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That you wrote six paragraphs to vent a simple emotion that you could have stated in one sentence does not lure me into thinking that you are making a rational argument. I am not that much of a Motteizen. Plenty of people disagree with your idea that the greatest current failure of American civilization are the violent homeless drug addicts. There are so many other options. For example, the endless foreign interventionism... the NSA domestic surveillance... the war on drugs...
You are a Singapore-style authoritarian but I am not. If you want to move to Singapore, I doubt that it would be difficult.
"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."
Aha... but in this authoritarian utopia of yours somehow you think that The Motte would still exist? You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to... let people post on a forum that allows free speech?
"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."
...
"Lock the free-thinkers up, slaughter the spreaders of dissident thoughts, forget about the problem."
No, fuck you.
It is my impression that in the vague direction of the general left people are not in favor of things like climate change, and the driving of cars that encourages such processes. If people don't feel safe taking public transit because of addicts and dealers, is that not a problem? Is it not an injury to the public to have one's public spaces smelling of urine and strewn with stray needles?
The new urbanist movement is attempting to shame people into using public transit, at the same time it refuses to make it usable and safe. Revealed preferences shows that it is a bipartisan consensus that one should not expose one's children to schizophrenic lunatics and drug dealers, and women prefer not to go home late at night around the urban lumpenproles.
And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?
Authoritarianism is not 'whenever the state uses force'. If the government is not going to solve these social cancers with its monopoly on force it is weak and ineffectual and the people are not bootlickers or Hitlerites for wanting it fixed. Imprisoning addicts and killing the dealers is preferable to the status quo of letting them do whatever they want, and as populists in other countries have proven: if liberal governments don't solve the problem and just waffle in useless progressive policy a strongman will eventually come along and do it for them.
The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals: you are running out of time to implement policy, and you do not have infinite time or public resources to waste. Sadly, I doubt anyone in power will heed it.
They're not, they are trying to change the incentives. The sensible way, for them -- don't try to make public transit better, it would suck even if you cleared the noisome and violent homeless people from it. Instead, make cars worse, which is a much easier task.
Excuse me? These are not libertarian ideals. Libertarians drive.
The people I know who hate cars don't think public transit would suck. Perhaps it wouldn't meet their needs, but that's considered a reason to expand coverage, not to avoid public transit.
Penalizing cars is a way to skirt the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the noisome and violent. Maybe this is empathy, maybe it's a more libertarian unwillingness to apply force when soft interventions fail. Raising the cost and inconvenience of cars fits much more comfortably into a normal worldview. It's like the daycare late-pickup fee from the other week: cars have a clear monetary value, so they're seen as fair game.
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