While walking to the store today, I passed a woman in the throes of some kind of episode. Maybe it was a mental health thing. Maybe it was drugs. Regardless, she was screaming, and as we met on the narrow sidewalk she pointed her madness directly at me. "You're a thief!" she screamed, getting in my face. "You're not homeless! You have a house! That's stealing!"
With no ready response to that, I just kept walking, listening to her ongoing rant fade as we went our separate ways. The encounter left me a bit shaken. My first instinct was to be angry with her for breaking my day's peace. Yet thinking about it more left me feeling less angry than frustrated. If that lady was indeed homeless and losing her shit, yelling at random strangers probably wouldn't improve her situation, but what better options did she have?
Having been homeless before, I know how challenging it can be to see a good way forward. I also know mental health support services in Minneapolis can be difficult to access and impossible to navigate, particularly in moments of acute crisis. Philosophically, the idea of property-as-theft was popularized by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's anarchism in 1840. So today, I can see how the notion of housing-as-theft might organically arise in the mind of a homeless person. Such notions are symptoms of systemic problems. The woman I met was an in-your-face symptom of society's profound failure.
Living in a somewhat violent American city where syringes are commonplace litter and people sometimes overdose in the coffee shop bathroom, I've to some extent become inured to the profound human desperation that only seems to grow with every passing year. With shaky health and an income below the poverty line, I'm never too far from this degree of desperation myself. This likely contributes to my belief that everybody should have enough to live, full stop. The mentally ill lady who yelled at me should have a safe place to sleep. The addict nodding off at the coffee shop should have access to healthy food. Everyone should have good medical care.
I don't think a bunch of additional little bureaucratic programs will get us there. Neither will nonprofits attempting to fill in the many gaps left by bureaucratic missteps. What would move us towards a better world is a collective decision to stop manufacturing poverty and desperation. And what would actually get us to that better world is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) funded by a 5% wealth tax.
Looking around, I don't see a society capable of making such a collective decision. I see boomers taking selfishness to new extremes. I see millennials barely getting by. I see young people championing superficial causes while deep rot erodes our core. If collective decisions are music, what we're left with is nothing but noise. Noise that manufactures desperation.
A UBI wouldn't solve all of our problems. But it would sure put a dent in them. If the homeless had enough money for housing, there would be far less homelessness. If addicts could afford medical care, more would probably choose to get healthy. If people could just bum around all day not doing anything without fear of financial destitution, few would work horrible jobs for poverty wages, and unethical companies would fold left and right. And if accumulated wealth was taxed, the unaccountable rich would at least be contributing something meaningful to the society that politically underwrites their prosperity.