A big part of the reason as far as I can tell why people are struggling to get food and housing is artificial scarcity. Well. Sort of. Not even artificial scarcity.

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The thing is that systems of capitalism are so widespread that they're able to control and enforce the control of resources such that people no longer have the ability to take options OTHER THAN to buy from them.

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What I mean is. It's not possible for poor people to escape poverty by trying to be more self-sufficient by say, building their own homes, or growing their own food, or generating their own electricity to save a little bit of money even if they had the means/education and time to, because capitalism is so all pervasive that they would be prosecuted for some capitalism-specific crime.

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If they live on the streets and try to set up a tent, they're jailed for vagrancy. If they steal a gallon of milk or carton of eggs despite both of those things being over-abundant, they get jailed for theft. If they try to raise their own chickens or produce their own milk they get jailed for violating FDA rules even if they don't sell. Try to set up a shanty shack or something on a part of someone else's unused land, or live in an unused house, they they're jailed for squatting and creating an unsafe shelter, regardless of the fact that a park bench in winter will kill a person deader/more-reliably than the slight possibility of a falling stick from a slightly-structurally unsound lean-to.

So. When I see Bloomberg saying that clean water is now being traded on the stock market, I don't actually see a lack of clean water. I don't see the lack of the ability to get people clean water. I see the artificial scarcity and illegalization of the ability for clean water to be free.

Bottled water companies and countries such as China and the USA and Turkey and Iran are deliberately sucking clean water out of communities with bottled water plants, and dams. It's not that there isn't enough, it's that capitalism is that pervasive and that widely support despite the immeasurable harm it causes.

(Also, if you try to set up your own power generation, or try to build a house by yourself that might have really shitty electrical work, although I agree that this is dangerous, if people are doing that and they're the only people living in this, they don't deserve to be jailed for it. Especially not when contractors that do legitimately dangerous electrical work on houses that are bought and sold daily are barely ever held liable.)

The reason that I say all of this is because although I think many people are beginning to realize how laws result in disastrous effects in medicine and the poor who live on the cities streets through obvious things like vagrancy laws allowing the endangerment and persecution and keeping-down of the poor, and criminalization preventing people from seeking addiction help, and other obvious things along those lines, I don't think it gets talked about nearly enough just how many laws we live with and deal with every day (I would say that we take them for granted, but it's not so much that they're good necessarily as that we are conditioned to see them as good and ignore them as out of sight) are actually disastrous for lots and lots of people in the name of regulation.

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Now. I do believe we need regulation of food and electrical code and fire-code and medicine. These regulations are written in blood and absolutely necessary to keep people safe.

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But what I can't stand is how all of these are also used to persecute and keep the poor in poverty.

Families eating slightly sketchy eggs from their home-raised chickens don't deserve to go to jail for child abuse for giving those eggs to their kids, or for FDA violation for them being slightly sketchy eggs.

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They deserve free non-sketchy eggs so they can stop eating sketchy ones.