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Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
Many such cases.
Which problems are you referring to here?
Because the big NYC ones are:
Housing, which is entirely the fault of local voters using government to prevent more building. I blame the voters for this, not the politicians responding to their voters (selfish) wishes.
Public safety, voters hate all functional solutions to drugs/homeless because they feel "gross" (bleeding heart libtards hate enforcement, delusional rightoids hate proven solutions like SIS, no one wants to pay for more rehab centers).
Traffic/transit efficacy. See the huge backlash to congestion pricing, despite it being an economically sound and obviously beneficial policy. Also note that absolutely no one wants to give the MTA money despite it falling apart all the time (because preventative maintenance is expensive and boring). Admittedly it does seem like the MTA admin is a bit of a shitshow, so I guess we can blame government for that one. Although I've worked for large oligopolistic corporations and their admin was also an inefficient shitshow.
More broadly, in every western nation absolutely every citizen wants more gibs, and absolutely none of them want to pay more taxes to fund the gibs. So they mortgage the future instead.
I find it hard to blame government for all of this, as any politician who actually tried to take action to fix any of this would immediately lose their next election.
Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.
Safe Injection Sites. And the provenness of their effectiveness is certainly disputed. As is that of enforcement, as the 80s drug war showed. And rehab is a joke.
I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses and the waste of paramedic/hospital resources.
It's also incredibly clear that alone they do nothing to actually fix anything. They're a Band-Aid for symptom management as we treat the underlying issue. Problem is, we don't bother to treat any of the underlying issues.
They may reduce overdoses, but I think that's far from clear.
As a (sort of) counterexample, "...B.C. has implemented every harm-reduction program that has been proposed, from safe-injection sites to safe supply and effectively making all drugs legal. As each new measure has been introduced, drug overdose deaths have increased, except for a brief drop in 2019."
The toy model is that they would otherwise stop (often from from death), but instead they continue for longer before stopping (slightly less often from death), and the time they spend doing drugs is higher and therefore the social cost is higher as well.
I agree. SIS reduce overdoses, but don't make anyone stop doing drugs. And people who implement SIS also refuse to make people stop doing drugs.
We should have SIS, voluntary rehab, and institutions for those who can't stop themselves
So we don’t actually know that they reduce overdoses either. There is a plausible mechanism for them to do so, but there are also a few mechanisms in which they could not.
I would also caution in believing that the three items in your list can exist simultaneously - although there is no physical reason that they cannot, there are political reasons they will not, and that is much harder to change.
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The "underlying issues" are that your same 100 people want to keep taking drugs to the exclusion of everything else.
Yes and we should institutionalize them forever
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