[TuringNYC]

I sort of sympathize with your viewpoint, but i'm curious why this doesn't extend to other human needs?

- shouldn't we also allow hungry individuals to walk out of grocery stores w/o paying for food and w/o risk of prosecution?

- shouldn't we also allow sick individuals to avoid medical debt collection and medical bankruptcies?

- shouldn't we also allow individuals to not pay tuition?

If i were to take the analogy further, shouldn't struggling businesses also get cloud hosting charges forgiven by government decree? Should public agencies in budget crises stop paying programmers salaries by government decree? Should struggling small startups stop paying software licenses by government decree?

I'm genuinely curious where the one stops and why.

[matsemann]

Of course tution should be free, and no one should have medical debt. I'm almost laughing at this being a "gotcha". Same with food and housing, it should be guaranteed by society.

But no, I don't think you should be able to walk out of a grocery with whatever you want. But the difference is a grocery provides a service, it has a function. A landlord is mostly a parasite extracting money but provides little value. if anything landlords just makes it more expensive for everyone to get a roof over their head.