Homeless per 10k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
Notice that USA has more houses per capita than countries with homeless populations that are significantly smaller.
People can move between American states easily. If there's a state where living as a homeless person is easier - people without homes will move there. Which will cause the problem to grow there and decrease in the origin state. If you really wanted to only compare American states - at least split the states by "homeless produced" vs "homeless exported". Otherwise it's just propaganda. Also - why would you only compare American states? Seems very manipulative. Like you wanted to ignore the possible causes of the problem that are shared by all American states.
The truth is there already is cheap shelter available .. just not near downtown LA.
The pharmaceutical industry is international. Many of the big players are headquartered in UK, Canada, etc.
Hospitals are mostly non-profit, and mostly purely domestic.
They have insane expenses. There are lots investments that are recouped in the doctors office: paying for medical school, buying downtown real estate, decades of medical research, etc.
Nobody says “we have $50 million to invest, let’s build a hospital.” Although investors occasionally buy them.
I don’t think US hospitals are for profit in the sense they have shareholder demanding a return on investment.
Doctors who have the ability to make lots of cash usually break out on their own asap.
So there’s probably some profit seeking, but not a lot.
I know plenty of folks who work for non-profit hospitals, and it’s a total mess. But it it’s usually organization chaos, and not profit seeking.
But I’ve heard stories of venture capital firms buying and shutting down hospitals, but never building them.
It's not a shadowy cabal deciding to make medicine worse to profit more, the sociopathy is efficiently diffused between everyone involved, many of whom work their asses off in incredibly stressful environments for a tiny share of these profits, powerless to change anything about the system.
But for purposes of discussion, it's one industry and it's fucking broken. It is impossible to fix anything by changing only one piece of this.
In general:
* Insurers try very hard to keep costs down.
* Unions try very hard to keep labor costs up.
* Drug makers try very hard to keep drug costs up.
* Hospitals just try to survive.
* Medical provider try to keep a decent work life balance while paying off their student loans.
https://www.aafp.org/students-residents/medical-students/beg...
As I understand it, these folks want privacy, storage, pets, quick commutes to loved ones, and/or drugs/alcohol.
I think it'd be easy to offer privacy and storage. Let them have locks on their doors (that staff can open). Put cameras in the hallways. I think these things could be done affordably, especially if housing was built on cheap land.
Dogs might be possible and might help some of them recover. There would need to be a system to keep violet animals and maltreatment down, and sanitation would be important. Apart from that, animals help calm the mind. That's probably cheap to do too.
You'd need to feed and clothe everyone, but it needn't be expensive.
Transportation is expensive and should be offered in a limited basis. Non-profits probably already have this cornered, and you could do it at scale even cheaper.
The substance abuse problem I haven't the slightest idea on. You ideally want to get them to stop abusing, and most taxpayers would gag at the thought of providing homeless with the drugs of their choice as an incentive to get off the streets. Not sure how you compel the addicted to leave. Forcing them to leave would be illegal in most municipalities, and it feels a little wrong unless we have quantifiable data that it helps their outcomes.
And then there's the fact that each individual will fall into a range of mental health states. Some may be permanently disabled and in need of institutional housing (which I don't think we do anymore?)
It's a tough problem. Every nation has to deal with this, but some are clearly doing better.
I'm not well educated on this topic, so maybe I have the incorrect assumptions.
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Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
```
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
This is something else. In some ways it’s closest too feudalism where the rule of law is subservient to various powerful entities and limited competition exists parallel to various monopolies. Though obviously it’s very different from the historical examples of feudal societies.
But the best good faith definition of capitalism that I can come up with is that it's a framework focusing on capital first and foremost. Contrast with focusing on free markets first and foremost. A lot of people hand wave away the distinction between those two and treat them as synonyms, but they can be strikingly different and even directly opposed.
For example, imaginary property. A focus on capital leads one to conclude that creating new types of capital out of whole cloth is a good thing. Whereas a focus on free markets sees imaginary property as a market intervention (whether justifiable or not).
Similarly, capitalism would seem to include regulatory capture and other purchased legislation as a form of business capital.
That seems to equate our current system as the only thing that qualifies as capitalism. Slavery or the abolition of slavery both seem happy to coexist in our definition of capitalist societies. We are happy to talk about ownership of the means of production without including the ownership of workers. The same presumably applies to the existence or non existence of individual elements like intellectual property etc.
Ie. The idea of patents of limited duration alongside copyright of seemingly endless duration both seem to qualify as capitalism.
> The same presumably applies to the existence or non existence of intellectual property
If the two are orthogonal, why is it common for arguments against imaginary property to be characterized as anti-capitalist?
And is there not a general tendency for "capitalists" to push dividing up things that would otherwise be public commons or the purview of government, to parcel out for private ownership? eg water rights, radio frequencies, power grid, the Coase theorem in general. There have been varying amounts of success with privatizing each of these things, but the point I am making is that putting primacy on the private ownership aspect is a bit like putting the cart before the horse with regards to the overall quality of the outcome.
> private capital exists in societies that we wouldn’t describe as capitalist
Capitalism at its core is an outgrowth of respect for private property which creates incentives for further investment. A Neolithic hunter is going to invest time into better tools if he’s not worried about those tools being taken from them. As such, an inner city ghetto isn’t capitalist if people expect their stuff to be stolen regularly.
That’s the essential ground truth of capitalism, the minutiae isn’t nearly as important as the incentives. Civil asset forfeiture is directly anti capitalist in ways that changing specific IP laws isn’t.
Is this not one of the main justifications for imaginary property, putting the concept solidly under the banner of capitalism? The only possible difference I see is that physical property is exclusionary, while imaginary property is not. So it depends whether you consider "taken from" and "stolen" to refer to copying of non-exclusionary information or not. But "owners" of IP capital certainly seem to think so!
I do basically agree with the thrust of this quote! But it's also important to acknowledge the limitations, as massive capital holders will not. Especially when they can benefit even more from not-investing (eg the sorry state of telecom infrastructure in places where competition is non-existent).
Anyway there’s a common argument for IP as being capitalist, but there’s also many arguments that limitations on IP are also capitalist. Many musicians only want to outlaw the most blatant forms of copyright infringement as they feel imitation drives things forward. There’s a huge spectrum of arguments around the idea that various forms of IP is in fact government granted monopolies on culture which limit competition. Obviously companies with valuable IP want to extract as much money as they can from it, but that’s just profit maximization.
To be clear I am not arguing for any specific set of rules for what is or isn’t capitalist. There’s advantages to more freewheeling systems where constant minor improvements can quickly play out in the market (Chinese copycat electronics) and there’s advantages to systems which promote larger scale investments (cars).
IMO, it’s the results being consistently applied that’s most important. Both vary stringent environmental regulations and nonexistent regulations are capitalist. What you can’t have is insiders able to bribe enforcement so only one company can make a competitive product because then the market isn’t rewarding investment. Which is exactly what you describe in the telecom industry.
> but there’s also many arguments that limitations on IP are also capitalist.
I've read plenty of them, and internalized them. After my infatuation with embracing the term "capitalism" faded, those arguments didn't really seem to be based on capital. Rather they bundled other often-associated concepts based on an assertion that they must obviously go hand in hand, while still carrying the "capitalism" banner most prominently. Your bit seems of the exact same vein - I agree musicians aren't generally IP maximalists, but most musicians aren't generally capitalists either, so that doesn't say much. Meanwhile the parts of the music industry that we would describe as the most capitalist are indeed IP maximalists, seeking to modify the law to maximize the scope of their capital.
Also I don't agree with your general assertion that any laws can be a foundation of a capitalist society as they're enforced consistently. A trivial refutation is a society that abolishes private property - no matter how consistent it is or what else it does, it could never be considered capitalist.
Songwriting etc seems like a very capitalistic enterprise to me. You evaluate the market then invest X hours making something that is then judged on the open market. This is very different from most people simply work for someone else.
The parts of the music industry that’s IP maximalists on the other hand tend to simply buy existing IP rather than create it. They essentially face zero risk from infringing on others copyright because they aren’t creating anything. While that’s a form of investing there is several forms of investment in feudal society like making loans etc. Investing on it’s own doesn’t necessarily mean capitalist.
> a society that abolishes private property
I was suggesting it as a prerequisite rather than the only need. Obviously a communist society can enforce it’s laws without being capitalist.
That said there are many online communities which promote creativity etc based on acknowledgement and social credit rather than ownership. I don’t know how you could end up with a stable capitalist post scarcity society without any form of private ownership, but it’s one of those things we don’t have any direct evidence for either way.
Academia may actually be relevant model here. Mathematics isn’t owned by the individual who discovers it, but they still control and can invest in the means of production Aka themselves. Calling that capitalist doesn’t seem to fit, but it seems closer than the other options like socialism, anarchy, etc.
Hopefully that’s taken as food for thought rather than just being a ridiculous argument.
I see where you're coming from with many aspects similar to say, starting a business [0]. But why is the specific label "capitalist" appropriate for songwriting, rather than songwriting merely being compatible with capitalism? Or describing it with similar terms like marked-based, enterprising, or something else? Without having "ownership" of the song afterwards, then the only resulting capital would be "social capital" for their name/reputation. But the term social capital is a stretch, as it cannot be freely traded with someone else the way a property right can be.
Would a songwriter in the SU, NK, or China do something different such that their songwriting isn't capitalist? Would a songwriter writing a song for a king be capitalist? Or even market based? It would be a stretch to call pleasing just a king and his court "a market", or preparing for it as "investment". So we're down to just human interaction of "is this other person going to appreciate what I've done", which "capitalism" can't really take credit for as a prescriptive paradigm. (There is a difference between using an -ism for analyzing traditional cases through its lens, and using it as a prescriptive model for shaping society)
> I don’t know how you could end up with a stable capitalist post scarcity society without any form of private ownership
This seems like another statement of a fundamental characteristic of capitalism that I agree with, but which supports my initial comment. If capitalism requires private ownership, then doesn't it stand to reason that a society which is more capitalist has more types of private ownership?
> Academia may actually be relevant model here. Mathematics isn’t owned by the individual who discovers it, but they still control and can invest in the means of production Aka themselves. Calling that capitalist doesn’t seem to fit, but it seems closer than the other options like socialism, anarchy, etc.
But the workers own the means of production, and can't really part with it (unless mathematicians were chattel). To me, it seems quite close to the ideal envisioned by communism [1], where individuals have implicit bodily autonomy but the fruits of their labor are shared for all to use.
[0] I've long said the SV startup scene is directly modeled on the LA music biz.
[1] I haven't read Marx and I'm definitely not implying that communism in practice could live up to this ideal across many types of endeavors!
Oligarchy is the problem.