Having a very tiny homeless population is a sign of healthy society. What are gonna do with some people that are non-violent and don't want to live in the building X? Are you gonna lock them up?
I'm sure you mean well by posting this comment, especially given the "very tiny" qualification. However, this is a quite common straw man argument that homeless people are choosing to be so, rather than finding it the least bad of their terrible options.
The problem of involuntary homelessness and lack of access to adequate facilities, health care, mental care, transitional assistance, etc. is so large that to get hung up on some mythical dystopia where people are forced into homes is worse than a distraction; it actively aids those who for whatever reason do believe that for currently homeless people it's a choice or the result of their own bad decisions or whatever.
I seriously doubt the metrics used by the Finnish government would encompass such "wanderers by choice" that you're imagining. They are instead talking about people coming into shelters for assistance and helping them find stable housing that they can rely on.
Private housing is cultural, whereas shelter is a necessity. Shelter is sometimes vital for surviving. I would be surprised to be proven that speculation in private housing is necessary for survival.
A tongue isn't neccessary to survival and yet we would call someone who went out ripping people's tongues human rights violators among other things. Not being neccessary is not sufficient to for something to not be a human rights violation.
I wouldn't call speculation in itself a human right but it emerges from others like right to trade and ownership. Taxing unoccupied homes would be a way to address it perfectly respectful of human rights - fixed costs of infastructure upkeep need to be paid after all.
Rights used to mean human capabilities that government should not obstruct, because the government was not the source of said capability, and therefore had no authority to control the capability.
Now rights seems to mean things the government is responsible for giving to the citizen, which turns the formulation on its head to imply that the government is the source of human rights.
Seems to be a dangerous trend, however humanitarian its portrayal may be.
The American Bill of Rights; first 10 amendments to the U. S. Constitution, are restrictions on what the government can do to the people, not stuff the government has to do for, or give to, the people.
Amendment 6, 7 and 8 sound like stuff the government has to do for people. e.g
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
Yes, on a surface level, these are framed as "stuff the government has to do for the people," but the root issue is still making sure the government doesn't take away the rights and freedoms people naturally have.
Written a different way, this would say "the government can't take away your freedoms by arresting you, accusing you of a crime, but then delaying or denying a fair trial to figure out if you're actually guilty."
I think I see your point broadly, but some things don't really fit. Like how is, a person has the right "to have the assistance of counsel for his defense", linked to the government not taking away the rights of people. I guess I'm more focusing on the `fair` part in the rights, which to me seems more connected with something like housing.
Ensuring you have counsel is intended to make sure that the government can't unfairly imprison/punish a person who is ignorant of the legal system and incapable of defending themselves. The end goal is still to be a check on government power.
That's still far different from the government being obligated to provide you housing.
(To be clear - I'm not taking a position on universal housing. It might be a great idea! I just think it's a different class of right, and I think the distinction is worth preserving.)
Putting together an effective legal defense in the face of myriad laws is a difficult task. The government agrees to not abuse its power of incarceration against the citizenry.
Your right to freedom is what's at stake. If the government wants to take it they agree to make their case, not do so capriciously.
They need to leave an alternative to not pay and must pay for enforcement. No home? Sleep on their doorstep. They want you off? Then left sleeping on the street. If they want you out of the street and so on. Eliminate all other viable alternatives and they either get stuck with the bill of enforcement or cede the claim effectively to thr Nth last step because say they cannot stop you from sleeping on a park bench without also pissing off elderly voters who dose in parks. Throwing you in jail at any step in the process is just a spiteful way of providing housing that is less productive for everyone.
The harsh logical truth is you /always/ pay for other people in some way. Choice only affects the cost and outcome.
You could easily argument that by facilitating operations in speculation and high concentrations of wealth in a few hands, the government has indeed been obstructing people from their rights. It is only natural to counterbalance this trend with providing people with the needs they have been deprived of, like shelter.
Perhaps you should spell out this easy argument. On the surface it makes no sense to me.
Bob down the street having a mansion doesn't impinge on my rights in any way. In fact, it is great that Bob's mansion doesn't get taken away for my sake, because it means I have the opportunity to also get a mansion that won't be taken away from me :)
If you look for the problem where it is non-exsitent the thought will surely make no sense, but instead of a mansion in the suburbs, think of a highly populated area. Think silicon valley for instance, where 150k does not allow for a decent living condition. Take my home country, Brazil: 6.9 million homeless, 6 million empty homes (https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-44028774). The exact nature of this we can only speculate, but given how crazy expensive flats in big cities like sao paulo cost and how many of those are uninhabited, we can only blame speculation and the market regulation for it.
I never said that. I am just describing a problem. Those who live there do so because they either have jobs, family or some other need. In any case, that would not be a problem if, like in Japan's most populated zones, there wasn't this disparity between land pricing and uninhabited zones.
That is however a poor reflection of reality. In reality every man is not living on some Robinson Crusoe island where they create all their success and wealth in a vacuum.
Quite the contrary, almost all wealth in modern society is dependent on utilizing the knowledge and labor of other people. Either you extract rent from owning property or you extract profits by owning capital.
Either way you are somehow getting other people to do work for you. As your wealth and success grows your bargaining position improves.
In a market economy, the price paid for a product is determined by the bargaining position of the seller and buyer. A sufficiently rich capitalist owner can squeeze down the wage of his workers and thus extract a large surplus of income.
With wealth comes power. You can use your wealth to buy or influence politicians to create laws that benefit your and which are detrimental to your workers or possible competition. You can use your wealth to propagate a dynasty. Pay for your children to get the best education. Send them to schools where the rich and the powerful create special links and bonds. An insider game where they make sure they stay on top.
It is native to assume the game cannot be rigged in favor of the rich. It can and it has been done so since the dawn of time.
It does not mean we should not have rich people. But let us not kid ourselves into thinking opposing and conflicting interests don't exist.
The point is that it is inaccurate to use the word 'right' because the government is providing a product not a right as a right is something that you would have inherently without the government there anyways.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, the right to an impartial jury, and the right to know who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence against you.
People conflate these rights with human rights but they are in place to prevent the government from unduly interfering with your inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" which the Declaration of Independence says have been given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect.
Those are restrictions on what the government can do to you, not requirements that you be provided something. The government cannot prosecute in secret after keeping you locked up for years. The government cannot prevent you from obtaining counsel. The government cannot choose a jury on the basis of its bias against you. The government cannot shield whoever accused you from scrutiny. The government must tell you of what you are accused.
The problem I see with every discussion like this is despite this talking about experiences in Finland and applicability to Canada, Americans always assume that the CORERCT way to view government and the role of government is how it was laid down in the American constitution.
I am surprised so few Americans seem to realize they are imposing an entirely American centric view of the role of government and the rights of citizens.
Every country has different traditions and understanding of the role government should play. There is no right answer to this.
One must be able to argue this philosophically, without attempting to settle the matter as some sort of legal battle in court where one can "win" the argument by presenting legal text from the American constitution.
>I am surprised so few Americans seem to realize they are imposing an entirely American centric view of the role of government and the rights of citizens.
There is no right answer because it is not like a math question. It is a question of values. What is the correct answer depends on what you value. What you think society should be optimized for, and assumptions you make about human nature.
But even then, there is a correct answer. You just don't know which it is. Or are you suggesting that opposing value systems are both correct? Going a step back and looking at what you think society should be optimized for is also just a question.
The interesting part is figuring out the correct answer. Possibly the questions themselves are wrong, because you answered a preceding question wrongly. But none of that changes that there is always a right answer, even if you ask the wrong question.
No, they are human rights, or, at least, they are in their framers view an articulation of a subset of such rights essential to call out in a particular context.
> but they are in place to prevent the government from unduly interfering with your inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
No, they are essential components of Liberty in the context of the existence of government.
> which the Declaration of Independence says have been given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect.
Governments, more often than not, are not created for the purpose or protecting the particular vision of natural rights held in mind by the authors of the Declaration of Independence (in fact I would go so far as to say that since visions of natural rights are at least as varied as the people that believe in natural rights as a valid concept, and that even those individuals have their concepts shift over time, the only government that might ever have been formed for that purpose would be one formed at the exact time of the DoI by the same people.)
A bare human in nature is barely human even - he/she has no language, no family, no nation, no history, no culture, etc. Same for his rights. There's no freedom guaranteed to him by nature - anybody can enslave him. There's also no right to life or property: anybody can kill him, get his valuables, etc.
Rights are what we declare/determine that our collective organization (i.e. a government in modern terms) must help establish, secure, and guard.
"Natural rights" is a way to say "We believe that the government should protect and secure this and that "right", and that it is the obvious and natural thing to do".
Otherwise "natural rights" means nothing, it's an empty wish, and has no basis without anyone to enforce it.
People do have natural gravity. The have mass, weight etc, just because they exist in nature as people. Nobody can take that away from them.
But they don't have "natural rights" given by any kind of nature, those are things that somebody must establish and enforce for them (including themselves, either because they are stronger than anybody else, or because they group together and enforce them for one another).
Private property in land is pretty much the definition of a government-created privilege, so the government does plenty of "obstructing" when it comes to people's right to shelter. The governments which originally granted those monopoly rights on land many centuries ago had no inherent authority to do so-- although they may have had authority to lease the use of that land for some limited time, under fair and non-discriminatory rules. (This is how land is managed e.g. in Hong Kong and Singapore, and the system works quite well.)
> Private property in land is pretty much the definition of a government-created privilege
Though I welcome citations to prove the matter one way or the other, I suspect that the 18th-century Lockean concept of natural rights which informed the founders of the USA, saw ownership of private property as a right and not a government-created privilege. That is, if one claimed land on what was seen as terra nullius, or if a person’s family had owned the lank back to time immemorial, then the land was rightfully theirs regardless of government recognition or not. State recognition in the form of deeds would only have represented something useful for dispute resolution, and did not imply that the state was granting any rights.
Locke specifically cautioned that ownership in land could only be justified so long as there was "enough, and as good, left in common for others". Clearly, this is no longer the case today; indeed, the monetary value of that monopoly right precisely shows the extent to which the use of land has become scarce.
An artificial scarcity created by the fact the government controls most of the land...
We should be demanding the government cede control of the land, instead of pleading for the government to give us a smidgen of what it does not rightfully possess!
And private investors wouldn't immediately buy up as much land as possible as they did with single family homes during the housing crisis?
Everyone needs a place to live and land is a finite resource. Plus, foreign investors love to use real estate to park money. Government doesn't seem to be the problem here. People will pay what they have to to avoid being homeless. At the same time, developers will build what's most profitable: luxury housing. The market won't fix the problem, so we the people, by way of government, should.
And then we've just kicked the can down to the road a generation or so. Whatever problems you think more privately owned land will solve today, will just be waiting for us tomorrow.
None of what you've described is a problem absent government micromanagement of what can and can't be done on said land (strict zoning, examples include SV). The government has stepped in in many markets and halted that "race to the bottom" that everyone seems to hate and $500/mo 2br apartments vanish with it.
Can you point to a developed country where the government doesn't micromanage land and housing is affordable and plentiful as a result? I can't think of any modern or historical examples. How does less zoning lead to affordable housing? What's the mechanism?
Japan? [0] Most construction is by-right, and housing is some of the cheapest in a developed nation. There are zones, but only 12 nationwide, and each only specifies a maximum use - this means if a location is zoned for industrial or dense commercial, you can still build apartments there. (Generally. It's not quite that simple, but still fits on a single poster [1] - you can't build stores, restaurants or schools in industrial for example)
That's why these rights should be leased over time. The rent from these leases can then pay for national defense, a courts system (formal rights to real-estate are quite important if you want people to physically invest in it) and many other things. If you just give them away, you're left with no money to pay for these things.
That is a highly artificial concept that only applies to the US given that there was vast amounts of land and relatively few people. But even in the US the assumption was highly flawed as it basically ignored the existence of native people.
Their land was just to be taken by violence. Hence without government created privilege all your are left with is a dog-eat dog world where the strongest through violence will take land for himself.
European settlers would respect each others claim of land mostly, but it basically meant it was in principle no different from an invading force stealing land.
Native Americans of course did not own land in the Lockean way. They held the land in common. The natural arrangement was in many ways closer to a communist/socialist ideal.
> This is how land is managed e.g. in Hong Kong and Singapore, and the system works quite well.
Really? I thought HK was notorious for it's housing crysis where you have people living in flats the size of closets. According to this[1] only 24 % of land is developed in HK (7 % is residential). My understanding is that the government does this on purpose because it makes the majority of its budget from this.
I suppose it beats the CA housing crisis where people aren't even allowed to live in flats the size of closets, even if many would be quite willing to.
I disagree with this because it solves the exponential wealth distribution problem exactly by making exponential wealth acceptable. It's okay that I live in a mansion where 100 people could live because those 100 people have the option to live in a closet.
I would instead favour making unproductive use of land exponentially expensive through taxation. However I admit the details of how that would be implemented are very fuzzy.
Hong Kong has very difficult topography: lots of islands, bays and steep hills. Much of the land is not really habitable, and the government builds very dense, very tall (unfathomably so by US standards) public housing on much of what is.
This is not to say that HK doesn't have a housing supply side problem, because it definitely does, but it's not just the government squatting of vast tracts of flat land.
Not government-created but government-enforced and protected, as is the case for all property rights. This is for obvious reasons of protecting social order and peace.
The day, thousands of years ago, someone picked a fertile piece of land, cleared it, and started growing crops on it is the day private property of land was born.
In countries without constitutional protections, sure. But in the US taking away people's inalienable rights, for example to free speech, is nearly impossible.
And if you give everyone housing you would still have to use force to take away that housing and especially from so many people, the same way you would have to use force to take away free speech.
All you have to do is pit one group as more deserving than another and let them fight it out. You also let them deteriorate like the Soviet housing blocks (not that the tenants didn’t try to do upkeep, but infrastructural aspects).
This would take a while. What I am trying to say though is that action and inaction are not so different really. There are plenty of things government has to actively do and enforce to make sure that any basic rights are honored. You can take away free speech by simply stop policing and defending your people. Meaning free speech will not be so free as someone might kill you for what you are saying.
Decision whether something should be made a right should not be based on whether it can be labelled as passive or active, but whether it will benefit the society.
If making housing a right overall increases average life quality and makes unproductive lives productive it should be done. People here can disagree or agree whether the people who will get that housing will male something of their life, and this is something that we have to experiment with in order to find out.
Also if you believe that of the government and that government can not inherently be improved there is not much to do anyway.
I agree in principal but unfortunately in practice the playbook for denying rights is pretty tried and true.
a)
Quietly pass an obviously unconstitutional law (or better yet, a series of smaller laws that work together), don't enforce it too much against powerful or sympathetic people/groups and then do so for a decade until the court gets around to telling you to stop at which point you tweak the law just enough that you can lie and say it's different and reset the clock.
b)
Pass a law that lets you deny some right to "obviously bad people" (e.g. felons, people who beat their wives, addicts, etc) then quietly expand the scope of "obviously bad people" to include many normal people.
I agree. I really wish people would tweak the rhetoric just slightly - "housing should be a right" is a perfectly logical humanitarian cause to rally behind. It doesn't assume the right is innate, doesn't call it a "human" right, but still says housing should be something everybody in our society is entitled to. Reasonable people can then disagree about whether the humanitarian benefits of making it a right are worth the costs, etc.
Calling things that aren't innate to our humanity "human rights" is absurd - for housing, but especially for things like the internet. Should we try politicians in The Hague because they don't provide universal housing for their people? Should we impose international sanctions on countries that don't have widespread broadband? Of course not.
Conflating these concepts also devalues the concept of human rights, and reduces our ability to actually focus on human rights violations. Slavery, political oppression, violence, etc. are still a very real and special class of problem in our world. People's innate human dignity is being trampled every day by oppressive, violent regimes (and, even in some cases, by liberal democracies). Let's not water down our view of these travesties by conflating them with debates about the generosity of the welfare state in rich Western democracies.
Of course it's in the UN's declaration... I just disagree philosophically with the UN's declaration.
Human rights, in my mind, are something that existed before the UN, and exist independent of the UN. And there's centuries of political philosophy that agree with me on that point. See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence. That tradition of political philosophy sees rights as inherent to humanity (in this case God-given, but it doesn't have to be), not guaranteed by some statement of a government or group of governments.
I'm aware of the discourse in the US, and I think I can agree to everything you said in the second paragraph - though I can't see how housing not being a right can follow from rights being unalienable?
> See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence
For many thinkers in the years following the founding of the United States, precisely this language has been the fatal flaw of the “natural rights” approach. What if the world has moved on and no one can take seriously the notion that there is a Creator which has endowed men with rights? Even for the American Founding Fathers, those Deists among them were already well aware that this phrasing was a mere rhetorical flourish, it didn’t actually mean anything.
In the absence of a Creator who endowed men with rights, we can only view "rights" as a convenient fiction that humankind, as a social animal, proposes for mutual benefit. And in that case, a representative democracy’s decision to see housing as a human right is pretty straightforward.
I get the impression that you’re playing pretty fast and loose with the word “innate”, to basically refer to the rights you think are most important.
Shelter is definitely pretty important in, for example, Maslow's hierarchy. Obviously there are less and more fundamental rights, and the degree to which something can effectively be realized as a positive right depends on the capabilities and wealth of a society, but surely it’s worth considering what society should work collectively to provide.
I also don’t think it’s at all reasonable to claim that freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, the right not to be tortured, and other basic human negative rights are at risk - ethics mist be continually improved and adapted as society changes, and the mere fact that abject suffering exists in the world should not mean we can’t decide that there are higher order human needs within the effective purview of society.
> but surely it’s worth considering what society should work collectively to provide
Agreed!
> the mere fact that abject suffering exists in the world should not mean we can’t decide that there are higher order human needs within the effective purview of society
Again, agreed! I'm not arguing that we can't talk about universal housing. We can! We should! I'm just arguing against conflating what I see as two distinct types of rights - those that you have because you are a human, and those that governments choose to guarantee to their citizens.
> I get the impression that you’re playing pretty fast and loose with the word “innate”, to basically refer to the rights you think are most important
I'm not so sure. There's a big difference between a person (or government) taking away something I have by default as part of my humanity (e.g., taking away my life) vs. a person (or government) being required to provide me with something that's not guaranteed by my humanity (e.g., the fact that I will have food is not guaranteed just by virtue of me being a living creature with human DNA).
In the end, I can't stress this enough - I'm not saying a social safety net is bad, or that we shouldn't create political rights where the government should be obligated to provide food or shelter or whatever. Maybe those rights should exist! I'm just saying let's not conflate the concepts.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group—a government, for example—usually in the form of abuse or coercion. As such, negative rights exist unless someone acts to negate them. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group. In other words, for a positive right to be exercised, someone else's actions must be added to the equation.
No that was never the case. You are making a universal assumption about how the e.g. US was founded. This idea of government not getting in the way of citizens is an American idea. It does not apply to every country.
And the US, Canada and Australia are also outliers in this respect. In these cases one had vast amounts of land and resources and relatively few people. Anyone could in principle make it by working the land.
In most other countries civilization has existed for thousands of years and all land is taken. Without government working with people, there really is not opportunity in these cases.
If one takes the European experience, common people have a history of having been exploited by the rich, pushed into tiny plots of land. It was only through democratic control of government that the common man could start to get the government to work for his/her benefit.
In Europe as well it used to be mostly about rights in the sense of freedom to do things without obstruction and about limiting state/monarch power. See the English Bill of Rights or the French Revolution. America was founded on the same principles.
Housing as a human right may be classically interpreted as being free to buy, rent, build your house, etc. but the widespread modern interpretation is that individuals are entitled to be provided housing.
The consequentialist philosophy of justice (which is the base of the Finnish reasoning) goes a bit like this:
* People should have a right to housing.
* Yet we see many people how apparently can't obtain housing.
* Assuming they don't just all prefer to live on the streets, some forces are hindering them to get housing.
* It is therefore the responsibiliy of society to remove this discrimination, so that people don't just have the right on paper, but also factually.
So this isn't about entitlement in the negative sense.
The constitutionalist view more common in the US:
* People should have a right to housing (I know, not per the consitution, but this is the right this article is about)
* If nobody is discriminated by law, based on race, gender or something else, from practicing this right (e.g. buying property, or signing a contract for renting a flat), then all is fine.
So the core difference is that the consequentialist view looks at empirical evidence to decide whether there is discrimination or not. The institutional view just looks at the law etc. ( = the institutions).
You can pick any time period to fit your ideological beliefs. The point is that modern day Europe has developed in an entirely different direction from the US, in large part because Europeans have not had access to an abundance of cheap resources and land. Opportunities and a sensible standard of living has thus depended on government guaranteeing them.
It makes no sense to talk about government being in the way of pursuit of happiness when most people are dirty poor renting some land all owned by a small elite, and there being no free land elsewhere.
That is why in Europe the purpose of governments is to a larger degree to guarantee rights of people. You can see that also in the different way free speech is understood in many European countries compared to the US.
In the US free speech is about government getting out of the way, but other entities obstructing your free speech is far more accepted in the US. While in Europe government to a larger degree seeks to protect your right to free speech in a wider variety of settings. That is why e.g. US company rules often restrict speech, while the same would usually be illegal in many European countries. As your speech is protected by government even inside companies.
People can have their preference on what they prefer. But I think the European model makes more sense for European history and society. It may make more sense in modern day America as well, since there the freedom to just find some land in the wilderness and do whatever is basically gone today. The US is in many ways recreating the old rich elite of Europe of old. The US is in many ways developing into an oligarchy and starts to mimic how Europe was in the early 1800s.
It used to be that you could wander far off into the woods, chop down some trees and start building a house. The government won't let you do this. There didn't even use to be a government. It's only fair I think that if there is a government which stops us from doing these things, it could help provide housing some other way instead.
Super simplified, but just to give a nuance between "right to have" vs "right to not being hindered".
Or, the government should not stop us from doing these things. The government is for the people, by the people, not some overlord we need to ask permission from.
I agree with your previous post, but I do think it's good that the government puts limits on where you build. And honestly, if we don't like it, it's the government we elected, and we can elect a new government. But it seems we are ok with that so far.
> The government is ... not some overlord we need to ask permission from.
I see it as the government is restricting certain people from trodding on the rights of other people. Otherwise you get things like chemical companies dumping waste straight into rivers, etc.
Yes, it makes sense to stop corporations poisoning people by dumping toxins into rivers. But, generally stopping people from building on land is more in the government's interest than the people's interest.
I don't know all the details, but I'm certainly glad people can't just randomly build things wherever they want. I can imagine lot's of some people rights being trampled by selfish people.
How on earth do you distinguish between the people and the government in a properly functioning democracy? That is essentially the same thing. The government in a democracy is an expression of the will of the people. You cannot argue that the people want something different from a democratically elected government.
That makes absolutely no sense. It only makes sense when it is a failed democracy where elections are corrupted or bought in some way.
AFAIR there never was a period from the renaissance up to present times where rights were universally interpreted the way you describe them - though your view certainly is pretty widespread in the US discourse.
If one wants to conveniently fit all the different views on the topic into two categories, the view advocated by you would be the instituionalist tradition, with e.g. John Rawls as a famous proponent. The reasoning driving Finland here is the consequentialist tradition, represented by e.g. Amartya Sen.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, the consequentialist interpretation is more popular in Europe, while the favorite in the USA is the institutionalist thinking.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Shelter is a necessity to life. Without a permanent address, it is extremely difficult to obtain gainful employment, which is widely understood to be necessary for the pursuit of happiness. I'm not sure when you're referring to, saying "used to mean," but
this humanitarian view of rights is quite solidly entrenched in US law.
Ninth Amendment:
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The founders deliberately left this barn-door open for the sake of progress.
>Rights used to mean human capabilities that government should not obstruct, because the government was not the source of said capability, and therefore had no authority to control the capability.
No, that's for the government-phobic American liberals.
Rights used to mean things a person is warranted to, just because they exist.
For most European cultures for example the government = the enforcers of the will of the people (if we're talking about a democratic government, elected etc), so there's no hostility between the two (except to the degree that it doesn't enforce people's will).
That's the case for the more cohesive, ethnic-wise, countries.
For Americans it was more complicated, because it was established as a hodgepodge of peoples (as opposed to a single people) with different ideas, ethnic backgrounds, histories, etc. So no single government could cover those all, and any government was viewed with mistrust.
>Rights used to mean human capabilities that government should not obstruct
That's only if you look at it from a very old and US-centric perspective. The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 [1], for example, includes the following articles:
"ARTICLE 25
1. 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.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
ARTICLE 26
1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."
Those don't sound like "merely not obstructing" kinds of rights.
It's fundamentally a conflict of the very European concept of individual liberty and responsibility (within a compassionate and voluntarily united community) versus the somewhat alien concept of mandatory communal 'cooperation' observed in foreign cultures.
I hadn't seen this list before and I find it outrageous. I might even go so far as to say that it constitutes an assault on our culture. Not that I would expect any less of the UN.
Housing is the perfect example to illustrate the flaws of how democracy is put into practice in many (but not all) Western societies. There are at least two big issues:
1. Those who have housing are less transient and as a result have (increasing) influence over local politics in aggregate.
2. Said local politicians then take their constituents will upstream, resulting in the (re)enforcement of policies that benefit the existing property owners. Mainly this manifests itself in anti-growth policies. Not just in housing, but really any sort of change that can be seen as disruptive to the existing population even if it's good generally. This can mean housing, public transportation, roads, and more!
The solution to these issues is to nationalize rules regarding housing, but because of (2) it's unlikely to ever happen.
I wonder what will need to happen before the minority (not speaking about race or ethnicity, but in terms of voter participation) finally are empowered, given many times the minority voting population actually makes up the majority of eligible voters.
I guarantee you that if 100% voter participation was enforced and macro votes could override micro votes (i.e. a state vote could overturn a local rule) most issues would go away.
It served its purpose when the colony was being consolidated, but now that society has matured, this ownership has indeed to be reviewed if it is hindering society development. It will put some privileges in jeopardy, and some will not be all too happy about it.
I think that is going too far - we have seen the teaming mass of nothing in Ireland historically and well every precarious third world country where building a better proper cabin instead of a shanty shack will get it seized.
Landownership is not without flaws and reform potential but lets not go crazy here. Eminent domain already exists dor hindering development issues and shows why it is used sparingly.
These Scandinavian success stories are great, but it bothers me that they are always held up as some progressive ideal. As if it's even a choice for other nations.
They have immense advantages, and unique benefits. Norway in particular being the frontrunner.
Yet in my news feeds it seems middle European progressive parties (Belgium/France/Germany/Spain) always point to these countries and say "see, look what happens if we take care of our people". Ignoring not only the money needed for such an initiative, but the huge demographic differences from immigration in the last 20-40 years.
I welcome opposing thought here, because it's a matter that genuinely confuses me, and I'm open to being on the wrong side here.
What is Finland's advantage? Norway I get, it's oil. But Finland is just a well managed country without significant natural resources. Most of its industry is not related to extraction of resources.
You cannot compare tiny Norway to the whole of the US. You have to compare to individual states in the US. Many American states have more oil than Norway and has produced oil for much longer and at much lower cost.
Drilling a 4km deep oil well out in the north sea in rough weather is very different from drilling 20 meters on land in Texas.
If you look at various American oil states. They have managed their oil wealth far more poorly than Norway. No sovereign wealth fund. Public system often underfunded and in poor condition. Look at Oklahoma e.g.
There are as many "blends" of crude as there are oil fields (about 160 blends according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crude_oil_products). Some are "thicker" than others and that results in different products you can get from the crude you refine. Also, each crude requires a different setting in your refinery, and it is very costly and lengthy to change that setup.
Refineries in the US are for the most part set to heavy crude.
Guess what kind of crude the US get's from fracking?
Considering their mentioning of immigration, I fear (Edit: I was right, see replies) they see the the nordics‘ advantage as being almost entirely white.
That would not just be boorish, but also wrong: both Sweden and Morway (the two I just checked) have around 17% foreign-born residents, with more than half of those from outside the EU.
The unemployment rate for native Swedes is less than 4%. The unemployment rate for foreign-born Swedes is at around 20%. Regarding Sweden, from Wikipedia: 'First generation immigrants, for example, constituted 60% of economic welfare recipients in 2016, 73% of all unemployed and 53% of those serving long prison sentences.'
This isn't a clear-cut "advantage", but Finland is much more ethnically homogeneous than America. Over 90% of people in Finland are ethnically Finnish. Heck, 70% of Finns belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland [1]. It's not anywhere near as diverse (and fractious) as the USA.
The USA has historically chosen "more immigration, less social services" and Finland has chosen "less immigration, more social services". "More immigration, more social services" seems to be a hard sell. For whatever reason people generally seem turned off when a welfare state spends money on people who they feel aren't like them.
To me it is a problem of convincing voters to spend money, not lacking money to spend. Convincing voters seems easier in a homogeneous place (whatever it was immediately after WWII, there seems to be a strong "we are Finns" culture now).
> Heck, 70% of Finns belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
70% of Finns are merely on the rolls of the Lutheran Church, which really only means that parents had their child baptised as a popular traditional ritual, not as a sign of devout belief. I would suggest that Christianity never penetrated the Finnish psyche as deep as certain other European states. In most Finnish communities the church is not a center of community life but simply a building that stands as a museum (in many localities there is no active church at all). Also, with the rise of the welfare state, Finns immediately abandoned the notion that the Lutheran Church has any significant role to play in the lives of the less fortunate. Finland’s state churches themselves have happily handed over almost all of their charitable role to the state.
And in that portion of the country which was traditionally Orthodox, support for the welfare state doesn’t noticeably differ from the Lutheran part.
If you want to claim that Finns make their welfare state work because of ethnic homogenity, that ethnic homogenity would have to be located somewhere else than religion.
Finland has forests which isn't really much but is far more than just tundra.
I think their advantages are essentially fundamentally geographic but deeply counterintuitive. The Nordics counter intuively may have the "advantage" of a harsh climate which both aids defense and promotes "sincere" cooperation due to a force outside their control and long term planning and infastructure. Don't prepare for winter and it kills you.
Conceptuallly it is essentially an inverse resource curse where a disavantage has a positive impact. Of course there are other unspoken factors to their success. Like all nations the geographic distance to trading partners has influence on growth.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, I believe you're on to something here.
The harsh climate has forced these countries to adapt, otherwise you'd simply perish in the past. Finland, having no conceivable natural resources like Norway, was forced to adapt by building a few thriving industries and excellent infrastructure to facilitate them.
This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.
There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.
It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.
Sweden had an empire at one point - if they were homogenous then they would have failed at every turn. There is a reason why the Romans had political correctness and xenophobia is fundamentally an ideology for and of losers literally.
Go back a hundred years, and the notion of Finland as homogeneous or stable would seem laughable to its citizens.
The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory.
Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.
Think about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.
Finnish is my native language, but I grew up in Helsinki in the 1980s in an environment where essentially everyone I met could speak at least three languages.
The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.
> Ignoring not only the money needed for such an initiative
The Finnish welfare state began in earnest at a time when the country was not particularly wealthy and it had little of the internationally renowned industry it has today. Furthermore, Finland managed to ramp up a welfare state at about the same time that it was forced to pay huge reparations to the USSR after World War II. Similarly, Sweden (the country which Finland used as a model for its welfare state) was not originally among the most prosperous nations.
The historical experience of the Nordic countries underscores that a welfare state is not a matter of having unusually large amounts of money compared to other Western European states, but rather it is a matter of taxation and spending priorities. Certainly Norway’s oil wealth lets it have some nicer public infrastructure than the neighbours, but such substantial natural resources are not a prerequisite.
When it comes to Nordic countries with sovereign wealth funds, you must be confusing Finland with Norway. Finland is not listed here [0], and the country has never had the sort of abundant natural resources that would make it a powerhouse in this regard. Sure, Finland does have forests, but the vacillations in the paper market in recent years and competition from other countries has hurt the economy, not boosted it.
You are welcome to do your own research as to the lack of a sovereign wealth fund to power the Finnish welfare state. But the fact you get Finland's economy very wrong should already be clear to you from the downvotes you have attracted.
Financially it makes sense though; shelters cost taxpayer and/or charity money, and there's a whole industry dedicated to discouraging people from sleeping in corners, public benches, and using public toilets. How expensive is it to just give people housing, a basic income, and the care they need?
I mean it's an opportunity to get someone back on their feet, and with time, reintegrate them with society - that is, turn them back into taxpayers. It makes sense both from a capitalist and a socialist point of view.
The problem is convincing those who think the homeless are subhuman undesirables who should be made Someone Else's Problem.
Scandinavia, or even Norway, isn't an ideal for everyone. There would not be political consensus anywhere in the US, not even close, to the tax levels we have.
Ditto regarding our interpretation of property rights (you're almost always dependent on democratic or bureaucratic support for any significant change in usage, even in remote areas), our acceptance for de facto anti-competitive behavior in hiring, our deep cultural skepticism towards people who excel in business and professional life, ++.
Success stories regarding support for the weakest are often popular abroad, but it isn't just due to a homogenuous population that our policies aren't often replicated elsewhere. I make the deliberate choice of staying here in spite of being an ambitious professional, and support a significant part of our policies, but not all our policies favor everyone equally. This isn't pointed out so often.
I'm guessing OP (Right term? I'm new to this!) is referring to immigrants, at least in Europe, typically depending more on the state for assistance and having much higher unemployment rates, thus having more immigrants would place a higher burden on public finances. This is from Wikipedia regarding Sweden: 'First generation immigrants, for example, constituted 60% of economic welfare recipients in 2016, 73% of all unemployed and 53% of those serving long prison sentences.'
Yeah I get that but this is a general "fix homelessness by giving people a place to live" issue. Immigrants are people too or aren't they? I mean, what changes with them?
Do you believe that immigration happens in a vacuum? I.e. the reason people immigrate is because they believe that going to location y is better that staying at location x.
Providing free housing, medical, school, etc... is a huge incentive.
This is why we try to control immigration, we simply don't have the resources to provide a safety net to everyone.
It's not like "everyone" is on the move to Finland. Never was and never will be. It's a strawman and unnecessary dramatisation to justify inhuman behaviour.
In this case: what do you want to do with them instead? Let them die on the streets? Did you even read the article? They are being provided with some kind of housing and support already like human beings deserve. Giving them a place to live, gives them also a chance to become a proper member of the society who also ads to it and can provide for other homeless.
There is also a thing I noticed reading HN comments, when country pr city X does something good some US persons would jump immediately to find the reason this is absolutely impossible to be done in their local city,state or country. The "impossible" part is also most of the time defended with the excuse that US is bigger, less dense and freedom people have.
I imagine though that in such a large country there must be some city somewhere with good infrastructure, with good housing and with low crime .... anyway I think people need to think more on "how can we achieve X" not "how can I prove that X is impossible so we do not need to try "
What do demographic differences due to immigration have to do with taking care of their people? Statements such as these come off as immensely xenophobic.
Only Norway has significant amounts of oil, and even Norway was a prosperous welfare state before discovery of oil
I don't see why it is so important for you to ignore the Nordic experience. It seems like a very strong ideological drive to find flaws in the Nordic model or reasons to reject it.
Nordic countries started out worse than these other European countries in terms of money and resources. Nor is the demographics markedly different. German has much the same success story despite being a larger country. So there are universal lessons.
Also Nordics have lessons for all side of the political spectrum. Nordic countries have active states and many welfare services however they also relentlessly push people to work. Not necessarily by punishing them economically as many Anglo-Saxon countries to but by also offering a lot of help for people who struggle to get into work: health care, re-training, childcare etc.
Nordics are also very pro business and free trade. Nordics focus on helping people as individuals but there is not that much of propping up failing businesses. Unlike the US e.g. Sweden never bailed out failed car companies.
Nordics is a mix of both socialist and capitalist ideas. Unfortunately there has been a right wing agenda to tar the Nordic reputation for decades. All the way back to Eisenhower American conservatives strongly disliked Nordic countries. Sweden in particular was singled out as an object of derision. That Sweden in the 50s did not stigmatize single mothers offended them greatly.
Conservatives all the way back to the 50s ran all sorts of hit pieces on Sweden about how loose their sexual morality was. How society was falling apart in due to drunkness and low morality. These people have predicted and wished for our failure for decades. And it is frankly a bit sick that this belittling of Nordic success stories still keeps going.
We have not figured out everything, but can we not be given credit for something? Must there always be a dark side to Nordics to hype up among conservatives?
I can't find a quote but as far as I know it's true across the EU- permanent residents get the same rights as citizens (except for voting, working for some government positions etc)
Private housing is both a basic human need, and the largest asset class. Private speculation in private property is massive in scandinavian countries. It is hard to see speculation going away without unpopular state regulations on the housing market.
For first time buyers of housing in norway, family background has become the most important factor.
Especially with the increase of automation and the reduction of the number of jobs, I think it's a must.
It's 2020, it just doesn't make sense to still have people living on the streets, like animals.
As most people are not financially independent, homelessness could literally happen to any of us. All it takes is a rough period in your live, you get laid off, a bad divorce, someone in your family passes away that used to contribute to the expenses and now you can't pay the rent, a war veteran that could not adapt to society.
A car breaks down and you can't go to your minimal pay job anymore, you get laid off and can't pay the rent.
Unfortunately Finland is not immune from the scourge of multiracialism. It is perhaps a sign of their naivety that they're introducing generous new public spending programs at the same time as the West is overrun by Africa and Asia.
Why is that the choice? The government can just build housing by the normal means, or fund other entities to do so, such as the housing nonprofit Y-Foundation in the article.
What a total disaster the threads on articles about homelessness turn into. No wonder most of the developed world has a serious homeless problem when people are so completely lacking in both empathy and insight.
Straw men about "rights" and "coercion" abound, while there's very little acknowledgement of the scale of human suffering that can be solved by just providing housing instead of half-heartedly funding shelters, halfway houses, ERs, etc.; the usual leaky uncoordinated sieve of a "safety net" that exists in most countries.
How about instead a Y Combinator applicant that takes the idea in the article of cost-benefit analysis in terms of public service usage and scales it up across cities, states, and nations?
"Keeping people homeless, instead of providing homes for them, is always more expensive for the society. In Finland we have some scientific evaluations of the cost of this program. When a homeless person gets a permanent home, even with support, the cost savings for the society are at least 15,000 Euros per one person per one year. And the cost savings come from different use of different services.
In this study, they looked at the services that homeless people used when they were without a home. They calculated every possible thing: emergency healthcare, police, justice system, etc. They then compared that cost to when people get proper housing. And this was the result. I'm quite sure this kind of cost analysis can also be found for Canada."
A previous partner of mine worked as a social worker for an organization that did "housing first". She would house homeless individuals in apartments, advocated on their behalf to the landlord, get them some basic furniture, and helped them get financial assistance to afford rent and food. That part was easy.
The biggest problem she faced was that people would leave their homes. She would come by a few days after housing them and they weren't around. She'd call them up only to discover they'd taken the train over to the next town and spent the night on the streets there. One lady complained that she thought the apartment was too small and preferred to be outdoors. She housed a family of 4 who were sleeping in their car, only to find that they crossed the border a few days later because the father thought that there were better opportunities there.
Homelessness is not about "not having a home". It is a mindset and lifestyle that people develop over many years.
The best solution is to try to stop the incoming generation from developing this lifestyle - get 'em while they're young. Keep troubled kids in school at all costs. Double down on drug and addiction education. Police the shit out of poor neighborhoods. And then provide some health and wellness support for those who choose this lifestyle. Because that's all you can do.
Perhaps. The experiences came to me from someone new to the profession, who was probably given all the troublesome cases so the established employees could have an easy ride with the ones who were interested in changing their lives around.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadHaving a very tiny homeless population is a sign of healthy society. What are gonna do with some people that are non-violent and don't want to live in the building X? Are you gonna lock them up?
The problem of involuntary homelessness and lack of access to adequate facilities, health care, mental care, transitional assistance, etc. is so large that to get hung up on some mythical dystopia where people are forced into homes is worse than a distraction; it actively aids those who for whatever reason do believe that for currently homeless people it's a choice or the result of their own bad decisions or whatever.
I seriously doubt the metrics used by the Finnish government would encompass such "wanderers by choice" that you're imagining. They are instead talking about people coming into shelters for assistance and helping them find stable housing that they can rely on.
I wouldn't call speculation in itself a human right but it emerges from others like right to trade and ownership. Taxing unoccupied homes would be a way to address it perfectly respectful of human rights - fixed costs of infastructure upkeep need to be paid after all.
Is private housing speculation Article 31?
Now rights seems to mean things the government is responsible for giving to the citizen, which turns the formulation on its head to imply that the government is the source of human rights.
Seems to be a dangerous trend, however humanitarian its portrayal may be.
references or examples?
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
Written a different way, this would say "the government can't take away your freedoms by arresting you, accusing you of a crime, but then delaying or denying a fair trial to figure out if you're actually guilty."
That's still far different from the government being obligated to provide you housing.
(To be clear - I'm not taking a position on universal housing. It might be a great idea! I just think it's a different class of right, and I think the distinction is worth preserving.)
I see, I always thought that those amendments were about equality between people, but in this context it makes more sense.
Your right to freedom is what's at stake. If the government wants to take it they agree to make their case, not do so capriciously.
The harsh logical truth is you /always/ pay for other people in some way. Choice only affects the cost and outcome.
Bob down the street having a mansion doesn't impinge on my rights in any way. In fact, it is great that Bob's mansion doesn't get taken away for my sake, because it means I have the opportunity to also get a mansion that won't be taken away from me :)
That is some of the thought behind my argument.
Quite the contrary, almost all wealth in modern society is dependent on utilizing the knowledge and labor of other people. Either you extract rent from owning property or you extract profits by owning capital.
Either way you are somehow getting other people to do work for you. As your wealth and success grows your bargaining position improves.
In a market economy, the price paid for a product is determined by the bargaining position of the seller and buyer. A sufficiently rich capitalist owner can squeeze down the wage of his workers and thus extract a large surplus of income.
With wealth comes power. You can use your wealth to buy or influence politicians to create laws that benefit your and which are detrimental to your workers or possible competition. You can use your wealth to propagate a dynasty. Pay for your children to get the best education. Send them to schools where the rich and the powerful create special links and bonds. An insider game where they make sure they stay on top.
It is native to assume the game cannot be rigged in favor of the rich. It can and it has been done so since the dawn of time.
It does not mean we should not have rich people. But let us not kid ourselves into thinking opposing and conflicting interests don't exist.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, the right to an impartial jury, and the right to know who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence against you.
People conflate these rights with human rights but they are in place to prevent the government from unduly interfering with your inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" which the Declaration of Independence says have been given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect.
I am surprised so few Americans seem to realize they are imposing an entirely American centric view of the role of government and the rights of citizens.
Every country has different traditions and understanding of the role government should play. There is no right answer to this.
One must be able to argue this philosophically, without attempting to settle the matter as some sort of legal battle in court where one can "win" the argument by presenting legal text from the American constitution.
I'm not the least bit surprised actually.
The interesting part is figuring out the correct answer. Possibly the questions themselves are wrong, because you answered a preceding question wrongly. But none of that changes that there is always a right answer, even if you ask the wrong question.
No, they are human rights, or, at least, they are in their framers view an articulation of a subset of such rights essential to call out in a particular context.
> but they are in place to prevent the government from unduly interfering with your inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
No, they are essential components of Liberty in the context of the existence of government.
> which the Declaration of Independence says have been given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect.
Governments, more often than not, are not created for the purpose or protecting the particular vision of natural rights held in mind by the authors of the Declaration of Independence (in fact I would go so far as to say that since visions of natural rights are at least as varied as the people that believe in natural rights as a valid concept, and that even those individuals have their concepts shift over time, the only government that might ever have been formed for that purpose would be one formed at the exact time of the DoI by the same people.)
A bare human in nature is barely human even - he/she has no language, no family, no nation, no history, no culture, etc. Same for his rights. There's no freedom guaranteed to him by nature - anybody can enslave him. There's also no right to life or property: anybody can kill him, get his valuables, etc.
Rights are what we declare/determine that our collective organization (i.e. a government in modern terms) must help establish, secure, and guard.
"Natural rights" is a way to say "We believe that the government should protect and secure this and that "right", and that it is the obvious and natural thing to do".
Otherwise "natural rights" means nothing, it's an empty wish, and has no basis without anyone to enforce it.
People do have natural gravity. The have mass, weight etc, just because they exist in nature as people. Nobody can take that away from them.
But they don't have "natural rights" given by any kind of nature, those are things that somebody must establish and enforce for them (including themselves, either because they are stronger than anybody else, or because they group together and enforce them for one another).
You don't really have an inherent right to security and security is not really even possible in a state of nature.
Who decides what inherent authority governments do and don't have?
Though I welcome citations to prove the matter one way or the other, I suspect that the 18th-century Lockean concept of natural rights which informed the founders of the USA, saw ownership of private property as a right and not a government-created privilege. That is, if one claimed land on what was seen as terra nullius, or if a person’s family had owned the lank back to time immemorial, then the land was rightfully theirs regardless of government recognition or not. State recognition in the form of deeds would only have represented something useful for dispute resolution, and did not imply that the state was granting any rights.
We should be demanding the government cede control of the land, instead of pleading for the government to give us a smidgen of what it does not rightfully possess!
Everyone needs a place to live and land is a finite resource. Plus, foreign investors love to use real estate to park money. Government doesn't seem to be the problem here. People will pay what they have to to avoid being homeless. At the same time, developers will build what's most profitable: luxury housing. The market won't fix the problem, so we the people, by way of government, should.
0: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
1: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sV5ETXDs_8M/Ux-axBTuF2I/AAAAAAAAA...
Their land was just to be taken by violence. Hence without government created privilege all your are left with is a dog-eat dog world where the strongest through violence will take land for himself.
European settlers would respect each others claim of land mostly, but it basically meant it was in principle no different from an invading force stealing land.
Native Americans of course did not own land in the Lockean way. They held the land in common. The natural arrangement was in many ways closer to a communist/socialist ideal.
Really? I thought HK was notorious for it's housing crysis where you have people living in flats the size of closets. According to this[1] only 24 % of land is developed in HK (7 % is residential). My understanding is that the government does this on purpose because it makes the majority of its budget from this.
[1]: https://www.cedd.gov.hk/filemanager/eng/content_954/Info_She...
I would instead favour making unproductive use of land exponentially expensive through taxation. However I admit the details of how that would be implemented are very fuzzy.
This is not to say that HK doesn't have a housing supply side problem, because it definitely does, but it's not just the government squatting of vast tracts of flat land.
You obviously never had to pay actual rent in either place.
The day, thousands of years ago, someone picked a fertile piece of land, cleared it, and started growing crops on it is the day private property of land was born.
It also has the quality of creating dependency on a government and their ability to deliver and or their ability to dictate conditions.
Decision whether something should be made a right should not be based on whether it can be labelled as passive or active, but whether it will benefit the society.
If making housing a right overall increases average life quality and makes unproductive lives productive it should be done. People here can disagree or agree whether the people who will get that housing will male something of their life, and this is something that we have to experiment with in order to find out.
Also if you believe that of the government and that government can not inherently be improved there is not much to do anyway.
a)
Quietly pass an obviously unconstitutional law (or better yet, a series of smaller laws that work together), don't enforce it too much against powerful or sympathetic people/groups and then do so for a decade until the court gets around to telling you to stop at which point you tweak the law just enough that you can lie and say it's different and reset the clock.
b)
Pass a law that lets you deny some right to "obviously bad people" (e.g. felons, people who beat their wives, addicts, etc) then quietly expand the scope of "obviously bad people" to include many normal people.
Calling things that aren't innate to our humanity "human rights" is absurd - for housing, but especially for things like the internet. Should we try politicians in The Hague because they don't provide universal housing for their people? Should we impose international sanctions on countries that don't have widespread broadband? Of course not.
Conflating these concepts also devalues the concept of human rights, and reduces our ability to actually focus on human rights violations. Slavery, political oppression, violence, etc. are still a very real and special class of problem in our world. People's innate human dignity is being trampled every day by oppressive, violent regimes (and, even in some cases, by liberal democracies). Let's not water down our view of these travesties by conflating them with debates about the generosity of the welfare state in rich Western democracies.
Human rights, in my mind, are something that existed before the UN, and exist independent of the UN. And there's centuries of political philosophy that agree with me on that point. See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence. That tradition of political philosophy sees rights as inherent to humanity (in this case God-given, but it doesn't have to be), not guaranteed by some statement of a government or group of governments.
For many thinkers in the years following the founding of the United States, precisely this language has been the fatal flaw of the “natural rights” approach. What if the world has moved on and no one can take seriously the notion that there is a Creator which has endowed men with rights? Even for the American Founding Fathers, those Deists among them were already well aware that this phrasing was a mere rhetorical flourish, it didn’t actually mean anything.
In the absence of a Creator who endowed men with rights, we can only view "rights" as a convenient fiction that humankind, as a social animal, proposes for mutual benefit. And in that case, a representative democracy’s decision to see housing as a human right is pretty straightforward.
At first blush, my thought is that you could still create a secular argument for natural rights, but I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.
Shelter is definitely pretty important in, for example, Maslow's hierarchy. Obviously there are less and more fundamental rights, and the degree to which something can effectively be realized as a positive right depends on the capabilities and wealth of a society, but surely it’s worth considering what society should work collectively to provide.
I also don’t think it’s at all reasonable to claim that freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, the right not to be tortured, and other basic human negative rights are at risk - ethics mist be continually improved and adapted as society changes, and the mere fact that abject suffering exists in the world should not mean we can’t decide that there are higher order human needs within the effective purview of society.
Agreed!
> the mere fact that abject suffering exists in the world should not mean we can’t decide that there are higher order human needs within the effective purview of society
Again, agreed! I'm not arguing that we can't talk about universal housing. We can! We should! I'm just arguing against conflating what I see as two distinct types of rights - those that you have because you are a human, and those that governments choose to guarantee to their citizens.
> I get the impression that you’re playing pretty fast and loose with the word “innate”, to basically refer to the rights you think are most important
I'm not so sure. There's a big difference between a person (or government) taking away something I have by default as part of my humanity (e.g., taking away my life) vs. a person (or government) being required to provide me with something that's not guaranteed by my humanity (e.g., the fact that I will have food is not guaranteed just by virtue of me being a living creature with human DNA).
In the end, I can't stress this enough - I'm not saying a social safety net is bad, or that we shouldn't create political rights where the government should be obligated to provide food or shelter or whatever. Maybe those rights should exist! I'm just saying let's not conflate the concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
And the US, Canada and Australia are also outliers in this respect. In these cases one had vast amounts of land and resources and relatively few people. Anyone could in principle make it by working the land.
In most other countries civilization has existed for thousands of years and all land is taken. Without government working with people, there really is not opportunity in these cases.
If one takes the European experience, common people have a history of having been exploited by the rich, pushed into tiny plots of land. It was only through democratic control of government that the common man could start to get the government to work for his/her benefit.
Housing as a human right may be classically interpreted as being free to buy, rent, build your house, etc. but the widespread modern interpretation is that individuals are entitled to be provided housing.
* People should have a right to housing.
* Yet we see many people how apparently can't obtain housing.
* Assuming they don't just all prefer to live on the streets, some forces are hindering them to get housing.
* It is therefore the responsibiliy of society to remove this discrimination, so that people don't just have the right on paper, but also factually.
So this isn't about entitlement in the negative sense.
The constitutionalist view more common in the US:
* People should have a right to housing (I know, not per the consitution, but this is the right this article is about)
* If nobody is discriminated by law, based on race, gender or something else, from practicing this right (e.g. buying property, or signing a contract for renting a flat), then all is fine.
So the core difference is that the consequentialist view looks at empirical evidence to decide whether there is discrimination or not. The institutional view just looks at the law etc. ( = the institutions).
This is more fundamental because it indeed used to be that whole parts of society were banned from doing things or owning things.
We now take this fundamental right for granted, which might explain the shift to interpreting "right" as "being entitled to".
There is another aspect in your comment, which to conflate "not being to obtain" with "discrimination". I think this is going a step too far.
It makes no sense to talk about government being in the way of pursuit of happiness when most people are dirty poor renting some land all owned by a small elite, and there being no free land elsewhere.
That is why in Europe the purpose of governments is to a larger degree to guarantee rights of people. You can see that also in the different way free speech is understood in many European countries compared to the US.
In the US free speech is about government getting out of the way, but other entities obstructing your free speech is far more accepted in the US. While in Europe government to a larger degree seeks to protect your right to free speech in a wider variety of settings. That is why e.g. US company rules often restrict speech, while the same would usually be illegal in many European countries. As your speech is protected by government even inside companies.
People can have their preference on what they prefer. But I think the European model makes more sense for European history and society. It may make more sense in modern day America as well, since there the freedom to just find some land in the wilderness and do whatever is basically gone today. The US is in many ways recreating the old rich elite of Europe of old. The US is in many ways developing into an oligarchy and starts to mimic how Europe was in the early 1800s.
Can you remind me what are my ideological beliefs?
Picking an overly political username and being aggressive isn't very conducive to discussion.
Super simplified, but just to give a nuance between "right to have" vs "right to not being hindered".
> The government is ... not some overlord we need to ask permission from.
I see it as the government is restricting certain people from trodding on the rights of other people. Otherwise you get things like chemical companies dumping waste straight into rivers, etc.
That makes absolutely no sense. It only makes sense when it is a failed democracy where elections are corrupted or bought in some way.
Which people can make arguments for ;-)
If one wants to conveniently fit all the different views on the topic into two categories, the view advocated by you would be the instituionalist tradition, with e.g. John Rawls as a famous proponent. The reasoning driving Finland here is the consequentialist tradition, represented by e.g. Amartya Sen.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, the consequentialist interpretation is more popular in Europe, while the favorite in the USA is the institutionalist thinking.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Shelter is a necessity to life. Without a permanent address, it is extremely difficult to obtain gainful employment, which is widely understood to be necessary for the pursuit of happiness. I'm not sure when you're referring to, saying "used to mean," but this humanitarian view of rights is quite solidly entrenched in US law.
Ninth Amendment:
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The founders deliberately left this barn-door open for the sake of progress.
No, that's for the government-phobic American liberals.
Rights used to mean things a person is warranted to, just because they exist.
For most European cultures for example the government = the enforcers of the will of the people (if we're talking about a democratic government, elected etc), so there's no hostility between the two (except to the degree that it doesn't enforce people's will).
That's the case for the more cohesive, ethnic-wise, countries.
For Americans it was more complicated, because it was established as a hodgepodge of peoples (as opposed to a single people) with different ideas, ethnic backgrounds, histories, etc. So no single government could cover those all, and any government was viewed with mistrust.
That's only if you look at it from a very old and US-centric perspective. The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 [1], for example, includes the following articles:
"ARTICLE 25
1. 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.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
ARTICLE 26
1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."
Those don't sound like "merely not obstructing" kinds of rights.
[1]: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng
I hadn't seen this list before and I find it outrageous. I might even go so far as to say that it constitutes an assault on our culture. Not that I would expect any less of the UN.
1. Those who have housing are less transient and as a result have (increasing) influence over local politics in aggregate.
2. Said local politicians then take their constituents will upstream, resulting in the (re)enforcement of policies that benefit the existing property owners. Mainly this manifests itself in anti-growth policies. Not just in housing, but really any sort of change that can be seen as disruptive to the existing population even if it's good generally. This can mean housing, public transportation, roads, and more!
The solution to these issues is to nationalize rules regarding housing, but because of (2) it's unlikely to ever happen.
I wonder what will need to happen before the minority (not speaking about race or ethnicity, but in terms of voter participation) finally are empowered, given many times the minority voting population actually makes up the majority of eligible voters.
I guarantee you that if 100% voter participation was enforced and macro votes could override micro votes (i.e. a state vote could overturn a local rule) most issues would go away.
Landownership is not without flaws and reform potential but lets not go crazy here. Eminent domain already exists dor hindering development issues and shows why it is used sparingly.
I have some fairly extensive experience with the types of folks that end up homeless.
I'm extremely grateful that it's never happened to me; but I'm quite aware that it's always a a possibility.
They have immense advantages, and unique benefits. Norway in particular being the frontrunner.
Yet in my news feeds it seems middle European progressive parties (Belgium/France/Germany/Spain) always point to these countries and say "see, look what happens if we take care of our people". Ignoring not only the money needed for such an initiative, but the huge demographic differences from immigration in the last 20-40 years.
I welcome opposing thought here, because it's a matter that genuinely confuses me, and I'm open to being on the wrong side here.
The main advantage of Norway seems to be that they didn't give away their resources for pittances to private companies, but exploit them directly.
Drilling a 4km deep oil well out in the north sea in rough weather is very different from drilling 20 meters on land in Texas.
If you look at various American oil states. They have managed their oil wealth far more poorly than Norway. No sovereign wealth fund. Public system often underfunded and in poor condition. Look at Oklahoma e.g.
There are as many "blends" of crude as there are oil fields (about 160 blends according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crude_oil_products). Some are "thicker" than others and that results in different products you can get from the crude you refine. Also, each crude requires a different setting in your refinery, and it is very costly and lengthy to change that setup.
Refineries in the US are for the most part set to heavy crude.
Guess what kind of crude the US get's from fracking?
. . .
It's not heavy crude.
That would not just be boorish, but also wrong: both Sweden and Morway (the two I just checked) have around 17% foreign-born residents, with more than half of those from outside the EU.
Rather the question is, does importing radically different cultures, and low skilled labor bear a cost on the welfare state.
This is a cost that is probably acceptable, and necessary, but we should keep an eye on the practical limits.
Norway has far more money to spend, and Finland has far lower foreign cultural migration, so they don't make fair examples.
That's a huge difference with France/Belgium.
The USA has historically chosen "more immigration, less social services" and Finland has chosen "less immigration, more social services". "More immigration, more social services" seems to be a hard sell. For whatever reason people generally seem turned off when a welfare state spends money on people who they feel aren't like them.
To me it is a problem of convincing voters to spend money, not lacking money to spend. Convincing voters seems easier in a homogeneous place (whatever it was immediately after WWII, there seems to be a strong "we are Finns" culture now).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland#Demographics
70% of Finns are merely on the rolls of the Lutheran Church, which really only means that parents had their child baptised as a popular traditional ritual, not as a sign of devout belief. I would suggest that Christianity never penetrated the Finnish psyche as deep as certain other European states. In most Finnish communities the church is not a center of community life but simply a building that stands as a museum (in many localities there is no active church at all). Also, with the rise of the welfare state, Finns immediately abandoned the notion that the Lutheran Church has any significant role to play in the lives of the less fortunate. Finland’s state churches themselves have happily handed over almost all of their charitable role to the state.
And in that portion of the country which was traditionally Orthodox, support for the welfare state doesn’t noticeably differ from the Lutheran part.
If you want to claim that Finns make their welfare state work because of ethnic homogenity, that ethnic homogenity would have to be located somewhere else than religion.
I think their advantages are essentially fundamentally geographic but deeply counterintuitive. The Nordics counter intuively may have the "advantage" of a harsh climate which both aids defense and promotes "sincere" cooperation due to a force outside their control and long term planning and infastructure. Don't prepare for winter and it kills you.
Conceptuallly it is essentially an inverse resource curse where a disavantage has a positive impact. Of course there are other unspoken factors to their success. Like all nations the geographic distance to trading partners has influence on growth.
The harsh climate has forced these countries to adapt, otherwise you'd simply perish in the past. Finland, having no conceivable natural resources like Norway, was forced to adapt by building a few thriving industries and excellent infrastructure to facilitate them.
There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.
It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.
The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory.
Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.
The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.
Sweden in particular has had higher than European average levels of immigration over the past 20 years.
These countries are not a uniform block in the sense you’re suggesting.
The Finnish welfare state began in earnest at a time when the country was not particularly wealthy and it had little of the internationally renowned industry it has today. Furthermore, Finland managed to ramp up a welfare state at about the same time that it was forced to pay huge reparations to the USSR after World War II. Similarly, Sweden (the country which Finland used as a model for its welfare state) was not originally among the most prosperous nations.
The historical experience of the Nordic countries underscores that a welfare state is not a matter of having unusually large amounts of money compared to other Western European states, but rather it is a matter of taxation and spending priorities. Certainly Norway’s oil wealth lets it have some nicer public infrastructure than the neighbours, but such substantial natural resources are not a prerequisite.
Rubbish. Finland has a sovereign wealth fund and a tiny population
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...
I mean it's an opportunity to get someone back on their feet, and with time, reintegrate them with society - that is, turn them back into taxpayers. It makes sense both from a capitalist and a socialist point of view.
The problem is convincing those who think the homeless are subhuman undesirables who should be made Someone Else's Problem.
This is approaching Twitter level of "everybody who disagrees with me on this topic is a fascist".
Ditto regarding our interpretation of property rights (you're almost always dependent on democratic or bureaucratic support for any significant change in usage, even in remote areas), our acceptance for de facto anti-competitive behavior in hiring, our deep cultural skepticism towards people who excel in business and professional life, ++.
Success stories regarding support for the weakest are often popular abroad, but it isn't just due to a homogenuous population that our policies aren't often replicated elsewhere. I make the deliberate choice of staying here in spite of being an ambitious professional, and support a significant part of our policies, but not all our policies favor everyone equally. This isn't pointed out so often.
Why can't you put immigrants in houses too?
Providing free housing, medical, school, etc... is a huge incentive.
This is why we try to control immigration, we simply don't have the resources to provide a safety net to everyone.
In this case: what do you want to do with them instead? Let them die on the streets? Did you even read the article? They are being provided with some kind of housing and support already like human beings deserve. Giving them a place to live, gives them also a chance to become a proper member of the society who also ads to it and can provide for other homeless.
For further reading regarding the "Pull Factors Myth" take this for example: https://www.ecre.org/op-ed-pull-factors-the-myth-that-never-...
I imagine though that in such a large country there must be some city somewhere with good infrastructure, with good housing and with low crime .... anyway I think people need to think more on "how can we achieve X" not "how can I prove that X is impossible so we do not need to try "
I don't see why it is so important for you to ignore the Nordic experience. It seems like a very strong ideological drive to find flaws in the Nordic model or reasons to reject it.
Nordic countries started out worse than these other European countries in terms of money and resources. Nor is the demographics markedly different. German has much the same success story despite being a larger country. So there are universal lessons.
Also Nordics have lessons for all side of the political spectrum. Nordic countries have active states and many welfare services however they also relentlessly push people to work. Not necessarily by punishing them economically as many Anglo-Saxon countries to but by also offering a lot of help for people who struggle to get into work: health care, re-training, childcare etc.
Nordics are also very pro business and free trade. Nordics focus on helping people as individuals but there is not that much of propping up failing businesses. Unlike the US e.g. Sweden never bailed out failed car companies.
Nordics is a mix of both socialist and capitalist ideas. Unfortunately there has been a right wing agenda to tar the Nordic reputation for decades. All the way back to Eisenhower American conservatives strongly disliked Nordic countries. Sweden in particular was singled out as an object of derision. That Sweden in the 50s did not stigmatize single mothers offended them greatly.
Conservatives all the way back to the 50s ran all sorts of hit pieces on Sweden about how loose their sexual morality was. How society was falling apart in due to drunkness and low morality. These people have predicted and wished for our failure for decades. And it is frankly a bit sick that this belittling of Nordic success stories still keeps going.
We have not figured out everything, but can we not be given credit for something? Must there always be a dark side to Nordics to hype up among conservatives?
The simplest way to think about it is did it exist before houses existed? No?
Then it's a made up human privilege.
It would only work if all residents are covered, right?
In New Zealand citizens and residents can get govt support for accomodation, yet there are crazy numbers of homeless people everywhere!
For first time buyers of housing in norway, family background has become the most important factor.
It's 2020, it just doesn't make sense to still have people living on the streets, like animals.
As most people are not financially independent, homelessness could literally happen to any of us. All it takes is a rough period in your live, you get laid off, a bad divorce, someone in your family passes away that used to contribute to the expenses and now you can't pay the rent, a war veteran that could not adapt to society.
A car breaks down and you can't go to your minimal pay job anymore, you get laid off and can't pay the rent.
To anyone who thinks otherwise and thinks homeless people just don't want to work, I recommend the channel Invisible People - https://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblepeopletv
Vagrancy, loitering etc have always had cause to be enforceable offenses for 200 years for a reason
It's considered a perfectly normal part of live that some people live on the street in 2020 like animals, it's just nuts.
This will be a disaster (for Finns).
Straw men about "rights" and "coercion" abound, while there's very little acknowledgement of the scale of human suffering that can be solved by just providing housing instead of half-heartedly funding shelters, halfway houses, ERs, etc.; the usual leaky uncoordinated sieve of a "safety net" that exists in most countries.
How about instead a Y Combinator applicant that takes the idea in the article of cost-benefit analysis in terms of public service usage and scales it up across cities, states, and nations?
"Keeping people homeless, instead of providing homes for them, is always more expensive for the society. In Finland we have some scientific evaluations of the cost of this program. When a homeless person gets a permanent home, even with support, the cost savings for the society are at least 15,000 Euros per one person per one year. And the cost savings come from different use of different services.
In this study, they looked at the services that homeless people used when they were without a home. They calculated every possible thing: emergency healthcare, police, justice system, etc. They then compared that cost to when people get proper housing. And this was the result. I'm quite sure this kind of cost analysis can also be found for Canada."
A previous partner of mine worked as a social worker for an organization that did "housing first". She would house homeless individuals in apartments, advocated on their behalf to the landlord, get them some basic furniture, and helped them get financial assistance to afford rent and food. That part was easy.
The biggest problem she faced was that people would leave their homes. She would come by a few days after housing them and they weren't around. She'd call them up only to discover they'd taken the train over to the next town and spent the night on the streets there. One lady complained that she thought the apartment was too small and preferred to be outdoors. She housed a family of 4 who were sleeping in their car, only to find that they crossed the border a few days later because the father thought that there were better opportunities there.
Homelessness is not about "not having a home". It is a mindset and lifestyle that people develop over many years.
The best solution is to try to stop the incoming generation from developing this lifestyle - get 'em while they're young. Keep troubled kids in school at all costs. Double down on drug and addiction education. Police the shit out of poor neighborhoods. And then provide some health and wellness support for those who choose this lifestyle. Because that's all you can do.