This reply is brought to you by...
Wednesday's Tent City Photo Album - Bulldozer Bullies, Police Harassment, and the Rally Against Injustice At Tent City:
And this video from Wed, made by our friends at
CopBlock:
Hey libman, let me tell you a little secret. We don't mind "wasting" our tax money to get you and the rest of tent city out of here! I am so happy that's what it's being used for.
Who's "we"? Are you a monarch using the royal pronoun, or do you have a delusion that everyone who pays taxes agrees with you?
I'm a fan of logical optimization for
performance, so let's start with the most obvious:
your "we" doesn't include me. I'm a tax resister, but I still inevitably pay some taxes when I want to buy healthy food, or when I occasionally buy booze, etc. (I know, I should grow my own greenhouse kale, catch / farm my own fish, and distill my own moonshine - someday I will...) Homeless people do pay taxes - sales tax, sin taxes, corporate tax and all the other taxes built into everything you buy, gasoline tax for our generators, etc, etc, etc. Many Tent City residents were once middle class, and I can think of several who were (multi)millionaires - and of course they've paid plenty of taxes then. And many people who are middle class or even millionaires today may end up in a Tent City someday - I am fighting for their benefit as well.
Your "we" doesn't include a lot of other people too.
According to a recent poll, only a small minority of NJ residents want TC bulldozed! And I would venture that many in that minority are not thinking for themselves, but are a part of that
moocher voting block that is out to get us, so they could get this land in yet another crony land deal that Lakewood is becoming famous for. Our NGO was actually offered ownership of this land before the said voting block interfered.
Of course the Township Committee has been swearing on every Torah in Lakewood that this land is an "environmentally protected no-cut zone", and will remain undeveloped...
We all know that's a lie - this land will be given to political cronies, trees will be cut down, and another taxpayer-supported boondoggle will be built, reminiscent of
the neighboring Blueclaws Stadium...
Our mathematically illiterate Deputy Mayor was just
quoted as saying that "residents are upset because their taxes keep going up". This also debunks your claim, and he is of course absolutely backwards about the financial consequences.
Gee, let's bulldoze a private charity that helps the homeless without using taxpayer money, put a few homeless in motel rooms for propaganda value, and throw the rest out onto the streets - that'll lower the taxes! Fact:
bulldozing TC will hurt taxpayers on every level!Because of the bulldozing plans, Ocean County Superior Court has ordered Lakewood to provide "one year free housing" for 122 people on the 2013-05-01 census - a small subset of the current and future homeless who would be affected by Tent City's destruction. Only myself and at most a handful other people on that census have refused housing on principle. That is at very least $1,500,000 million in rent costs alone, but you know how much government inefficiency and waste will inevitably be involved. Most of these bums can't pay utility bills, so that's extra. Etc, etc, etc. Lakewood has largely reneged on this contractual obligation - there will be lawsuits about this, and Lakewood will probably end up paying more as the result. But that's only the prelude.
It will then cost the government millions of dollars to enforce the unconstitutional anti-homeless laws in light of the upcoming civil disobedience and court battles. Such laws have been successfully overturned in other cities, and they didn't have a dedicated libertarian political / legal / media machine that I am now devoted to building in Lakewood. I put up a $50 tent, perhaps in the middle of Town Square, and they'll spend $50,000 bulldozing me, arresting me, fighting me in court, etc. Then: rinse, repeat. And it won't be just me: I'm building a BIG TENT coalition, with co-belligerents from both "
right" and "
left" joining this libertarian cause. Yes, this is vengeance - if bulldozing Tent Cities is easy, then more Tent Cities will get bulldozed. By the time the
Lakewood Tent Party is through, the government will very seriously regret bulldozing Tent City, and no other town will want to make the same mistake again!
And even all this is merely the tip of a MUCH bigger iceberg of the financial consequences of bulldozing Tent Cities - the natural economic consequences of more homeless people now also being tentless will be very severe. Municipal governments will pay for more people sleeping in the streets without access to shower or portajohns, more homeless hanging out at the library all day, more "crimes of desperation", more trespassing, more forest fires for lack of sober oversight and fire extinguishers, declining property values, etc, etc, etc. County, State, and Federal governments will pay for higher hospital costs from people living on the streets without tents, etc, etc, etc.
Tent Cities and letting homeless NGO's homestead remote plots of so-called "public land" is the only viable solution to the growing economic problem. Stupid, handicapped, and dysfunctional people will always be among us, and the market value of mindless labor will only continue to decline - the minimal cost of living needs to decline with it, with voluntary charity and mutual aid helping to fill the gap.
NJ already ranks as one of the worst states in overall freedom, tax competitiveness, property taxes, government credit rating, etc.NJ is like a star athlete with good genes who smokes and drinks heavily, but is still able to perform well - for a while... NJ has a lot of "old money" momentum, benefits of population density, being in between two major global
Alpha Cities, etc. But these benefits are starting to run out. Benefits of the Internet, virtual reality, delivery drones, self-driving cars and other transportation innovations, etc are gradually making big cities obsolete. More and more businesses, brains, investment capital, and jobs are leaving!
These jobs are going to places like India, where there are fewer government laws against cheap living. And, if they're staying in this country, those jobs are going to places like Texas, which have a bit more economic freedom, lower taxes, and where
they embrace innovative cost-cutting ideas like ours!
Bulldozing Tent City is a stupid move that NJ cannot afford to make! They should recognize our Homesteading Rights, so that our NGO could sell this land and buy land for a homeless camp somewhere else.
And all this garbage how it's not detrimental to my neighborhood, it's a load of bull!
Again:
The
burden of proof remains on you.
I'm breathing your bonfires or whatever is going on there a whole winter. Please pack your crap up and move out!
I've repeatedly said that complaints about smoke are as close as Tent City haters come to a coherent argument (even though no scientific evidence of harm was yet presented). I've taken this so seriously that I've tried to go that past winter without heat, like Rev Steve Brigham does, but I got sick around mid-December and had to use a propane heater until mid-March.
Propane is what we've been using from the beginning, but then the government ordered us to switch to wood-burning stoves, which is where all the smoke was coming from. In November 2013 they tried to ban wood-burning stoves, giving us no advance warning, but we didn't have the funds to make the switch back to propane. They were putting people's lives in serious danger, and the Ocean County Superior Court put a restraining order on Lakewood to prevent them from harassing us.
Had the government been acting in good faith instead of sabotaging us, we could have solved the smoke problem a long time ago!
Poll