The Libertarian Solution To End Homelessness

[Alex Libman]

Good points, fisharmor, thank you.

Cock at :58.

And "pigs" in the background:


Minister Steve Being Arrested by Alex Libman, on Flickr

Now let's be serious...

Having roosters around is just good survivalism (even if they do wake me up at like 4am). Chickens turn old bread into protein better than any mammal, though people in Tent City almost never eat them - they also keep down the bug population, which is very important for everyone's health and safety. (The couple who takes care of the birds here are vegetarians, and so are a number of other people in the camp.)

The shot you've mentioned is of a good man being arrested...


Minister Steve Arrest Protest by Alex Libman, on Flickr

[Alex Libman]

I've clumsily started something like a chat-room about Tent City / Destiny's Bridge on Facebook, and introduced the situation to some of my FB friends. (Clumsily because I refused to use "social networks" before just a couple of months ago, when someone asked me to use it "for the cause", and sometimes FB doesn't behave the way you expect...)


Some very interesting people were able to weigh in...


L. Neil Smith [FB] [TW] [WP] [WQ]:

All I have to contribute to the topic is this, but it is enough.

Buy a copy of my book Down With Power: Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis. Over my 50-odd years as an activist and advocate, I am convinced that involuntary homelessness and poverty are the result of deliberate practices on the part of the government and its various corporate symbionts.

We can see this clearly on the world stage, where there is widespread hunger but no shortage of food. What creates starvation is a political class whose greed and lust for absolute power stands in the way of freedom from both misery and tyranny.

There is also the United Nations, whose upper echelons (although the "embedded media" ignore it) have openly declared that they want to see 90% of the human race exterminated.

The only action you can take that will have any lasting meaning or effect is to read my book, and then join me in speaking out to end both taxation and economic regulation, which are the chains by which we are held captive. The result will be an immediate 8-to-10-fold increase in real wealth and purchasing power, and an end to the problem you're concerned with.

L. Neil Smith's Down With Power: Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis, winner of the 2013 Freedom Book of The Year Award, is available at Amazon.com, B&N.com, and other such places, in both dead-tree and e-book format.

Mary J. Ruwart [G+] [FB] [IN] [WP]:

L Neil Smith is correct: most homelessness is a direct result of zoning and building restrictions, which keep housing prices high. When I was renting to low income tenants, the city of Kalamazoo enforced ridiculous codes (like the length of a kitchen counter), so that landlords would have to do expensive renovations, raise rents, and drive the poor out of the city. The inspectors told me they did this deliberately and were proud of how they were "cleaning up" the city. They didn't think about the homelessness that would and did result.

Davi Barker (The Muslim Agorist) [G+] [FB] [IN] [TW] [YT] [FTL] [SS]:

I wrote this years ago about a particular homeless man who got himself out of poverty in a very libertarian way, entrepreneurship. Of course it was the city that came and shut him down in the name of helping him.

Minimum wage, licensing laws, and vending permits have a lot to do with it too. I've been trying to think my way into an actual solution since I wrote this, but so far everything I've come up with would be criminal. But my short answer is, if you want to help the homeless, train them to be Agorists.

Alex, I love what you're doing.

http://www.examiner.com/article/what-about-the-poor

L. Neil Smith:

Here's something that may interest you.

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle497-20081214-04.html

I first wrote this speech in the early 1970s for delivery to Libertarian Party audiences. I gave a version of it at a Future of Freedom conference in Culver City, California in 1987; among others in the audience was the great Robert Anton Wilson, who came to me afterward and praised the speech and my delivery highly. Made me blush and almost made me weep.

The version here has been modified to support my social contract, the "Covenant of Unanimous Consent" but you can disregard that aspect of it if you wish. The general idea is the effect of freedom on the economy. I'm going to prepare a more generic version in the near future and probably make an audio recording of it.

Here you go ...

Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision -- or -- I Dreamed I Was a [Libertarian] In My Maidenform Bra

By L. Neil Smith <lneil[shift-two]netzero.com>

"There's no single Libertarian future, but as many different futures as there are individuals to create them."

L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 497, December 14, 2008

Thank you, Mary. Robert LeFevre used to tell some very funny (and infuriating) stories about his attempt to open a restaurant in San Francisco. I suspect Robert Heinlein drew some of his "The Tale of the Twins Who Weren't" in Time Enough For Love from LeFevre's experience.

One story involved the requirement for a legal occupancy notice -- we've all seen them: "This Room Seats 120 People". He had a sign maker draw him up a nice one on poster board, only to be told he was in violation: the sign had to be made in cast bronze, and by some odd coincidence, the Mayor's brother just happened to have a foundry ...

It cost something like $800 in the 1950s. How many jobs in the kitchen did that wipe out? I've always said that poverty is the government's most important product and its proudest achievement.