Is there a Constitutional Right to free housing?

Advocates for the homeless say there is indeed a Constitutional Right to free housing. They're suing to force Ocean County, NJ into providing free shelter to all comers.

This is, of course, nonsense on stilts.

I suppose they're hiding behind the "general welfare" clause, which has been elasticized so far beyond it's original intent that the Founders wouldn't recognize it if they fell over it. By what passes for logic in Liberal-land a free house is just the next compassionate step after free food (food stamps and government cheese), free money (welfare, refundable tax credits, lifetime unemployment benefits, Social Security), free health care (Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare), and free school (even for illegal aliens).

Fortunately the good Burghers of Ocean County don't see it that way. They're quite reasonably asserting that a myriad of existing public and private social services agencies are more than up to the task of finding homeless people a place to live.

An existing, and incidentally illegally sited, "tent city" on public land off Route 88 continues to grow, despite assurances from these very same "advocates" that it would not.

That's the funny thing about free stuff. Everybody wants it. Make the free stuff too attractive (cough, funemployment, cough) and pretty soon it becomes impossible to stop giving it away.

The Route 88 tent city is no Ritz Carlton. But I can't see how replacing it with free apartments or taxpayer-paid motel rooms will reduce the population of homeless people looking for a place to live.

What we have here is yet another bunch of limousine liberals deciding that equality of opportunity needs to be replaced with equality of outcome. That's not How Life Works, and to prove it these guys ought to be reading the children's book I reviewed yesterday. The moral of the story is quite clear:

"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."

It's a valuable lesson; one which I sincerely hope the judge overseeing this case has taken to heart.

Posted at 16:05 by Chris Wysocki   [/rants]   Comments | Perm Link |
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