A new law passed by the LA city council prohibits homeless people from owning more belongings than can fit in a 60-gallon trashcan with the lid on, and allows police to summarily confiscate any tents that are still standing on public property during daylight hours.
The law is a response to Los Angeles's epidemic of homelessness -- a rise in homelessness that's clocked in at 20% of two years.
Of course, homelessness isn't like smoking, a lifestyle choice that can be disincentivized given enough government arm-twisting. Homelessness is a human rights crisis, brought on, in part, by Bill Clinton's cruel and vile "welfare reforms" (which were passed by adding "compromises" that allowed state governments to be even crueller, an arrangement that came home to roost when the Tea Party started electing governors who ran on a platform that demonized poor people, and subsequently began to literally starve the poorest people in their states).
There are many reasons that people become homeless, but all homeless people share one plight: they don't have a home. Shelter is a human necessity, only one up from food on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the property bubble has converted shelter from a human right to an asset class, driving governments to go to extraordinary lengths to make shelter more expensive: imagine if governments's surest path to re-election was to make food more expensive.
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