Soylent pale yellow!
People who have lived in cities all their lives generally have little or no knowledge of farming, whether they’re rich or poor. And then there’s the problem that farming skills aren’t really in demand in the overall economy- less than 1% of the population is employed in agriculture, and median income is less than $10/hour. That’s not that much better than minimum wage. If we’re going to train people to have skills for low-paying jobs, why not train them to be cashiers or something like that- at least there’s more demand for those skills.
You run into the same problem with manufacturing things like furniture and pottery. There’s downward pressure on manufacturing wages from countries like China, where wages are lower. It’s another skill that isn’t much in demand and isn’t going to pay well enough to support a family without assistance. If we’re going to spend money to train poor people to have some skills, we might as well train them in skills that are actually in demand in today’s economy.
Each “welfare community” would be subsidized by the state government (I first came up with this idea when “block grants” were all the rage), with the goal of bringing that number down–or at least holding it steady while the size of the commubity increases.
At bare minimum a member would be entitled to a cot and a bowl of oatmeal, with all sorts of incentives–and again, counseling and community reinforcement–to encorage members to work and learn skills to become more productive and improve their standing.
Especially doctors or accountants. Ditto on farming as a complicated and skilled and vastly underrated job.
Your proposal requires a huge amount of supervision by government folk, who don’t know jack about farming, building, running a factory, etc. With all the counselors, trainers, managers, inventors, etc, etc, it’s going to turn out to be phenomenally expensive. Don’t forget the costs of equipment for the farms, factories, kitchens, etc. Making furniture and making pottery, as well as the farming, are also activities requiring pretty high skill levels as well as artistry – unless you have a designer do the basic designs, and your residents do the grunt work assembly line style.
This sounds uncomfortably like prison camp slave labor…an expensive prison camp.
But it’s great you are looking for solutions. Keep looking and trying new ideas. There are some interesting training programs out there – like Seattle’s Fare Start , which trains homeless men and women to work in the restaurant industry. Useful skills they can take and use in mainstream society.
You make a proposal and in doing so you gracefully admit drawbacks and then brush aside those drawbacks with nothing at all to suport your ideas.
(emphasis added)
Those are the only problems with government programs? How about underfunding? That happens quite a bit.
The 'we simply keep those in mind? That’s your solution? Talk about pie in the sky!
It really sounds to me that your basic premise to get the poor to move away from you.
They require high skill levels but do not lead to well-paying jobs outside the commune. Employers aren’t exactly falling over each other trying to hire out-of-work factory workers or farmers… Are people going to stay in this commune all their lives? Seems to me that’s more of a “culture of dependency” than the welfare system we’ve got.
Horrible idea.
First of all, the majority of homeless people are homeless because they’ve got multiple mental and physical health problems that make it impossible for them to work. To put in plain english, they’re crazy broken down drunks and drug addicts. They can’t even handle a job at McDonalds.
If you really want to help these people, then you need to involuntarily institutionalize them. Job training and actual work can be part of their therapy. And working in the institution itself would be the most effective. Those who can work, even a little bit, can work in the kitchen, janitorial staff, administrative staff, and so forth. Heck, some patients could be very effective on the counselling staff. They’re crazy, not stupid, as the old joke goes.
Of course, this means involuntary institutionalization, because the problem is that most crazy people don’t like being around other crazy people, and who can blame them. Just because you’re a crazy drunk yourself doesn’t mean you appreciate the screamers, the violent, the guys who soil themselves.
Then you’ve got the people who I suppose you imagine this work farm is supposed to help: the lazy bums. Those who prefer living on the streets to working for a living. But if a guy who can loosely be described as mentally normal wants to live on the streets, should we put him in a prison camp? Force them to work, with guards and self-criticism sessions and re-education? We already have jails, why not just criminalize homelessness?
Then we’ve got the under-educated single moms. Their problem is that their kids need to be taken care of, and a minimum wage job means that over 100% of their paycheck goes to daycare. How are these people helped by shipping them off to a labor camp? The kids still need to be taken care of. Are you going to set up camps for the kids too? How is that better than paying the moms a barely-livable stipend to stay at home and take care of the kids themselves? Of course, IMHO the real solution is to organize cooperative daycare among the welfare mothers…they work 4 days a week, and the 5th day they work in the welfare daycare.
There aren’t any unemployed ex-farmers, etc. who might take the job? No charitable or activist organizations to partner with who could provide volunteers with the needed skill sets?
I first came up with this idea back when the rural economy was badly depressed and I figured a lot of this stuff could be cehaply available second hand.
Everyone would be entitled to a free bus ride back to the city.
That’s one of the open questions. Perhaps the aim would be to give members job training while meeting their daily needs before returning them to mainstraim society, or perhaps they would be encoraged to stay on and continue helping to build the community.
In the planning stages. This is still just a scetchy germ of an idea. I can’t anticipate and flesh out each and every wrinkle. This is partly why I started this thread. If the numbers don’t add up, then fine.
What makes you think I don’t want to be the megalomanic who runs the place with an iron hand? 
Most jobs require you to work full time five days, so these women will likely have to work for their job five days, their daycare one day, and get a day off.
Sounds harsh, but I don’t recall my mother having too many days off when I was growing up, and when I was a teenager my brothers and I took over from her the office-cleaning job she held down, to free her up to do other work.
“Poor Chow.” We can use the Elton John song in the promotional material.
The fact of the matter is that our government and our culture, for very good reasons, is loathe to ‘relocate’ as a solution. We tried relocating the native population and that didn’t work out so well. Some people are still bitter about it.
So the idea, that the government is going to take homeless people out of a shelter or off a street corner and move them to the country, is not a pleasant sounding idea to us. We like the idea of freedom and telling people where they have to live and where they will work and what jobs they will do is something that just rubs us the wrong way. The reason it does that is because it is wrong to do such things. It just is.
Now if you wanted to help people move from economically depressed areas to booming areas. Pay for movers, etc., I think that is a far better idea, for the poor, but not the homeless.
But if what we want is people with in-demand job skills, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to just train them in those skills, and forget the whole self-sufficient village thing? Maybe the government could open restaurants or stores whose main purpose was to give these people job-skill training, as I’ve heard some high school vocational education programs do. Or they could give a tax break to proprietors of stores or restaurants to encourage them to hire these people and give them on-the-job training. We could even locate the stores and restaurants in (or give them further tax advantages for locating in) the inner-city areas where the poor people already live. That has the additional advantage of providing services such as grocery stores that are lacking in those areas.
We could run subsidized day-care centers for them, where welfare mothers get on-the-job training in working in a day-care center. Then the kids are taken care of, and the single mothers learn useful job skills and get experience.
A quote from S.M. Stirling’s novel, Conquistador:
No, that’s not the main thrust. It’s that it’s more efficient to meet people’s basic needs of food, clothing, and housing by making them available in bulk in one location, rather than giving them minimal cash to run around a city trying to make ends meet. A lot of middlemen get cut out, for starters. And hopefully the recipients can help support the enterprise to some degree.
And although “It takes a village to raise a bum” is my little joke, I’m serious about applying those sorts of values. Instill a sense of community and have the people support and encourage each other.
No, the kids get sent to the coal mines. :rolleyes:
Seriously, some of the houses would be renovated as day-care facilities and some of these same women would work there. We may never find a real, live farmer, but there’s bound to be plenty of people with child raising experience. And the older kids will go to school like everybody else (while there are still public schools in rural areas, that is).
A quote from S.M. Stirling’s novel, Conquistador:
[Farming is] the only occupation in which specialists with degrees and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment are considered ignorant yokels
YES! Right on! Spot on! (Whatever the current phrase is).
I grew up on a farm; can’t you tell?
My Dad was an inventor, accountant, plumber, electrician, mechanic, accountant, carpenter, labor relations specialist, manager, laborer, trucker, long-range planner, marketer, salesman, forester, and a million other jobs I can’t think of right now. And he was GOOD at all of them. THAT is what a good farmer is – an all-around Renaissance person. Thinking that you can dump an uneducated crew onto a farm and make it work is profoundly insulting to the farmers of the world.
[QUOTE=sqweels]
There aren’t any unemployed ex-farmers, etc. who might take the job? No charitable or activist organizations to partner with who could provide volunteers with the needed skill sets?
So you want to exploit/rip off another body of people?
[QUOTE]
I first came up with this idea back when the rural economy was badly depressed and I figured a lot of this stuff could be cehaply available second hand.
Do you know how much a tractor costs? A combine? A silo? A hay bailer? Egg washing, candling, and grading equipment? Veterinary costs? Feed? Refrigeration?
Even second hand, it will cost a mint, if you aren’t flat out stealing from the poor effing farmer.
And what about insurance? Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations around? Who is liable for injuries that your residents will sustain? Don’t forget the protesters who will inevitably come around your operation. Both people protesting because you are exploiting your residents, and people who will protest that you are mistreating your animals.
I don’t think you can instill those values in someone beyond childhood. A person can learn these values in adulthood, they can pick them up voluntarily, by seeing the fruits of virtue and deeming them worth the effort. That’s what happened to me. Before I was 21, I was no one you would have liked to know. I like to think that I am better now.
My google-fu is sadly weak, but I recall reading a newspaper article on destitute Katrina victims who were moved to a small cluster of homes that was built by a Canadian benefactor. It is currently a flourishing community that is becoming sustainable, but it is composed of people who were ready for a placid life of hard, honest work, and only needed opportunity.
These systems for lifting people out of poverty in a lasting way only work for people who are living in squalor for lack of opportunities to live differently. They don’t work for people who are pathologically antisocial or who voluntarily “drop out” of civil society. There are hundreds of reasons why a person is homeless, and no one program or system could ever address all of them.
What about the people who don’t want to support and encourage each other? What about the guy whose sole purpose in life is to track down the demon-possessed children who are giving him grotesque commands by beaming radio signals straight to his brain, so he can beat them to death with a hammer and grind their skulls into bread flour?
sqweels, I know you’re getting piled on here, and your heart’s in the right place, but it’s just a cumbersome solution to the problem. A simpler solution would be well maintained and well lit shelters, mental health treatment, life-skills training and vocational training. I just don’t see what advantages your system has over that solution. Even then there are going to be some people you just can’t reach.