Everyone has a right to housing. The question is, do you have the right to make everyone else pay for yours?
"Monsieur, I have -- how you say -- crapped all over my home. It is ... unsanitary. Please to give me a new house toute suite. I know my rights, Monsieur. I am sure you do not want me to overturn cars in your scenic little streets, eh?"
Yeah, that'll draw just the right kind of immigrants now, won't it? Why don't you just establish a mandatory "adopt a bum" program that applies to all native French households?
Cool! Sign me up. I'd like a house in Paris s'il vous plait!
France has homeless people?
Must be a mistake. I thought France was a socialist utopia that the United States must emulate.
I presume that means is that if I move to France, they'll send over someone in a maid's outfit to clean my flat so I don't have to, right?
I think everybody should have a legal right to whatever housing they can afford. But an "enforceable" right to housing seems overly broad and extremely expensive.
Does this mean that I get to claim the Versailles as my summer residence?
(No, I'm not French; but so what? Neither are these "homeless" they're fretting about!)
(Villepin said the law would "make France one of the most advanced countries in terms of social rights". Housing would become the third legally enforceable right in France, along with access to education and healthcare.)
I'm sure the right to food is not far behind. If I had the right to housing, education, healthcare, and food, with no responsibility for getting any of it, what incentive would I ever have to work? Ever?
Values of "You don't work, You don't eat" are being crapped on by France, with predictable results right around the corner. France is not far from the day when the unproductive outnumber the productive. I wonder what business will remain in France.
Didn't France give all Germans a legal right to housing in France back in the early 1940s?
Um, how are they going to pay for that?
Governments cannot "create" rights. As our founders rightly proclaimed, rights come from God, and they are the same for everyone. Rights cannot change, or be added.
They can only be recognized or not recognized. and the government can only enforce them or infringe upon them. But it can't make new ones.
Clearly, if anything is NOT a God-given right in the sense that our founders understood that term, it is housing.
Only if God magically creates a house for each of us when we're born, could a right to housing be said to exist. Then you could argue that taking that house away would infringe upon a right to housing.
But in the real world, government cannot give us rights that God has seen fit to deny us. All the legislation in the world will not create housing for everyone in the long run. It will only destroy the housing market and create chaos. But it will never deliver a house to everybody, and the law will prove unsustainable in the face of economic reality.
A "right" to housing creates a new nobility: those who can't afford their own housing. Nobility is defined as a class of people who possess "rights" that are not possessed equally by all (and buying your own housing from your own earnings is not in any way "equal" to having the government use tax money to pay for your housing.)
The rational response is to stop earning money and give away your possessions, and demand that the government provide you the housing to which you are entitled by law.
Socialists are such morons.
It seems the laws of economics aren't nuanced enough for the French's liking.
France is just trying to keep up with us.
I have a legal right to screw up, lose everything, become and drunk or drug addict living on the street, and then, to demand housing. Hmmmm ......
Au revoir, France. Been nice knowing ya.
Sounds to me more like France wants to subsidize the privilege of housing.
Does anyone know what has happened to homelessness in Scotland since the wand was waved to create this "right"?
no legal right to air conditioning ,though? expect lots of dead old folks in their free crappy apartments.