Certainly not all of them ... but I can't be the only one with that observation?
Violence often looks like a small time monetary expense, but I think normalizing it creates a massive long term expense in the form of interpersonal misery.
So, I am certainly one of the posters whom you would consider “blasé” about executing homeless. I consider the question “would I be able to pull the trigger myself” frequently. It’s very easy for me to ask, “Will no one rid me of these turbulent bums?” But would I capable of meting out that type of violence myself, if tasked to do so? Now to be clear, I do not believe that it’s illegitimate to advocate for a particular policy unless one is willing and eager to sign up to be a law enforcement officer, security guard, etc. It’s okay to have specialized positions which employ only individuals with the physical and psychological qualities appropriate for that job, and for others outside that position to still have a say in what policies will be carried out. But, it’s still worth asking whether my rather cavalier attitude about the topic is purely a consequence of my own distance from the ugly part of the process I’m advocating. I have personally never meted out any sort of interpersonal violence; I’ve never even been in a fistfight - I’ve been punched, but have not thrown a punch in return - and I’ve only fired a gun a handful of times. (My marksmanship leaves much to be desired.) So the question of whether I’m capable of carrying out executions, and the adjacent question of whether it would break me psychologically to do so, are appropriate questions to ask.
Now this, I don’t understand at all. What, specifically, are your concerns about having me for a neighbor? I’m an extremely respectful, quiet, and orderly neighbor. It is precisely my preference for orderly, clean, and peaceful environments which causes me such distress at being surrounded by homeless and the disorder they bring. What actual actions do you predict I would perform, as part of being your neighbor, as a result of my stated beliefs? Clearly I’m not saying that I personally am planning on going John Wick on random bums any time soon; I’m very much in the “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” camp, and am not a loose cannon.
Now, I did recently get in a very heated verbal confrontation with a bum who had decided to camp on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex, and whose long chain of tied-together shopping carts was blocking our exit path. That confrontation, in which I did not lay a hand on the man, resulted in him leaving almost immediately, taking all of his garbage with him, and he has not been seen since. Do you think this makes me a bad neighbor? Do you think I’m a coward or hypocrite for arguing with him instead of shooting him in the head, since the death penalty for chronic homelessness is what I advocate here? I would venture to say that the vast majority of those who advocate a similar position would act exactly the same way I did in that scenario.
I think this whole paragraph is asserting things which are not actually generalizably true. For example, Singapore is notorious for applying the death penalty for a far wider array of crimes than any European country does in this day and age. Furthermore, Singapore (like Japan) uses a method of execution - hanging - which has been out of use in European countries for over a century now due to its violent optics. However, Singapore (also like Japan) is one of the least violent societies on earth. It is perfectly able to contain the violence to one very small but important facet of society - the criminal justice system - in order to prevent its spread to the larger society as a whole. The men responsible for carrying out executions in Singapore do not, as far as I’m aware, also go out and blow off steam by murdering people for sport in their spare time. I’m not even sure if they have higher rates of corporal punishment of children than the average Singaporean or Japanese. (And, if they do, are you so sure that corporal punishment, within reason, of children for transgressions is ineffective at shaping those children into responsible and pro-social adults?)
A decade ago I absolutely would have agreed with you that civilizational progress is all about reducing the amount of interpersonal violence across the board, and I still share your basic visceral aversion to violence in terms of the way I live my own life. However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace. Those anti-social elements are not going to stop being violent and unstable just because the rest of us forswear violence; rather, we need people who are not inherently prone to extreme violence to be willing to step up and do a little bit of it, in small doses, so that we can then go back to living our normal lives.
Except this is the lowest period of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in probably human history and also the least violent part of human history. In the past, there was way harsher actions against anti-social elements of society, and far more general violence and chaos.
Also, the reason I wouldn't want is you're not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor. You're an authoritarian with dreams of violent cleanses of people lesser than you, so in aggregate, crime and disorder goes down by 5%, if they're out of bounds of what you determine to be an orderly society.
Actually no, violent crime rates in America are significantly higher today than they were in, say, 1950, when the U.S. had harsher vagrancy laws than today. In 1890s England, violent crime rates were lower than they are in England today, despite laws being stricter at that time. Yes, certainly the world of 2024 is less violent than the world of medieval times and before, but it’s also true that rates violence in, say, 1990 were significantly higher than they had been a couple of decades prior; since laws had grown more lax during that time, rather than less, whatever causal relationship you’re attempting to draw between laxity/non-punitivity and low rates of societal violence seems fairly questionable.
What specific actions do you think I take, as a result of my beliefs about crime and punishment, that actually impact how good or bad a neighbor I am? Do you think I discuss my philosophy of policing with my neighbors? Do you think that any of the policies I advocate would have any significant impact on the day-to-day lives of the other residents of my apartment complex? If not, then in what sense am I “not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor”?
Sure, you don't do anything bad now - firstly, becuase you're by your own admission timid, but also because the state would put you away for shooting an irksome vagrant. Why would I want to take chances with living next to people like you in case the state shifts to be more permissive, though? Would you like to live next to a literal Marxist-Leninist intellectual who is perfectly civil yet a) owns a gun and b) posts on the Internet about all the kulaks and bloodsuckers he'd be putting against the wall if only the revolution came?
This seems to be an unfair comparison. Unless you/Outlaw are a drug-addicted, psychotic, violent bum, you have nothing to fear living next to Hoffmeister in his ideal society. The class which Hoffmeister is describing has very sharp boundaries, which (I doubt) any of us posting here will ever fall into. In contrast, it’s pretty likely that many of us on this forum would be shitting our pants in the Marxist-Leninist’s ideal society.
The situations are not symmetrical. Using a prisoner’s dilemma analogy: Hoffmeister seems to be saying that he will cooperate with any neighbor who cooperates with him and defect against any neighbor who defects against him (where “cooperation” is being a good neighbor and “defection” is attacking one’s neighbors and their property). The Marxist-Leninist has a far more restricted set of people whom he cooperates with. And the psychotic bum is just a plain and simple defectbot.
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