Homelessness is easy to solve.
A) Universal basic dorms for the poor but otherwise normal adults of sound mind.
B) Mandatory institutionalization for adults with severe mental health issues who are found living on the street.
Crime is easy to reduce.
A) Mandatory long sentences for serious crimes, particularly violent crime.
B) Penalties and prosecution for even small offenses, like shoplifting and graffiti, though not incarceration. Fines, public shaming, long periods of community service, etc.
C) Readjust the welfare system to favor nuclear families with fathers.
D) Decriminalize most drugs, with penalties for public use while driving while using, rather than manufacture & distribution. In essence, you can buy heroin at your local pharmacy, but if you shoot it up in the park, you get a citation and a $500 fine.
Inequality isn’t a huge issue and it’s really not solvable. If you raise the minimum wage to $20/hr and eliminate 99% of Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth, there’s still a crazy amount of inequality between him and the minimum wage worker.
Rather than focus on inequality, focus on three issues:
1) Ensure that there’s a decent minimum beneath which you cannot easily fall (universal basic dorms, employer of last resort jobs).
2) Ensure that men in particular can get a decent living so as to be attractive to women, allowing them to get married and have families. This is a hard one, outside of direct subsidies to men, the only thing I can think of is state owned enterprises that employ men specifically at good salaries.
3) Reduce the power of the oligarchs to set and guide policy. A lot can be done here, though it’s hard to say what would be best.
Unrealistic, of course. But it would be nice if somehow the Overton Window would move in this general direction, instead of the other way.
I would note that the fact that inequality is not solvable makes it the ultimate backstop for the left. If everything else is going well with capitalism, you can always complain about inequality and insist that it’s a crisis for government to solve.
the second to last one used to be large infantry divisions, for example, and public works.
Ensure that men in particular can get a decent living so as to be attractive to women… state owned enterprises that employ men specifically at good salaries.
This, but remedial efforts get hacked by activists who go to court and get women installed in the enterprise so that, once again, there is no delta between men and women.
“ Ensure that men in particular can get a decent living so as to be attractive to women, allowing them to get married and have families. This is a hard one, outside of direct subsidies to men, the only thing I can think of is state owned enterprises that employ men specifically at good salaries.”
If only there was a tool to neutrally judge the value of different forms of labor. Perhaps something like a market. And what if there were few or maybe no constraints. Some kind of a “free market” that established a fair value for services rendered.
If us men were deserving of special treatment perhaps such a market would reward them accordingly.
We may not be able to solve inequality but I think we can solve how unfair it feels. When the wealthy essentially have a different set of laws/taxation and outsized political influence it makes inequality far more maddening.
Perhaps add to the list:
-close tax breaks for the wealthy and the ability to shield capital gains til eternity
-prosecute white collar crime as aggressively as violent crime
-tax conspicuous and excess consumption (mega-yachts, third homes, all consumption above a certain level etc)
-Reduce legacy admissions to universities
If the elites were wise they’d do a far better job policing themselves to avoid what’s coming. They refuse.
“Decriminalize most drugs, with penalties for public use while driving while using, rather than manufacture & distribution. In essence, you can buy heroin at your local pharmacy, but if you shoot it up in the park, you get a citation and a $500 fine.”
I don’t think this qualifies as a conservative solution. One risk that is hard to measure with respect to drugs not already mainstream is the effect of legalization on social norms.
Prohibition pretty clearly demonstrated that declaring a substance that was previously legal and in widespread use illegal is a losing battle, but it is quite possible that declaring a previously taboo drug legal could have disastrous effects through the channel of reduced stigma.
We already have huge problems with abuse of legal pharmaceuticals in this country (pain meds, ssri’s, etc). In many cases the legality of these drugs made it easier for companies to create a market through advertising, doctor bribes, formulary positioning, etc.
Drugs are just bad. That should always and everywhere be the #1 talking point and goal of any conservative. We can quibble about effective enforcement regimes only after we’ve established a huge public consensus on This point.
The policy may or may not be conservative, but that’s not what concerns me. The real question is what policy would be most likely to make our society flourish.
For that we have to weight the benefits and costs to society of drug prohibition. Forcing production and distribution into the criminal world, in particular, seems to be a particularly large cost, effectively enlarging and enriching the criminal sector and ensnaring more individuals into it. The real question is how much use would rise if decriminalization occurred. My answer for now is “probably not much” but I’d revisit that decision in light of evidence to the contrary. Other resources currently deployed to fight drugs can be redeployed to other uses, drug related or not.
I do agree that you don’t want to give the impression that drug use is okay, which is why I suggested decriminalization: if you’re found high in public you get a citation and a fine, much the same as if you were speeding or running a stop sign. You can even go further and legalize drugs, but use social pressure to discourage their use (consider cigarettes, for example), though I myself would stick with decriminalization.
+1. I thought that everyone agreed that Prohibition was a big mistake, which led to the rise of organized crime. But here we are, doing it again with no end in sight.
Fines are of limited use against underclass behavior. Many underclass have tones of unpaid fines at any time. Fines only work if you can confiscate assets for non compliance, but these people have no assets.
Corporal punishment would work better, but imagine the optics. Remember when a cop tried to restrain a large black man having a fentanyl overdose after committing a crime and resisting arrest.
but imagine the optics
This.
Video editing and Narrative dubbing on social media has killed more good ideas for us Philistines than the jawbone of an ass.
In the case of people with no income or assets, they can pay the fine with community service. A $500 fine could instead be 50 hours of community service.
I think you have a point on corporal punishment. Pretty sure I remember Scott Alexander had a post a few years back on how many criminals themselves would probably prefer to be beat with a cane several times than be stuck in prison for months or years, yet it looks bad so we don’t allow it. We as a society have become very squeamish when it comes to things like punishment or consequences.
For welfare to favor married men, it would probably need to become less generous to poor single women. Ready to take on that voting block.
B. Mandatory mental health institutionalization manifestly does not work. The state mental health hospital in western Washington State lost its federal funding due to corruption and abuse of patients. When you put a bunch of “experts” in absolute control of the mentally ill for long periods of time, this seems inevitably to happen. The problem is that we still don’t have effective mental health solutions for severely ill people. Some of these people become irrationally violent. My wife has had to treat them in a small hospital, and they can be quite dangerous. Some of her colleagues have been seriously injured. It’s not hard to see how exposure to this sort of behavior on a daily basis over years or decades would degrade the mental and physical health of the caregivers.
Yes, there was a lot of abuse in the old mental health institutions, but the current method of simply putting the mentally ill out on the streets to fend for themselves is pretty horrendous, too. Is there a way to oversee institutions well enough that they don’t become hellholes? Sadly, probably not. Is there some third way? We sure need one!
Our mental health crisis is a crisis of affluence. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, you can have as many mentally ill people as you want to pay for. Life for mentally ill in 21st century America is just too easy.
We spend billions as a nation on housing and food for the homeless, for mental health facilities and treatment, not to mention all of the charity that misguided people will bestow upon these people with their cardboard signs by off ramps on the highways.
They are rarely hungry, cold, or destitute. They can make a middle class salary begging at the off ramps to highways in major cities, tax free, no less. I’m sure these mentally ill beggars are filing 1040’s for the IRS.
In cities in the Northeast, when the weather gets really cold, the police go out and look for the homeless to make sure they get to a shelter. They will literally give them a ride to a nice warm bed.
Most of these mentally ill homeless folks are, however, competent enough to travel to an area with great weather and camp out in tents, sleeping bags, and gear that would make a refugee in Africa feel like a king. Some of this equipment is provided to them through charities.
And what do we have to show for that mammoth effort at assisting the homeless? Record numbers of them out on the streets.
Used to be we’d just call them vagabonds, look at them disapprovingly and tell our children how shameful such behavior is. Instead, it’s become a mainstream lifestyle for many. And why not? If you like drugs and camping, it’s pretty much the dream. The social stigma is gone. Perhaps we should bring it back.
Wild idea, but how about we ticket all of these people for camping without a permit, and then round them up and send them to jail when they don’t pay their fines? Or maybe we could enforce drug use and distribution laws in these homeless encampments. Send in legions of cops, turn the place upside down, and arrest anyone who is high or in the possession of drugs.
If the judge hearing their case thinks they’re legitimately mentally ill, he can then recommend treatment instead of prison time. If they commit an act of violence within the mental treatment facility, send them straight to prison. If they get ticketed for camping without a permit again, straight to prison. We should be ruthless with enforcement.
This is the third way you’re asking for. It’s simple, but will never be implemented because no one has the stomach for it. Punish people for being homeless leeches on society, whether they’re mentally ill or not. If they are legitimately mentally ill, offer treatment, with an alternative of prison time.
Until we start seeing these people as leeches and criminals instead of victims, nothing will change.
The police are required to wear body cams.
Couldn’t we just have video feed in more or less all areas of mental health hospitals but the restrooms?
Like prisons for long term violent offenders, its an imperfect solution or putting a bullet in the back of their brain.
“The problem is that we still don’t have effective mental health solutions for severely ill people. Some of these people become irrationally violent.”
Toss them in prison then. If they commit even one instance of violence within a mental hospital setting, it’s off to prison. No exceptions. The moment they commit an act of violence, these people cease to be patients and become criminals and no longer belong in a mental health hospital. They belong in prison.
A prerequisite of getting help is to not harm those who are trying to help you. If you can’t even do that, you don’t deserve help, on the contrary, society needs to be protected from such people without regard to their well being.
To do anything else is a miscarriage of justice. Whenever we let mentally ill people commit acts of violence and then explain it away with “they’re just crazy people doing crazy things”, we’re signaling that the crazy person’s wellbeing is more valuable than the person they harmed. This is morally abhorrent.
This would also make those mental health hospitals more productive, if the goal is actually to help these people recover and rejoin society. Patients would know that if they make one wrong move, it’s straight to prison. Either accept help and try to get better, or end up in prison. You’ll quickly separate the wheat from the chaff with such incentives.
I don’t think inequality is quite so unsolvable. Throughout history, we were fairly equal, equally poor. Since our wealth came from our physical labor and there isn’t much more one can physically do than another, you couldn’t gain much more than another that way. What caused inequality is the growing importance of mental work, where one person could really outthink you and gain a hundred or thousand times more, initially through ideological constructs like the king or the church where they could get a bunch of people to work for them to now creating and running machines that do a lot of the work, whether physical tractors or mental computers.
However, it’s always a collaborative negotiation to determine who gets what, and Microsoft employees could have bargained away more stock from Gates just as Apple employees did from Jobs, who in time built a much larger company but kept less shares for himself (you could argue both were still underpaid: as ruthless masterminds of their software monopolies, their employees made a lot more money than they would have elsewhere, as techies are invariably giant dunces when it comes to business).
I think that’s what we’ll increasingly see in the future, more people bargaining more for themselves, as such business skills become more widespread, and inequality will wane, though we will always have exceptions for those who really discover new avenues.
Definitely unrealistic politically.
My general point in all of this was to note that things could be done (my own proposals or others) if there was the will to do them.