The Colony We Live in: Homeless Edition

We now live in a land, many nonmulticulturalists call it a colony for lack of a better word in American English, where many homeless shelters have bed lotteries or waiting lists.

But a counterargument arises: a large percentage of the homeless engage in crime, drug use, and irksome panhandling. So screw it. They deserve to be punished until they change their ways. Let incentives work.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has an estimate from 2003 that 38 percent of the homeless were addicted to alcohol. Twenty-six percent abused other drugs. (The sites I found weren't clear about the amount of overlap in the two numbers.) I doubt anyone knows what percentage of the homeless engage in crime careers since that group is far more noticeable and interacts with others far more often, a likely availability bias. Some homeless individuals wake up in shelters and go to work. Another group of homeless tries to be invisible, living in vehicles, woodlots, and other less conspicuous places. Many have physical disabilities. Estimates of serious mental illness among the homeless range from 20 percent to 33 percent. Personal responsibility incentives often fail with the mentally ill. We don't punish everyone on Wall Street because a large percentage of Wall Streeters engage in legal or ethical wrongs. We seldom even punish the Wall Streeters committing crimes. But the ruling classes treat almost all homeless individuals as if they should be punished for the wrongs of homeless individuals committing crimes.

(It would be irrelevant to mention we have umpteen trillion for reckless, self-destructive militarism. We have umpteen trillion more for direct and opportunity costs arising from the financial industry. We have trillions for tax entitlements. We have payments for parents having children with minor disabilities, often the parents own fault for dysgenic breeding. We have billions to resettle conquerors, in all their horrific dysgenic glory. We have umpteen trillion more for monopolies, oligopolies, and affirmative action, including foreign oligopolies such as OPEC. We waste trillions on colleges and college prep curricula for marginal students, who often drop out of college with large debts.)

Alas, we don't have enough beds for the homeless in brutally cold weather.

So we have ruling classes promoting mass dysgenics, atrocious cultures, and massive economic redistribution to themselves, then when the products of mass dysgenics predictably suffer from harmful genes and rotten cultures, too bad for them.