This is Richard Wolff, from Democracy at Work, responding to another “Ask Prof Wolff”
question from our Patreon community. And this one comes from Colorado Wookie.
And Colorado Wookie writes about homeless people living in tents, in this case,
in Denver, Colorado, where the city is apparently boasting that it is creating
safe spaces for the tents where homeless people are being confined.
Wow. You know it takes my breath away to read about yet another reform that some city official,
some state official, has come up with. Because for me, it has always been an ugly display of being
unwilling to face what has to be done, to do it in a proper way, and let's get on with our lives
and with a decent society. But no, the unspoken taboo of all of these reformers seems to be,
if they were honest enough to say so, we will not tax corporations,
we will not tax the rich, and therefore, we don't have the money to solve the problems of a society
that does not tax corporations and the rich anywhere near what they could and should pay.
Look, housing is a measure of the adequacy of an economic system.
Either you give people basic food, clothing, and shelter – housing is a kind of shelter – or you
don't. Either your system successfully provides that to its people, or it doesn't. And if,
and when, it doesn't, it's failing to perform the most basic of tasks. In the United States today,
both in Denver and in virtually every other city, particularly larger cities in our country,
we have tens or hundreds of thousands of homeless people. We know statistically
that nearly half of them are children. We know that living in a shelter, that is, a tent,
or out in the open, is dangerous for your physical and mental health,
your physical and mental safety, the education and lives of your children, and on and on.
We know exactly what the problem is, and we know how to solve it: build quality housing. Either
raise people's income so they can afford to buy housing, or lower the price of the housing so
with their existing income they can afford to buy the housing. No rocket science needed here.
So just do it. Make sure they have the jobs and/or make sure the cost of housing is lower.
And if you don't do that, be honest enough to admit that you're not willing to disturb the
super-rich, the people, for example, those 700 billionaires we sustain in our country.
Cut their billions in half, you'd have more than enough money to solve housing overnight,
and those people would still, after that, be the richest 700 people in the country. Wow.
You're not willing to do any of that. You're not even courageous enough to talk about it, other
than occasionally, in vague generalities, about doing more to make our tax system fairer. Wow.
Why don't you really do something? Why don't you show some real
courage? You know, we've had little hints about what the problem is and what the solution is,
if we just admit it. After World War II, when millions of Americans were being demobilized,
taking off their military uniforms, putting on their civilian clothes, and looking for a job,
and looking for a job that would allow them to afford a home, suddenly,
here in the United States, we began building public housing. Oh, goodness!
What was the logic there? Well, here's the logic, because it's all about capitalism.
If you require a profit when you build a home and rent out apartments, you're going to charge more
for the apartment's rent than if you didn't have to make a profit, and the government doesn't have
to in capitalism, just private enterprises live and die from profit. So, the government stepped
in. It built and ran the housing. So far, so good. People could afford housing. We didn't have the
homelessness problem in the 1940s and 1950s that we have now. That's the opposite of progress.
But the problem turned out to be that the private housing interests, the real estate big businesses,
they didn't like the government doing that. That was a competitor. People began to think, “Gee,
maybe we should have all public housing.” You know, like exists in Vienna, Austria,
an otherwise capitalist country that puts half of the housing in its capital city
into a public housing program with limits on how much rent a landlord can charge.
Sure, we know the answer. Leaving housing in the hands of capitalists makes it a profit-driven
business. And for those who live off profit, having a few million people homeless, who cares?
As long as those left, who can afford it, will pay the prices needed to generate your profits.
That's right, the conclusion is where you've already understood it. Capitalism is
not an effective way of providing decent housing to the totality of your population.
If you want to solve the housing problem in Denver, or anywhere else, you've got a problem
with the system, the profit-driven system, that allows a very small minority – employers – to
hold all the rest of us hostage to the profits they have to make, or else they won't build what
we need, they won't provide what the country wants. It's a strange system, made stranger
by the willingness of so many to accept it, to tolerate it, to resign themselves to it.
If analyses like these strike you as important parts of what the national conversation – in
this case, about housing – ought to be, then let us ask you to partner with us. Get these
videos out there. Share them. Find places to show them. Work with us to change the conversation so
we change the actual outcome of the lives we're leading. Be our partner. If you can,
support us. Our website will tell you how: www.democracyatwork.info. Very simple.
Thank you for your attention.