What if we just gave each resident of the U.S. either a basic income or the necessities of life such as shelter, food, and clothing? Poverty wouldn’t be eliminated in the technical sense as defined by the poverty-industrial complex because people who did not work wouldn’t have any cash income, but poverty would be eliminated in a practical sense because nobody would be without the necessities of life.
The Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco comes pretty close to the universal basic lifestyle utopia. Nonprofit organizations (the “homeless-industrial complex”) own buildings and give away shelter. Taxpayer-funded meals are also provided by nonprofits. From the Tenderloin Museum:
As a sign in the Museum gift shop notes, almost everyone is taken care of:
(Exercise for the reader: What class of humans are left out and should be denied care?)
Predatory capitalism has been kept at bay via zoning restrictions:
What happens when you give Americans everything that they need to live, by historical standards, an extremely comfortable life? They take a lot of drugs and live in tents on the sidewalk:
(See also, this New York Times article about Portland, Oregon, three years after drug use was decriminalized: “Oregon’s overdose rates have only grown. Now, tents of unhoused people line many sidewalks in Portland.”)
Related… Dianne Feinstein made cleaning up the Tenderloin a top priority during her tenure as mayor of San Francisco:
(In a great example of American polygamy, Feinstein was the third wife of a rich guy and is now involved in a fight with the dead rich guy’s children with another wife (NYT).)
Loosely related, a sticker on display at Oshkosh that I wouldn’t expect to see in the Tenderloin or anywhere else in San Francisco:
She’s more like a Steven Hawking with a lot less brain power now.
What class of humans are left out and should be denied care? Republicans, White men, Asians, and the dirty Jews!
Wonder if this is better or worse than the state of the Lotus Eaters from ancient times?