Let’s take a break from depressing posts about Obama’s fixation on class-warfare tax policy and the failure of Washington to enact genuine entitlement reform.
It’s time for another edition of “You Be the Judge.” I periodically come across stories that cause me internal conflict. Often my heart gives one answer and my head disagrees. Or I’m genuinely unsure of the right approach.
Previous editions of the game include:
- Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
- Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
- Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
- Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
- When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
- Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
- Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
- What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
- Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
- Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
- Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
- Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
- Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
Lots of fun stories, as you can see.
Our latest example is about the Dutch are dealing with the “scum” of society. Here’s some of the story from the UK-based Telegraph.
A potential name for the new Dutch community?
Hollands’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. 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. “This is the world turned upside down,” the mayor said at the weekend. …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.” …The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam’s famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behaviour that falls short of criminality. There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.
Part of me thinks this is a good approach. Not the part about expensive social workers, to be sure, but I’m sympathetic to the notion that there are “bad apples” that cause trouble and can ruin neighborhoods.
Why not put them all together and let them stew in their own juices?
On the other hand, this soft version of prison seems inappropriate if people haven’t been convicted of a crime. Surely the government could trump up some sort of charge, and even do it in a semi-legitimate fashion. These sound like the sort of people who could be nailed for all sorts of things, such as disorderly conduct, assault and battery, urinating in public, and so on.
But swinging back in the other direction, it sounds as if the “scum” are inhabitants of public housing. And while I think public housing shouldn’t exist, I have no problem with the government enforcing standards of behavior as a condition of living in one of these Moochervilles. So all that’s really happening is that the riff-raff of society is being shifted from one form of government-provided housing to another.
What do you think?
P.S. The Netherlands is a typical European welfare state in many ways, but it has a good school choice system and a very competitive corporate tax system (as shown in the second video in this post). But those few good policies won’t be enough since the nation’s long-run fiscal outlook is as bad as Greece and worse than Spain and Italy. And if the burden of government spending gets too high, it swamps any good policies in other areas.
Stewing in their own juice sounds right, but is unworkable as society demands the establishment does something about them. You have to decide whether society is to take a position and protect society from them – or not.
If the answer is “no”, society should not incur the costs etc associated with these people, then firstly you cannot complain and secondly mayhem will eventually reign. So, society really has no choice but to react.
What peeves me is that society has to react and incur costs often because parenting has either failed or quite often parents never tried to exercise control. “It’s someone else’s problem”….etc.
And if I hear one more parent say, “he’s a good boy really”, I swear I will scream.
Zero tolerance has it’s critics, and sometimes rightly so. But if we took that sort of approach, whereby we hit them hard and early on for every violation of society’s rules, …,we “might” be able to turn them to be useful and contributing members of society.
Once the Government is permitted to ship off the “bad apples” to some ghetto, the goal posts on what defines a bad apple will most certainly be altered. History tells us that.
Anything beyond this statement in the scope of this discussion is irrelevant.
Isn’t that what “red light” districts are for?
If no laws are broken (of course you can always make new laws and this is the proposed Dutch solution here) then this is primarily collective resistance to neighborhood change. Then you have to deal with deciding which types of neighborhood changes are acceptable and which ones justify collective majoritarian action against the “offending” minority — presumably with new laws. If prostitutes move in you pass ordinances? What if hippies move in? Yuppies? Walmart? People with low rider cars? People with what the majority may consider bad taste?
A familiar theme arises. Does the majority own the neighborhood? Can they dictate the color palette for all houses and citizens to abide by? The general categories of non-offensive clothing to be worn in public?
One partial relief valve going forward could be micro-federalism especially for newly created neighborhoods. Then if someone wants to carve out a neighborhood where women must wear veils, that could become part of the neighborhood charter. People would move in according to the attractiveness of such ordinance — and people could change their preferences at different stages in their lives, as it often happens. Same with all these variations of borderline offensive behavior which the majority apparently wants to suppress. Their prohibition could be enshrined into some sort of neighborhood charter, akin to a neighborhood constitution, with strong super-majority required for change.
Federalism, and here micro-federalism, provides at least a partial improvement.
While the details aren’t clear, the “forced deportation” of undesirables appears to be an administrative rather than a judicial process.
While the first people put on the buses may deserve this treatment, do we really trust the government to be the sole definer of who is an “undesirable”?
A cursory reading of history would suggest that governments tend to expand the definition of undesirables to include a wide swath of society.
Plus the brief article seemed to define a lifestyle rather than specific actions. A requirement of good laws is specificity.
Short answer, yes, but let it be segregation in situ, as by turning the troublemakers’ most cherished institutions upside down.
Troublemakers in N. America be divided against each other.
[...] the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general [...]
[...] the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general [...]
[...] the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general [...]