You get what you pay for

The tweeter seems to assume that lack of money is the reason most people are homeless. My experience leads me to believe that is not the case.

Although I don’t know what Jeff Bezos’ politics are, this is why I find it so funny when the progressive uber-rich argue for higher tax rates: if they feel that poverty (or whatever issue) is such a problem, they themselves can have a major impact on it without forcing others to do the same.

Even assuming no one became homeless to get the $100,000, Bezos would run out of money in a little over two years. Given that most chronic homelessness is due to mental illness or addiction, my guess is that most of those people would be back on the street in the third year.

As luck would have it, there was actually a documentary on Showtime about a homeless man receiving $100,000. He blew through most of it within six months.

Scott writes,

PS. What if the money were spent lobbying for weaker zoning laws?

I would rather see the money put towards ending the NRA’s reign of terror against reasonable gun regulations. This being said, last night’s take down of Senator Rubio gives me hope.

Also how much does Bezos consume?

Divide that up among the homeless and what do you get?

Besides the incentive issues, the fact is he does not possess $120 billion. I swear, people think rich people have all their net worth in a vault and they roll around in it like Scrooge McDuck.

According to Yahoo Finance has ~79 million shares of AMZN stock worth that much. If he were to sell that to fund the homeless, it would obviously crash the price. Same if he gave each homeless those shares and they in turn sold it.

@Mark,
Personally, the characterization of opposition to more gun regulation as a “reign of terror” and the tendency, shown last night, to morally equate not imposing rules that probably wouldn’t have prevented the killing of 17 people to murdering 17 people fills me with dread, both for declining capacity to view one’s opponents as anything but enemies, and the unwillingness to use logic and evidence instead of emotion to craft public policy. I don’t know how the event last night could be characterized as reasonable.
Well said.

Alex. You list a series of events which killed a total of 133 people. The total number of known murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 2017 was 17,250. Do you find it puzzling that some people regard the attempt to use dramatic events that represent less than one percent of all killings as using emotion to craft public policy?

The total number is large, but the rate per capita is about half what it was in 1990. So your implication that the problem is increasing (“At what point do you change your mind? When this happens every day? Every hour? Every 15 minutes? Every second?”) is the opposite of the actual pattern, if what you are concerned with is homicide not dramatic events.

Further, your comment makes it sound as though it is obvious how to prevent school shootings. If they have become more common–I don’t know if they actually have–the reason is not an increased availability of firearms. One proposed solution is to encourage teachers to be armed. If you reject that, as I suspect you would, does that mean you are blind to evidence? If not, why does the refusal of other people to accept whatever your solution is imply that they are?

I think lobbying for a carbon tax with a progressive consumption tax to make it not regressive is a higher priority.

David and Mark,

I don’t know why you mix “standard” homicides and manslaughters with mass shootings. These two are of a different kind. Mass shootings are going up, not down. I don’t know why, maybe its social media. I don’t oppose armed teachers, in fact I think this could be a reasonable idea. These shootings generally take place in gun free zones. I do have a problem with the easy availability of warfare weapons that can fire 50 bullets per minute and have a range of 500 meters.

Alex,

I personally don’t think getting killed alone is any better than getting killed with a bunch of other people, so I care more about homicide in general than particular subcategories of homicide; especially since this specific subcategory is a minute fraction of homicides overall, similar to terrorist attacks in that respect.

And I think fully automatic weapons are already heavily regulated. They are also a negligible factor in mass-shootings, the vast majority of which (including most of the most deadly ones) are carried out with semi-automatic pistols.

“You get what you pay for” would be a more effective way to teach “incentives matter.”

Gun control entails a lot more than say balancing the rights of gun owners with public safety. First, you have to ask how much does gun ownership improve public safety.

Next, what level of utility do gun owners derive from certain guns.

Other questions to ask what are the financial costs to gun control? What about the police resource question (you’ll need to enforce these regulations). What about the efficacy (likely an inverse relationship between efficacy and cost, which means the more the gun control regulations are effective, the mor ethey will cost, which means other crime may go up offsetting any public safety benefit?

Yet more questions to ponder is do we want to jail people for certain gun ownership or failure to document certain gun transactions? Whenever you think…there ought to be a law, remember that laws are enforced by people with guns. Take Eric Garner as an example. I don’t think anyone thought a law against selling loose ciggaretes would ever result in a death penalty, but it did in fact.

Does regulating guns create a strong black market, and the concomiitant violence associated with black markets?

Does 3D printing make this all moot?

I think gun control — for the above questions — is incredibly complex and a doubtful enterprise that may substantially make society worse off

At what point do you change your mind? When this happens every day? Every hour? Every 15 minutes? Every second? Who is the unreasonable? When facts change I change my mind, what do you do sir?

Quite frankly, yes. Also, what facts have changed?

My safety has been improved by the existence of hand guns. Construction sites used to have a large percentage of functioning alcoholics and drug addicts, often with criminal records. Some of them were dangerous to some degree. It was well known at the time that you did not follow people back to their truck during an argument due to some of them having weapons in them. 100+ degree heat index days, hard jobs, and people with poor people skills (to put it mildly) led to some quite loud arguments and occasional fights. But even people with a history of violence did not chase people to their vehicles. Though I never carried, those that did created a situation in which there was a line that aggressors wouldn’t cross. There were no shootings that I heard of, but quite a number of aborted discussions.

Eventually insurance rates forced drug testing and background checks on employers which made job sites somewhat safer at the expense of less capability to man jobs. I wonder how many skilled craftsmen with ‘a problem’ are working under their capabilities with day labor firms because they can’t pass the checks we have to do now.