The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.
Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.
I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.
You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.
> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach
Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.
Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.
Not any more than the original. But yeah, I agree it’s insane to reduce the whole crime problem to just those two variables.
It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.
At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.
Sorry for the rant.
But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.