“Make it nicer and we'll come back.” Oh boy, there’s so much wrong in that attitude! Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized

“Make it nicer and we'll come back.” Oh boy, there’s so much wrong in that attitude! Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment. Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned. Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.