Holland's capital already has a special hit squad of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders for a compulsory six month course in how to behave.It starts as "Hey, let's pay for other people to have the things we want them to have." It ends up as, "Hey, those jerks are costing us a fortune by being irresponsible, and saddling us with costs arising from their bad behavior!" So the solution has to be control of their behavior: and control at a level you couldn't employ against someone you respected.
Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction and homelessness.
Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behaviour every year. He complained that long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out....
The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed "scum villages" because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.
"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together."
Whilst denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum", a spokesman for the city mayor stressed... "This is supposed to be a deterrent[.]"
Thus, a movement that began out of a respect for the dignity of humanity turns those same humans into "scum." It will happen here too.
It starts as "Hey, let's pay for other people to have the things we want them to have." It ends up as, "Hey, those jerks are costing us a fortune by being irresponsible, and saddling us with costs arising from their bad behavior!" So the solution has to be control of their behavior....
ReplyDeleteAn orrery of epicycles flowing from a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem being worked. Much like the orreries built on Ptolemy's misunderstanding.
Eric Hines
Has anyone else observed the great frequency with which socialist thinkers and social policy developers get cause and effect reversed? "Middle-class people work hard and live quiet lives, so if we give middle-class housing and resources to everyone, all will work hard and live quiet lives."
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
I think InstaPundit has brought that up a time or two.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with taking on people's problems is that those problems then become everyone's problem.
Hmmmm...White people's problems.
ReplyDeleteI saw the term on kick-starter, uttered by somebody whose project had been wildly successful, and now they had to like, organize their work and deal with accountants and paying taxes and stuff.
Heh.
We already have villages for antisocial scum on the dole. We call them prisons.
ReplyDeleteThis business of taking revenge on people who cost us a fortune (when we benevolently give them the stuff we think they have an inborn right to) reminds me of the healthcare dilemma.
"long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out..."
ReplyDeleteYup. That shows that decent people value freedom and responsibility, even if they're poor. Pity they have to be screwed by their own government.