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All those other professions have preventative value. It is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters - the incentives are rightly aligned to make it
by lr4444lr 3y ago
All those other professions have preventative value. It is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters - the incentives are rightly aligned to make it temporary to keep down costs. Involving private outfits as contractors, just as with private prisons, skews the incentives terribly. (I also have nothing against private healthcare, security, or fire houses as a luxury spend for those who want it.)
- jxramos 3y agoThis is an interesting concept I’d like to hear more of with this so called preventative value. Is this to say in their absence bigger troubles would show up so having their services prevents worse outcomes from sneaking up on us or something?
- lr4444lr 3y agoMore or less. Otherwise you can get easily stuck arguing that any profession that fixes problems is untrustable for fabricating problems. E.g., doctors deliberately give us bad advice to keep us sick or overdiagnose so that they have more patients. (Okay, maybe chiropractors do this - hah!) But I think it's fairly safe to argue that employees of a system like nurses or cops - who are payed a salary regardless of how many "customers" they go through - are very different than the owners of private hospitals, prisons, or shelter operators whose profit incentives are directly aligned with funneling more people into the system, not at preventing or fixing anything.