this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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I don't think housing should be considered a human right, unless being homeless is made illegal. But, being homeless is practically illegal everywhere, so here we are, agreeing with one another.
I try to think to myself - at what point do we call for things to be considered human rights? At what point in human history did we start considering clean water to be a human right? -- Generally once we had massive cheap, clean, unfettered access to it, right?
Companies and corporations, want their workers healthy, housed, disease free, etc. So -- if they want those things, they should be considered 'rights' and we should collect taxes on making sure those rights are distributed, shouldn't we?
Why not?
I edited my reply to expound upon my thoughts. But mostly it comes down to -- because houses require vast resources to build. You need people in the steel industry, wood/lumber industries, a set of housing standards, architects, etc.
Unless these things become so cheap that they're basically costless, ensuring a house for everyone free of charge is a monumentally burdensome task.
Something shouldn't have to be free to be a human right. That's an extremely right-wing American point of view, where they only believe in so-called "negative" rights.
A right to housing wouldn't mean builders and their suppliers have to work for free. That's the same kind of nonsense reasoning libertarians and conservatives use to argue against free healthcare.
A right to housing would impose an obligation on governments to do everything they can to ensure housing is readily available to anyone who wants it. Whether by ensuring that everyone can afford housing (economic policies that lower the cost of housing and/or put more money on people's pockets) or by directly ensuring the government itself can give people a place to live if they can't afford it. Ideally a mix of both.
What you described there is not what a human right consists of. Sure, governments should do exactly what you say, but something considered a 'human right' has much higher standards. It MUST be met. It's not an optional strive-to-do-our-best situation.
I mean healthcare is definitely a human right, but there is always more we could be doing. That's a kind of arbitrary distinction that I don't think adds anything to the discussion here.
Basic human needs are basic human rights. I really do think it's as simple as that.
Healthcare is not a human right. It's a societal right granted to you by those around you.
Deep in that American politique, eh?
It's called philosophy. You should try it sometime. Understanding the worlds truths at a deeper level allows you to more precisely consolidate them into a unified opinion of things. Helps to be concise and rigorously authentic to their principles.
I'm not sure blasting adhoc justifications for what you feel is really philosophy, but if that's what we're doing... My mistake. Philosophy then. So tell me, Socrates, what is a human right?
Umm, no. That's just not correct. A human right is anything a human should have the right to. End of.
The practicalities of how we achieve that are a separate concern.
In that case, you have no rights at all. Not even to speech, or the right not to be killed. "Rights" are invented by the society we live in. You have literally none in the natural world. As it exists, "Rights" are a religious idea. (Hence, "God-given rights")
The practicalities are of the utmost concern, because those practicalities are governed by the society which recognizes them as rights. As of now, there is no "human right to shelter".
Wrong
Wrong
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Lol what? Where did you even get that idea?
Govt. does its best to ensure citizens aren’t murdered, yet it still happens.
Shouldn’t housing be similarly considered a right like the right to life?
Housing isn't free. Not killing someone is.
The 800,000+ police officers in the United States certainly come at a cost, no?
That's enforcement, those police officers don't need to exist for you not to kill someone...
Or do they?
"It's too expensive and too hard" are not good reasons to reject a right
Absolutely it is. Because our "rights" are just invented bullshit brought about by the society we've created. You don't have the right for me not to murder you in the lawless nothingness of nature. Therefore, if it's difficult as a society to supply it -- we can, AND DO, reject things as human rights.
As it is, clean water is not a human right. Housing is not a human right. You WANT it to be, but your feelings here obviously don't have a speck of reality within them.
What kind of backwards arsed ayn rand bullshit is this.
You do realise society actually only came into existence in and of itself via a loose collective agreement of behaviours, yes? These behaviours were not determined by whether or not they fit into a too hard basket, but whether or not they ensured the social strucuture remained intact for the good of the collective. Those eventually became codes of laws, and now relatively recently the conceept of human rights.
No shit housing was never ranked a right or even on the radar until recently, it wasn't an issue that affected enough of the population that it started to threaten social cohesion. It is now.
You're acting like lawless nature should dictate our actions when the sole fuckin' reason we're the dominant species is our ability and innate nature that works outside these parameters. It's laughable
“Because it’s expensive” never stopped us from things we have been motivated about basically ever. All I’m hearing is a fantastic jobs creation program.
A reasonably stable currency is incredibly useful as an abstraction for value. Do you farm potatoes? Do you need a difficult medical procedure? I guarantee you, the surgeon, support staff, and the hospital are not much interested in being paid in a sufficient amount of potatoes.
Being dehydrated isn’t illegal yet we consider it a human right. Not sure I follow your logic.
Huh? I don't see how that follows.
Freedom of speech is widely regarded as a human right. But you still have the right not to express yourself.
Shelter is literally a human need. It's like, number 4 on the list after air, water, and food. Maybe before food, even. Being necessary for life should be a sufficient condition to qualify as a human right.
Speech doesn't require anything tangible though. Big difference. Same with the right to water -- it has more to do with not infringing the rights of others (by dumping waste into the water, etc) than it does actually attaining something tangible; mostly due to how widely available it is, causing it to be essentially free as well. That's why those are already codified rights basically -- because they're easy to attain and ensure.
Water is tangible though. Clean, safe drinking water isn't cheaply and widely available (in the USA, anyway) by accident: it's a huge endeavor that requires tax money to maintain public infrastructure. See the ongoing crises in places with tainted water to see how challenging it is to maintain.
Housing is harder than water, but public water and sanitation systems are incredibly expensive, so I wonder what the comparison would be like against more public housing.
Literally rain. It's literally free, and literally "widely" available. As I said, water rights have more to do with not polluting fresh water sources than actually attaining physical water.
Hahaha awesome, do you get the majority of your clean water via collecting rain? Do you think it's a viable source for folks living in dense metropolitan areas?
Yes, I do. It's called a well. Millions of people do the same. You can drill a well almost anywhere, and drink clean rain water. There are some exceptions of course, but as I stated before -- "the right to clean water" -- has more to do with keeping large corporations, etc from polluting those water sources than it does physically attaining water.
No, but that's their choice to live there. That's the same reason why it's illegal to fish in dense populated areas.
My apologies, since wells are hardly "free" to build and maintain I had assumed you were talking about collecting it directly via a harvesting system. I've used wells the majority of my life.
My general point is that wells or direct capture is not viable for dense urban areas, and while you're saying it's a choice, the majority of folks in the USA live in urban areas. Big urban centers aren't going away any time soon, so we should consider how to meet people where they are, when possible. The larger point I wanted to make though is that we (at least in the USA, and all the Latin American nations I've lived in) have good public sanitation and water systems precisely because it's seen as a right. And those systems aren't cheap, but we do it. As I argue we should do more for re: housing.
That's the crux of the biscuit: I just think more should be done to help people afford these basic necessities. I think we should (as a nation/planet) fundamentally rethink the way we approach housing, for the same reasons water and food are subsidized (and they should be further subsidized IMHO, but that's another point entirely). I'm not going to claim I know the answers, or that it would be easy or cheap, but I think it's something we should all try seriously to solve.
Wells are essentially free. They used to dig them by hand...you still can, in fact. They're one of the most commonly used pre-technological age way of getting water with the exception of simply living next to a freshwater source.
You don't need metal, you don't need electrical, you don't need pumps, you don't need anything except some rocks, clay, and something to dredge water up with.
It's wonderful how in most places on this earth you can simply...dig...and get water.
I'd call that about as free as something could ever be achieved, gets.
Just why? Every single human being deserve to have access to housing, water, food, education, etc. We NEED those things.
No they don't. They want to pay as little as possible for you to produce as much as possible, it's literally the logic of the system. Corporations don't care about their workers, customers or anyone but their owners and investors.
If they could slave people they would. And look at that, they actually do.
Just realized its a .world user, they can't see my comment lol.