Without Government Who Would Hassle People Who Help the Poor?

Interesting comments over there on the linked story. The majority of them would be laughed off the table here, though a small minority address real issues. One being that government feeding the homeless is another argument for government control.

On one back and forth I would be interested in feedback from commenters here. Someone suggested drug testing the homeless and not feeding those positive. Another suggested that if they couldn’t afford food, they certainly couldn’t afford drugs.

Without government private individuals would take care of hassling people who help the poor. Probably a lot of the same ones behind doing it through government.

When governments try to stop churches and charities from doing things that attract the homeless it is usually because people who live nearby are seeking to live in an area where they are surrounded by a wealthier class of people than that.

In areas with government this is usually done through zoning restrictions. In an anarchist society it would simply be done by wealthy people coming together and agreeing to form an exclusive neighborhood.

@Thaomas

What were the reasons for the City’s request?

The only thing the article says is that the city said the homeless shelter was increasing the number of homeless. Like you, I wish there were more details. The only way I can think this is correct is that the city thinks people go to the city to be homeless because they take better care of them? But even then, shutting down the homeless shelter wouldn’t necessarily reduce homelessness; it’d just relocate the homeless.

@Arnold Layne:

1) Moral hazard: Rewarding homeless people who choose to refuse assistance from shelters (private and government) and instead live on the streets

I don’t understand your argument here. The homeless shelter in question is one of those providing assistance, so how is offering food rewarding homeless people for refusing assistance?

Regarding “destructive behavior:”

I think this is somewhat of an unfair characterization. Anecdotally, I worked with the homeless when I lived in New Hampshire (and this is anecdotal evidence, so take it for what it’s worth). With the exception of just a small number, most were homeless not because of destructive behavior, but because of the lack of a support system. They may have had a mental illness or something and their family abandoned them. Some were recovering drug addicts who had no support from families. These people are good people who have been dealt a losing hand; giving them some comfort in the world is not a bad thing to enabling their behavior. These people are not choosing homelessness, and most of the time it is through no fault of their own.

Some people don’t want homeless in their neighborhoods, so they “ask” churches to stop feeding those homeless. Others don’t want the foreign born in their countries, so they get the government to forcibly stop all people from hiring or selling housing to those foreign born.

Some claim that the foreign born have no right to work for a firm simply because the firm wants to hire them nor a right to live in a home simply because the property owner wants to sell or rent to them. I suppose if one follows that logic through to its conclusion, then the homeless similarly have no right to eat food simply because a church wants to feed them. If a firm has no right to choose its employees and a property owner/seller has no right to choose his tenants/buyers, then I guess it follows that a charity has no right to choose its beneficiaries.

@Greg G

You write: “Without government private individuals would take care of hassling people who help the poor. Probably a lot of the same ones behind doing it through government.”

You raise a good point. If these people didn’t have access to a government, they could still hassle others privately, at their own expense. But when they have the option to use a government to do this at taxpayer expense, they choose it and the government goes along with it.

This is in liberal Malibu where politicians keep telling the electorate that the government, if given enough power, will use that power to promote justice and fairness.

I wonder if the church doesn’t have grounds to sue the mayor & councilmen for violating their freedom to practice their religion as they see fit.

I don’t know this particular case, but there have been many like it before — homeless shelters and churches often don’t abide by all the rules and regulations that restaurants have to abide by, including food storage, handling, not serving past-due foods, work regulations, and so on. Your average bake sale is wildly illegal — cookies cooked in uninspected home kitchens.