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Notes -
Scott's criticism, that toughness alone can't solve the problem without an actual actionable plan, is both true and uninteresting because it doesn't engage with the critiques of the current establishment and just says a truism. It's an important truism because many people do actually just have no real alternative to the status quo, especially true when discussing critiques of capitalism that amount to basically "capitalism hasn't brought about utopia yet".
However being more tough becomes a more interesting critique when you believe that the problem we have with handling the homeless that I'd call hyper-empathy. if hypo-empathy is not being able to take another's perspective, usually implied because of lack of care or interest, and empathy is having a good understanding of another's perspective and needs hyper-empathy is the mirror of hypo-empathy where you are charitable and caring beyond reason. Hyper-empathy might be characterized by letting a bad actor brutalize you and your family because it would be mean to interfere and maybe they have a good reason to do so, maybe you've contributed to a general environment and they're the product of blah blah blah.
If you think the problem with our treatment of the homeless population[1] is hyper-empathy by the NGOs that basically run all homeless programs then being tougher makes sense. We need to either axe this hyper-empathetic orgs or staff them with people who are willing to be tough. Scott says the reason we can't solve the homeless problem is a lack of state capacity. Well what actually is state capacity and why don't we have it? What's actually stopping us from doing the things he scoffs at like building asylums and throwing people into them? I think part of the equation is a general lack of will or "toughness" among the people making decisions on this topic. The money is there, a desire for a solution is there. I'm an outside observer, I can't go into a step by step explanation for how to build asylums and set up laws so that we can populate them, that's an incredible burden, but I do know that the people that we entrusted billions of dollars and many years to have utterly failed to deliver improvements and they all seem to be manically hyper-empathetic so toughness might be just what is needed.
1 - by homeless population I mean the people in tents long term that make no effort to reintegrate back into society rather than people who live in their car for a little while or even temporarily rough it while trying to reintegrate for whom we do have good services and tools that I advocate for even being quite generous with.
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