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RealityVsUnreality 5 - 18 Feb 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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When Prof. Moglen was discussing the wide chasm separating between what we know about the penal system and what really transpires behind prison doors, it occurred to me that this divergence between reality and unreality certainly isn't unqiue to the criminal "justice" system, and that the failure to bridge that gap often leads to a distorted understanding of human behavior in other contexts as well. In the case of the penal system, we witness some alarming absurdities: the father who thinks jail time will "shape up" his son, the politician who pads his resume with convictions, the prosecutor whose political ties pervert her duties as a public servant, and a community which thinks itself safer despite rising rates of incarceration and crime. These symptoms are no doubt worrisome, but I believe the same social forces operate in other cases as well. | | | It seems to me there is only one way to eradicate homelessness. Free Housing for everyone who needs it. If you want better housing, you can go pay for it. But if you don't have money, free housing for you, no question asked.
-- XinpingZhu - 18 Feb 2009 | |
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- This is the same as establishing a right to housing. Declaring such a right seems fairly straightforward, but any step towards implementation of the right is fraught with difficulties. To pick only one, where do people have a right to be housed? Does everyone have a right to live on Manhattan, or are some people entitled to be housed in Vermilion, South Dakota only? Societies that subsidize housing often have a system of residency permission, which means that if one has a right to live somewhere, one has no right to live anywhere else. Such a system may appeal to those otherwise too poor to have decent housing anywhere, but will likely be objectionable to those with sufficient surplus over subsistence to be concerned about civil liberty. Problems of at least equal complexity lie in every other direction from the starting point.
- A right to decent housing is also completely undiscussable because it would be socialism.
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