Oh, My: Amsterdam Proposes "Scum Villages" At Outskirts of City For Criminal/Antisocial Persons

This sounds kind of creepy, because it is. Or at least it seems to be. The "scum villages" would not be a matter of voluntary choice; you'd be shipped there, involuntarily, after an official order. So it would be coercive.

This is the problem with socialism. Here's what Amsterdam wants: They want their city inhabited by upstanding, pay-your-own way sort of people so that the city can be prosperous and a major tourist draw and also so everyone can make (and keep) more money. (Yes, I said this twice.)

But they have socialist laws (I assume-- and I'm quite sure I'm right) which block the natural market mechanism for this sort of thing. To wit, as a city gets more prosperous and more desirable to live in, property values and rents should naturally rise, thus making it very difficult for anyone making less than, say, a lower middle-class salary to live there. But they have laws on the books to prevent that sort of natural property value escalation, because they don't like the un-socialist elitism by exclusivity that creates.

And yet they still want to drive out the non-prosperous.

This is always the weird and creepy thing about socialism: If you've got this desire, then why not simply end subsidies for low-income residents and stop building projects in the city? No, they can't admit that; they want to keep those measures on the books. But they'll correct the problems with those anti-liberty laws by creating even more anti-liberty laws, these new laws not even being restricted to the realm of economics, but taking that full step towards physically seizing citizens and physically moving them against their will to a new State Created Ghetto.

It's bizarre. The problems of anti-freedom laws are never corrected by more actual freedom, but only by truly Orwellian new anti-freedom laws.

So, here we go: forcible evacuation to camps, I mean villages, for scum.

The “scum villages,” as critics have called them, would lie in isolated areas and provide only basic services to their unwilling residents. According to details of the plan reported by Der Spiegel and the BBC, residents will live in “container homes,” under the watchful eye of social workers or police. The residents themselves might not make very good company. According to the BBC, they’ll include families that engage in repeated, small-scale harassment, like bullying gay neighbors or intimidating police witnesses.

posted by Ace at 01:53 PM

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