Noblesse Oblige

 The following was originally posted as an answer to a question asked on Quora.com.

Original question: “Do homeless people deserve to have society provide basic shelter for them? Why or why not?”

The answer to this question is highly dependent upon what you mean by “society.”

Humans are animals. All animals on this planet that we know of—all living organisms, really, not just animals—subsist by consuming resources from their environments. Mostly, they consume other organisms. We do the same.

Except when caring for their own young, most animals display no sense of altruism in voluntarily feeding other animals. To the extent that it does happen, it’s usually done out of selfish motivations, such as when ants raise aphids for food. It’s only in social animals that we see exceptions to this. For example, female lions hunt and bring meat back for their whole lion community. Wolves hunt as a pack and eat as a pack, without any sense of private property. Likewise, a village of humans may all work collectively to plant and harvest a large field of grain, and then share it among the entire village, even those who were too weak or sick to work.

But for most of modern humankind’s existence—all but the last ten-thousand years of our 200,000 to 300,000 years of existence—our chief mode of procuring food was hunting and gathering. Our usual means of obtaining shelter was to make it ourselves from whatever local materials lent themselves best to the task. We made tents and huts and houses out of skins, sticks, logs, rocks, wool, mud, grass, leaves, and bark. Aside from social and familial obligations within one’s band/tribe/family/village, nobody owed anyone else food or shelter. If we offered it to an outsider, it was as an act of kindness, generosity, or perhaps a desire to flaunt one’s wealth. It wasn’t required.

So this is the natural state of things. If you are a mentally capable, able-bodied adult and are free and able to roam your environment to gather food and building materials to make your own house, and you don’t have a house, then that’s your own fault. Go make one. If a storm knocks it down, build another one, maybe in a more protected space this time.

But that doesn’t really describe the situation most homeless people today find themselves in, does it? For most, it’s simply that they can’t afford to rent an apartment. Afford? Where did “afford” ever factor into what I just described above? Money has nothing to do with slapping together mud and sticks. We’ve been doing that since before money was invented. So why should a lack of money keep someone from being sheltered?

There are a couple of things going on, but they’re all part of one system. The first thing that’s happening is that some people—people with armies protecting their interests by force—claim the land and its resources as their own private property. Even if they claim more than they have any personal need for, the system of laws that they set up among themselves says that all the land is property, and that nobody else is entitled to use of someone else’s property. Some of this property is held by the government rather than by private individuals or businesses or other organizations, but even that “public” land is not typically available for all members of the general public to freely gather resources from and live on.

In this system of artificially constructed restrictions, there are people born with no legal right to exist on any spot and no legal right to gather and use any resources but air and sunlight. This is how homelessness was invented.

Humans are clever, though, and these dispossessed people, motivated by the will to live, sometimes find loopholes. Maybe they find public land that the law prevents them from being ejected from, or they find an abandoned house, or the resources of the enforcers are simply spread too thin to be 100% effective in kicking out all squatters and settlers who don’t legally own the land they’re living on. Whatever the case, they sometimes find ways to skirt the law or actually comply with it in a way that the writers of the law never intended. That brings us to the other thing that’s happening.

The other thing that’s happening is that the property owners use the law to create more restrictions to try to curtail the innovative non-landowners who found ways around the property laws. Why do they bother? Is it just pure sadism?

There may be an element of that in some instances, but that’s not the primary motivator. I said above that people will claim more land than they can personally use. They often do this at great expense to themselves. Why? Because land is a finite resource, and once it’s all claimed, the people who don’t have any can be made to pay for permission to exist on any particular spot of owned land. We call this “rent.” Whereas 30,000 years ago, if you, a stranger, built your house closer to mine than I liked, my choices were to leave, risk my life trying to chase you off, or just learn to live with it, under our system today, if you want to live next to me on land that I legally own, I can say that you owe me money every month if you don’t want the police to remove you. We call this “being a landlord.”

If you own enough land, you can collect enough rents from enough people who just want to exist without being threatened with removal that you can live entirely off the money you collect. You won’t have to work anymore. In fact, you can become lavishly wealthy and live like a king. People tend to like living like kings, and once they’ve had a taste of it, they don’t want to go back to scraping in the dirt for roots and grubs to eat. So they set up laws to try to force all non-landowners to participate in this system of paying rent.

How are the landless people to pay, though? Where do they get the money? They have no land to rent out to others, so they must sell their labor. If they wish to be allowed to exist in a spot, they have no choice but to sell their labor. And because they aren’t allowed to hunt and gather food, and no land on which to grow it, they must buy their food, which also requires them to sell their labor. Every resource a person might want other than air and sunshine, he must pay for by selling his labor. In this way, the property owners force the landless people to work so that the property owners don’t have to. It’s a complex form of slavery that inserts just enough steps between the exploited and the beneficiaries to give the illusion that it’s all voluntary. But, of course, it’s not voluntary any more than handing over your wallet to a robber who says, “Your money or your life!” can be said to be an act of charity. “Obey your boss or die” whether by hanging or by hypothermia or starvation, is slavery no matter how you slice it, and I think that it’s high time that we stop kidding ourselves that it’s not.

If you capture a wild animal and put it in a cage so that it is not free to wander the land and gather food for itself, whose responsibility is it to provide it with food? Can the animal be said to be responsible for providing its own food when you’ve deprived it of the freedom to do so? No, if you stick it in a cage, you must feed it. You’ve assumed responsibility for providing for the animal by taking away its ability to provide for itself.

Now, what if you put a wheel in that cage for the animal to run on? Say the wheel turns a little generator to produce electricity, and you sell the electricity. If you pay the animal in morsels of food in exchange for so many turns of the wheel, have you truly restored the animal’s freedom to provide for itself, or have you simply enslaved it, so that its only options are to work for you or to starve itself to death?

When landless people have no income, and we pretend to be charitable by providing them work to do for us in exchange for the right to be present, and to eat food that we make them buy from us, have we actually given them something, or are we just enslaving them?

“But that’s not slavery! If they don’t want to work for me, they can just go…work…for someone else.” A slave is a slave. Their slavery doesn’t end just because ownership of them transfers from one master to another.

Let’s talk about the alternative. I’ve said that our current economic system turns the landless into slaves. What would it mean for those slaves to be freed?

Well, we could decide to divvy up all the public and abandoned land and distribute it to the landless people. But then new people would be born, and when parents kick their kids out of the nest, they’d be creating new landless people within a generation. Now, maybe, if we had a government that made a priority of scooping up abandoned properties to assign them to new landless people, and if we put a cap on how much land one person could own so that more could be freed up for redistribution, maybe that could work. I haven’t run the numbers to know whether it possibly could.

But another approach would be to simply undo the restrictions that make the enslavement possible. Make it illegal to charge rent, for example. It’s that simple. Suddenly, there would be no advantage to be had by hoarding more properties than you could use yourself. Maybe you have other uses, like housing your friends, and that would be okay. But as soon as you demand something more than prestige and goodwill in return—like labor, if you’re housing your employees—you’d be in violation of the prohibition against collecting rent. By removing most of the financial incentive to own surplus properties, people would shrink their real estate holdings to avoid the taxes and maintenance costs. Why pay for a house you don’t need and can’t use to make money? People would be giving them away just to get rid of the responsibility of having them. Real estate investment corporations would vanish, and housing prices would crash overnight. I expect you could probably get a little house in a poor neighborhood for about the price of a car.

Short of that, at least remove all the other restrictions to people supporting themselves. Let them start businesses without licenses and permits. Let them build whatever kind of shelter they want to live in without requiring adherence to codes. Let them grow food, even if that food grunts or squawks. Let them grow it to eat or to sell. Stop criminalizing self-sufficiency. That’s what it would look like to end this form of slavery.

But we haven’t done that, and we aren’t doing that, and we aren’t likely to do that anytime in the predictable future, because we don’t want to threaten our property values. Instead, we’re choosing to keep enforcing this system of slavery that requires the non-compliant—voluntarily or not—to be homeless. We effectively put people in a cage and tell them to run on the wheel if they want to eat. When you put an animal in a cage, whose responsibility is it to feed that animal and provide it the other resources it needs? You’ve taken away its ability to provide for itself, so you’re now the provider, like it or not.

So, yes, I would say that landowners who want to keep claiming their right of ownership have inherited, along with their property rights, the responsibility of providing—at a minimum—food, housing, water, and heat to all non-landowning citizens within their jurisdiction. Probably the way to do that with the least fuss is to simply use property tax revenue to fund public housing and food distribution programs. If we wish to acknowledge the injustice of the situation and ameliorate it, we could make access to public food and housing an inherent right of all non-landowning citizens, without tying it to any work requirement. A caged animal is no less deserving of food because it refuses to run on the wheel. If you want to make it responsible for feeding itself, let it out of the damned cage. If you want to maintain the system that creates the cage, this is the price of it.

If you don’t want public housing blighting your community, and you don’t want to put the landlords out of business, then the tax money collected could simply be distributed out to the landless as a guaranteed basic income. But even there, we’d have to put some kind of price controls in effect to prevent increases in rent and food prices from outpacing the landless people’s ability to pay for it. It might be more effective to issue non-monetary vouchers entitling the bearer to one month’s rent, ten pounds of rice, etc., with the vendor then turning to the government for compensation, and the government taxing landowners to make up any deficit. Under such a system, if the landowners start feeling sufficiently pinched, as long as some constitutional protections were in place to prevent the landowners from simply doing away with the landless people’s right to sustenance, the landowners may find themselves entertaining the idea that it’s simply cheaper to share the land, or to turn more landless people into landowners so that government spending is less and the tax burden is more widely shared.