joanna wrote:
>
>
> Similar to the other 'terror' tactic: keeping the beggars on the streets
> and in plain sight of everyone, when it would take next to nothing to
> feed them and house them.
This is I think a pretty accurate account of the 'objective" results of treatment of the homeless in the u.s. But as with many of the horrors of capitalism, including many of those horrors which seem most deliberate, I suspect that they (for the most part) not the result of deliberate planning. One of the primary differences between capitalism and all other social systems of the past is how many of its results (whether desirable or undesirable) come from either sheer incompetence (grounded in the famous "anarchy of production") or from the 'unintended' results of that same anarchy of production. I place 'unintended' in scare quotes because the the agents who indirectly bring those results about probably suffer no pangs of conscience, and wouldn't have bothered to avoid them even if they could have.
Carrol