Professor: Homeless Populations Exist Because Power Is Concentrated Among the Rich

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Fort Lauderdale has garnered some national headlines -- we made the New York Times today -- with the recent anti-homeless laws that the City Commission enacted that basically serve as an attempt to remove the undesirables from downtown.

But there is no way to deal with the homeless problem without first dealing with the problem of concentrated power. The problem with poverty is that it is inversely related to concentrated wealth.

You cannot produce sizable working poor and homeless people unless you tolerate an arrogant rich minority to live with entirely too much power at everyone else's expense. The homeless population is predicated on the power of the few being enhanced over the many. And it is in fact the majority of the working population, along with the homeless population, that exists to support this class.

So, to have the city hyperobsessing over homelessness rather than dealing with the arrogant minority as the cause is absurd but also common in a political system in which the majority has almost no control over the political system in any meaningful way.

The bottom line is that we have a superrich political and economic class, and that will always produce homelessness.

There is no fix to it other than social services that are legit and well-funded and not the kind that rely on private charity. I'm talking about funding that provides homes, medicine to those with mental illness, and ample high-paying jobs for those who need them.

The estimates on mental illness and homeless veterans are staggeringly high. But since the choice is between having a political program that allows the entitled posh minority to maintain ridiculous levels of power over everyone else and dealing with the homeless in a real way, the political class chooses to support what James Madison referred to as the "minority of the opulent" and to try to go with an aggressive and draconian plan to go after the weakest and most disorganized people they can find, because they do not have the political capacity to attack anything with meaning and power.

So they cannot create a sane income floor power for the limited parts of the homeless population that would enter the labor markets on terms that are sane, humane, and provide decent and quality work for decent pay, and they cannot deal with the mentally ill because the state infrastructure does not seem to have the capacity to keep people with reasonable shelter and medicine.

And since they cannot improve the standard of living for the many, the homeless are simply the bottom floor of an already completely stressed working class that has worked each year to allow massive concentrations of power to expand even more. This is why the stock market is at an all-time high and the labor situation is at a 62 percent participation rate, with much of that being mostly low-wage service employment.