Homelessness is the single-most powerful indictment of capitalism, the embodiment of human disposability, the ultimate expression of callous cruelty. In this nation where one out of sixteen rental homes is vacant at any given time, one in six hundred Americans (550,000) sleeps outside. An additional 3.7 million people, the so-called “hidden homeless”—one out of ninety of our sons, our daughters, our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, our mothers—are doubled up in other people’s homes because they can’t afford their own place.

            “You look out the window of the White House and see the ragged and pathetic figures huddled over the steam grates of the Ellipse,” President George H.W. Bush told an audience of insurance agents in 1989, calling homelessness “a national shame.” “It’s an affront to the American dream.”

            He was right, of course. He promised to do better. Yet, because not even a president can change an economic system, nothing has improved. Only the Left can fix it.

            Of the many ways America fails its citizens, its failure/refusal to ensure that everyone has somewhere warm and safe to sleep at night is the starkest reflection of what passes for a social compact: Unless you are lucky enough not to be born into poverty, and lucky enough to avoid succumbing to addiction or some other dysfunction, and lucky enough not to suffer a debilitating physical or mental illness, and lucky enough to have the charm and the education and the experience that an employer happens to need, and are lucky enough that the economy is not contracting at that time, and you are lucky enough to find a needy employer at the exact moment he happens to need someone exactly like you, sooner rather than later you may find yourself sleeping on the street or a subway platform or on a park bench or a steam grate across the street from the White House.

            Such a society cannot credibly claim to believe that every life is precious. It cannot criticize the way other societies handle their affairs. It has zero moral standing whatsoever.

            Chronic homelessness creates problems that impact housed people as well. Responding to calls about public drinking and trespassing diverts the police from dealing with serious crimes. Areas with a high homeless population suffer significantly reduced property values, which lowers assessments and hurts municipal budgets. Because homelessness is associated with chronic health conditions, mental illness and substance abuse disorders, homeless peoples’ frequent visits to emergency rooms—where they account for a third of all patients—cost hospitals an average of $18,500 per year per person, unreimbursed since they are uninsured. Those expenses are passed on to the rest of us. Mentally-ill people are 35 times more likely to commit a crime if they are homeless, compared to the mentally-ill domiciled; they are also much more likely to become victims.

            Homelessness is expensive. National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that one chronically homeless American costs the taxpayer an average of $35,000 per year. That comes to about $20 billion for the Americans now living outside.

            Catching a glimpse of a misérable attempting to shelter outdoors also has an insidious downward effect on wages and living standards for we, the housed. It reminds you: this could happen to you. Better, then, not to risk asking for a raise.

            Cynical Marxists have suggested that this may be a feature, rather than a bug, of the current system. Fear of falling is a powerful motivating force.

            The answer to the present state of homelessness is “re-housing.” We give homes—not shelters—to the people who need them. If they don’t have money for rent, give them stipends. Most cities keep doing what doesn’t work: dangerous shelters that are only open overnight, no path to housing, people are denied shelter for drinking, using drugs or acting out.

            This is exactly wrong.

            Real homes, not shelters, help people get off drugs and alcohol because people abuse substances to numb the misery of their situation. As it happens we have plenty of real homes sitting empty: 15 million homes are vacant. 550,000 of them, beginning with abandoned units and those that have remained without a tenant for a long time, should be seized under eminent domain.

            Rapid rehousing can and should be mandatory; no one should be allowed the “freedom” to succumb to the elements. Rehousing should be done free of traditional preconditions like employment, income, absence of criminal record or sobriety. Each person’s individual needs, whether they be addressed by physical rehabilitation, job or language training, psychological therapy or other services, should be carried out by a team of social workers and other experts. Housing first, The New York Times reported in 2022, rests on a reality-based approach: “When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.”

Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, moved 25,000 people directly into apartments and houses between 2011 and 2022, reducing its homeless population by 63%. Denver, another housing-first city, saw arrests of homeless people drop 95% and dependence on government cash-benefit programs fall by 80% after housing-first took hold.

            According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “supportive housing” costs an average of $12,800 per person per year. That comes to $7 billion for the outdoor homeless population, or $55 billion if you also include the “hidden homeless.”

            The higher figure is 1.2% of the $4.5 trillion a year the U.S. is currently wasting on wars and other garbage. And after you subtract the $20 billion a year we’re currently spending on policing and hospitalization, it’s 0.8%.

Next: How to guarantee everyone the right to free, high-quality healthcare.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

            Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left’s struggle to eliminate economic insecurity.

            We must also fight for workers’ rights on the job as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed countries; we are tied with Botswana, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan. Our safety net also comes in dead last.

            For as long as anyone can remember, the balance of power between labor and management has been radically tilted in favor of capital. While nine out of ten workers are not organized, employers not only form cartels to set prices for labor, they enjoy outsized influence in Washington and state capitals through campaign contributions to politicians.

            Globalization has exacerbated this imbalance; an apparel company like Nike may manufacture goods in low-wage, anti-union countries like Vietnam or Indonesia and ship them to high-income/high-price markets like Europe or the United States on container ships whose expenses are subsidized by taxpayers of the latter. As much as an ambitious worker might be willing to abandon her family and native culture to move to a higher-wage place like Norway or Qatar, however, it is nearly impossible to obtain the necessary working permits, much less citizenship. Capital is fluid; labor is stationary.

            The Left seeks to level the playing field between labor and management.

            U.S. labor laws are “at will,” meaning that you can be fired for any reason other than discrimination because of your race, sex, sexual orientation or other legally-protected class. At-will is a license for companies to overhire during booms and impose mass layoffs when the economy cools down, as we saw tech companies do after the COVID-19 pandemic. It enables bosses to vote themselves a raise at the same time they let workers go, many of whom disrupted their lives to take those jobs, lost other opportunities, and who have no responsibility for poor management decisions.

            At-will must go. An employer who wants to get rid of an employee should have to prove to the Department of Labor either that the move is required due to the company’s finances—and then only after upper management have absorbed pay cuts and stockholders lose their dividends—or that he did something wrong, in which case he should be entitled to a hearing before an impartial court system established to litigate labor-management disputes before a jury.

            Workers’ power relies first and foremost on the right and ability to withhold labor after contract negotiations break down. Therefore, every American worker in an enterprise with ten or more employees ought to be legally guaranteed the right to join a union—even if they are the only member of their company’s workforce who wants to sign a union card. Existing laws prohibiting employer retaliation against union organizers and members, which are weak and rarely enforced, must be strengthened to the point where it is nearly impossible to fire someone for standing up for higher wages and working conditions. Needless to say, state “right to work“ laws that allow workers in union shops to withhold union dues while receiving negotiated benefits, should be eliminated.

            Laws like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which ban solidarity strikes and strikes by the military and other public-sector workers and have been expanded by courts and presidential executive orders to include “essential” workers like coal miners and rail workers, go far beyond regulations in other developed nations and must be abolished. If workers are truly essential to the functioning of the nation, like firefighters and postal workers, they should be remunerated accordingly. In the case of exceptional categories of workers deemed essential in matters of life and death, which should be highly limited, the loss of the right to strike should be compensated by guaranteed raises pegged to the inflation rate.

            U.S. workers are divided into arbitrary classifications designed to allow corporations to treat them like dirt. I work at least 40 hours a week as a cartoonist and columnist yet my syndicate misclassifies me as an “independent contractor.” Same for Uber and Lyft drivers, though there’s nothing independent about a job which specifies everything about your tasks down to the model of car you must drive, though you pay for it yourself.

            The system is random and arbitrary. When I lost my W-2 job as a syndicate executive, I qualified for unemployment even though I had only worked half-weeks. If my syndicate cans me as a cartoonist and writer, I do not.

            For the Left, all work is work, all work has value and all workers must be protected. The “independent contractor” loophole should be closed. A 20-hour-a-week job should come with at least half medical benefits. A third of U.S. citizens are self-employed; they should qualify for unemployment benefits when work dries up, just like people who work for other people.

            And work will dry up. Because boom-and-bust cycles are intrinsic to capitalism, until the Revolution comes the Left should agitate for a safety net that reflects this reality. Jobless benefits should be far more generous than they are now. They should expire when you find a new job, not after the six-month limit set by most state legislatures. By way of comparison, countries like Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain provide up to 24 months of unemployment payments. Iceland gives 30.

            As we’ve seen with robotics and are seeing with artificial intelligence, disruptive technologies destroy entire lines of business at once, rendering hard-earned education and experience worthless overnight. The heartland has plunged into despair and drug addiction after decades of deindustrialization fueled by pro-globalization policies. Surely we could use the lost productivity of these millions of fellow citizens who have filed for federal disability checks because they have no hope of ever being gainfully employed! Those who are willing to take classes to be retrained for positions that will be needed in the near future must currently bear all or most of the cost themselves. Retraining programs should be gratis, and the government should pay them a living stipend so people can focus on their studies.

            The ultimate manifestation of economic insecurity, the abject poverty that leads to homelessness, hunger and death, ought to be impossible in this wealthiest of all countries in history. Even if they “want” to do so, the Left should not allow people to sleep outside, for the freedom to die in the cold is no freedom whatsoever.

            Next: How to abolish homelessness.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)