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I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.
That doesn't help the issue of people with empty wallets and full bladders/large intestines. If there is no legitimate place in public where people can relieve themselves without spending any money, everyone else will have to navigate a bio-hazardous obstacle course on the side-walk.
My recommendation:
All I see here is the Road to Serfdom. The further growth of the State by involving itself in all matters to solve issues it has created itself.
Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists? I'm sure
I guess that doesn't create thousands of jobs in the bureaucracy to manage the whole situation. But then if that's what we want we might as well get the benefit of that approach and empower the State to intern vagrants. Using state capacity to manage the results of not using it to actually solve problems is silly.
Because I am trying to come up with a solution for the problem of 'providing restroom facilities to people who cannot pay for them'.
It is generally considered unacceptable (at least in the West) to put someone in a position in which they have no choice but to violate the law, and then punish them for doing so. As people do not cease to have bodily functions when they cannot legally perform them, there needs to exist places in which someone can exercise the Greater and Lesser Conveniences, even if they cannot pay to do so.
(I suppose one could allow private businesses to operate paid toilets, subject to taxation used to fund the free-at-point-of-use facilities....)
If you care so much about it, you're free to set up a donation fund and/or shelters that include such conveniences.
I don't see why the price couldn't be made so low as to be trivial even for vagrants, since, well, I've lived in places where that was the case. In the third world.
I really don't understand what makes people think it's okay to use violence to use other people's ressources to solve the problems they care about instead of just solving them with their own ressources.
Without arguing on the merits of this particular case, surely the answer is often "because I want the problem meaningfully improved, and I don't have enough personal resources for that". Or on the less morally pure side, "I don't see why I should have to bankrupt myself because everyone else selfishly refuses to do the right thing which would only cost them pennies each". Some pro-taxation people are idiots or hypocrites, yes, but trying to compel other people to use their resources in a way that you approve of is not in itself mad. I wish the Right were more open to it, they might achieve something.
What's mad is how people are under the illusion that the only way to achieve such ends is robbery. When people are perfectly willing to behave civically for prestige or social standing and have done so in countless civilizations, including some that exist right now.
But the "materialist" can't fathom the rewards of spirit and legacy, so things have to be obtained through force of arms, or not at all.
True, and I’m all for these things. The replacement of alms by tax-based welfare is something I’d love to know more about, and would surely make a good effort-post.
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The materialist can fathom the rewards of spirit and legacy quite well. They just don't scale.
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