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http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/05/feeding-homeless-arrests/18529709/ (http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/05/feeding-homeless-arrests/18529709/)

TL;DR A 90-year-old man who runs a non-profit dedicated to helping homeless people was arrested in Fort Lauderdale for violating a new ordinance that makes giving food to homeless people illegal. He faces 6 months in prison and a $500 fine.

It baffles me how a 'republican' state like Florida allows the passage of a law making private charity to the homeless illegal, but republicans are constantly up in arms about the government giving handouts to poor people and how the poor are just leeches on the productive members of society. If private charities want to help people, don't make it illegal.

This law is bullshit.

It's been making the rounds on my FB newsfeed
insane, one of the many reasons why the US baffles so many of us....

It doesn't make it illegal to feed the homeless. It imposes some restrictions on how and where you can do it. But even then, I agree that this makes little sense, and the way it was enforced makes it even worse. Guess the police have nothing better to do than going after the dangerous 90 year old pastor that feeds the homeless. By the way, why create another thread for this story? There are already 2 or 3 others.

It baffles me how you immediately turn this into something political. The article says the people violated a city ordinance which "bans the public sharing of food." Is this a passive-aggressive way of stopping people from feeding the homeless? Maybe. But it has nothing to do with Republicans, especially considering the mayor of Ft. Lauderdale is a Democrat (not to mention one who opposes same-sex marriage... Uh Oh! http://www.browardbeat.com/fort-lauderdale-mayor-harmed-by-anti-lgbt-vote/).

helping others is a virtue, especially to help people who really need it, why it is considered a criminal and should be imprisoned for such acts, man was created to complement each other, man was created with the advantages and disadvantages of each, with the advantages and the shortage is expected to man can be complementary, rather than mutually between one and despise the other.

States should facilitate citizens who wanted to help his brother, I think the state was supposed to be a very active role to help the homeless in the country, for example by making laws to help the homeless, help the more I agree, if not in money, but help the more to aid training to hone their skills so that they can get a decent job ...  ::)

Can't share food in public, what do you think this sis, a free country? if you think this ordinance is about sharing food and not criminalizing homelessness, you're a bit naive not to see the politics of it.  ::)

The law is not about sharing food in public, it is about distributing it in a way that people assume it is safe to consume. There are regulations regarding the distribution of food in order to help keep consumers safe from food borne illnesses that can be very harmful and that consumers have little other way to protect themselves against

Wait a minute here...
 The police didn't break his arm, drop kick or tazer him?  He's not in a coma fighting for his life?  This has to be a phony story.

Oh please, that's a bunch of bullshit.  The whole purpose of the law, just like the ones making it illegal for homeless people to congregate in certain places at certain times, is that if we make it difficult\impossible for them to eat or sleep here, they will go somewhere else.  That is the only purpose of the law, get the homeless people to go somewhere else since it would be politically untenable to simply kill them.

These regulations obviously affect the homeless disproportionately more than anyone else. Besides, you know what else can be very harmful for these "consumers"? Not eating.

 Politically untenable?  I would have thought morally, legally or even perhaps spiritually but politically?

Politically in that laws are passed by politicians.  Morally:   Obviously, if you are find taking food from a starving person you don't care about morals.  Legal:  Well if you pass a law, then it is obviously legal.  Spiritually:  I don't think that enters into their thought process. 
To clarify what I meant, obviously killing them was an exaggeration, passing these types of laws are "good" for a politician because they "solve" the homeless problem (look see?  There are no more homeless people hanging around in our town).  But, they don't do so in an unpopular way;  we aren't saying it is illegal to be poor (that would cost us votes), we say we are doing it for safety or some other such reason.

I posted about this on one of my own forums and an American friend posted this image she found:

http://image.bayimg.com/cf7aaef67b3d4a802f5ab080d24c7eb81ef4f263.jpg

wow another reason to not live in florida.... Thats the most insane law I have heard of

Some of the bylaws cities and states create in the US are just plain weird.
The homeless people ban is one of them, but I like the beach party comparison ^^.

It's illegal to run a lemonade stand or garage sale in some states in the USA without a permit (tax stamp) so why they going to let you feed the homeless and lose tax income?  :o

I don't know about laws, but stuff similar to this doesn't happen only in Florida. Wasn't it in the UK that some people started installing anti-homeless spikes on the ground outside the buildings? And something like it was going on in Chicago as well.

It looks like a new example of too much regulation

The details are complicated. The issue boils down to politicians not wanting competition. If they allow private groups or individuals to prove they can care for those in need, it makes it harder to argue the government is needed for that purpose.

There are similar "spikes" under bridges and benches are designed so it is not possible to sleep on them in many cities across the US. These kinds of things are going to give people incentives to get "off the street"

Come on, you believe that's true? I guess any little league teams in that city should stop distributing snacks after the game because they aren't in compliance with the law, right? I mean, the law is there to keep people safe from people who distribute food that can't be trusted because it doesn't have the city's stamp of approval on it that it's safe.

That's not at all the case. If a cop saw one of the parents distributing the team snack and some guy giving a homeless man the same snack, only one of them is getting arrested for violating the law, because only one of them is the intended target of the law.

YES! I remember reading about that. Apparently, it's a problem in Canada too:  https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/london-criticized-anti-homeless-spikes-canada-better-174042472.html (https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/london-criticized-anti-homeless-spikes-canada-better-174042472.html)



How does this give them an incentive to get off the street? If they responded to a simple incentive, you'd think being homeless would be it. This kind of comment ignores the fact that homelessness isn't just a case of being lazy or choosing not to work. It's often a slew of circumstances beyond their control, with a high incidence of mental health disorders, that makes 'being homeless' anything but a choice. These spikes are just inhumane and the advocates are the type of people who will victim-blame someone for being homeless.

This is a free country, which entails something called freedom of association.

That means we are free to choose whether or not to live in communities which have rules about sharing food.  We may even vote to change those rules!   :o  Isn't democracy amazing?   8)

There are plenty of cities where you may feed the homeless, but that's not good enough for your bleeding heart, which desires to enforce a universal uniformity and hypocritically call such homogeneous altruism-at-gunpoint "freedom."

You hate people having the freedom to choose rules for their own local community, because you want everyone to be forced to subsidize the homeless and be forced to accept the (literally shitty) externalities that giving away free food to people without their own bathrooms/toilets/sewage systems/water bills creates.

That's taking the 'Free Shit Army' to a whole new level!   ;D

Freedom of association is the freedom to associate with certain groups of your own will, not the freedom to pass laws governing the behavior of other people. You've got a really poor understanding of what freedom is.

Maybe he's a Constitutional Lawyer?  :D













That's a joke, by the way.  8)

You are creating a false dichotomy where none actually exists.  By seeking to impose a universal prohibition of food sharing bans, you advocate destroying the freedom you claim to value.

Freedom of association necessarily includes freedom of disassociation, and the freedom go create/join communities based on like minded individuals.

These intentional communities, which are build on the foundation of a libertarian national government, provide for simultaneously maximizing freedom and utility for all participants.

There is a famous award-winning book length proof of this philosophy's claims, written by a Harvard professor, called 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia.'

I'll take Robert Nozick's "understanding of what freedom is" instead of your asinine interpretation (which seems to chiefly value the freedom to eat/sleep/shit anywhere you want) any day of the week!   ;D

There are plenty of places where your Freely Shit Army is welcome; why do you need to insist that every town must follow in lockstep?  What works for San Francisco and Portland doesn't always work for Retiredville, Florida.

The law/rules is not about the ability to share food, it is a question about food safety. The old man was sharing/giving away food in a way that would require him to meet certain food safety guidelines which he was not following.

Someone already answered this pretty effectively.


I agree with the assessment that the law has nothing to do with food safety. It's about targeting the homeless.

I would reccomend all the homeless to commit crimes and be fed and housed by the state of florida

Double negative logic? How embarrassing for you! By restricting laws that restrict the freedom of people, you're infringing my right to belong to a group of people that passes laws that dictate what other people can do. :'(  

Haha, yeah, you're a real champion of freedom.  ::)

It may be illegal, but it is not unlawful.

If you are a 14th Amendment citizen, you might have to follow all kinds of codes and ordinances. But if you are a "people" like one of those who set government in place, most or all of the codes and ordinances don't affect you if you don't want them to.

http://1215.org/

Of course, if you need some extra cash...

http://www.unkommonlaw.co.uk/

:)

So a disclaimer should suffice and people can make their own decision about taking his food or not.

This sounds good to me. If there is an ordinance against food-sharing in a park, and the old guy doesn't want to be confrontational, he could agree to meet the hungry people somewhere else to share the food.

:)

I'm not embarrassed to agree with libertarianism; it's the most rational position available. 

And yes, I am a real champion of freedom, unlike you sophomoric black flag waving jokers who run around yelling "Help! Help! - I'm being repressed!"

I suspect your malfunction is that you believe in anarchy, not intentional communities supported by the foundation of a minimal federal government.

How dare you insist that like-minded individuals have no right to establish communal structures which they believe maximize their utility?

If you don't want to live in a community that disallows bums begging/stealing/crapping/pissing all over the place, you are free to move to one that does.

If you hate the state so much, pack up and go to Somalia.  I'm sure the warlords will find your first-world whining about how oppressed you were by high standards of public sanitation and food safety very amusing!   :D

I'm a minarchist, which is why I reject you attempting to use laws to dictate the actions of other people. If you want to have a community where no one is allowed to share food, that's fine. But you can't use the police to force other people not to do it. That's not libertarian, that's use of force, the opposite of libertarian. I suspect your malfunction is you don't know that you're a closeted republican. How dare you sully the flag of freedom with your police-state ideas about what people are allowed to do. If you hate freedom so much, why don't you move to Russia? They love to use the police to tell you what you can't do!  :D

Non aggression principle and mutually beneficial interactions should be the foundation of a libertarian society; you can have laws but an extremely small number of them such as "don't kill"; you would not have the law unforced in the case we are discussing

Could you please clarify/expand on the underlined? I don't follow what you mean by "unforced."

Edit: Unless you mean "enforced?"

I did meant enforced sorry. In a libertarian society, laws to control and protect activity will be non-existent or extremely rare. You won't be able to pollute at will and if you pollute and other suffer a loss you would have to compensate them.

This is not the only ridiculous US law, there are so many of them a simple google search will get you hundreds of them... an example a dozen http://justsomething.co/the-22-most-ridiculous-us-laws-still-in-effect-today-2/

It is sad to see that feeding other humans in need can get you to jail ...

Yep looking at the other thread he got arrested again
Kind of makes you facepalm when you think the reason the US jail system is overcongested may be because of stupid crimes like these
Not really a crime per say but just an action that has been written as a crime in the book.

You need to understand that he was arrested for more then just feeding people. There are regulations as to sanitary requirements and food service licenses that must be obtained before you can serve food to the public. The reason for this is to protect the public from potential food borne illnesses that can potentially be fatal.

@Swordsoffreedom that's true, but jails are intentionally overcrowded. It's not an accident or incompetence. Criminalize completely harmless and victimless things, and not only do you get free slave labor, but you also get rid of those in the lowest rungs of society more easily.

@MelodyRowell that's not even funny.

LOL.
A license can protect someone from a food borne illness if the license is used to clean up the rat poop, or to wrap the fish to keep it from going bad.

You have to be careful that when you want to protect you in fact control and decrease freedom :

The State poisoning people to protect them :

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-poison

That's the excuse the wrap the law around so it doesn't look like they're making charity illegal. Don't fall for it.

And now they are offering free bus tickets to any homeless person who wishes to leave the city.  But of course, it is important to understand that this is simply mere coincidence, the intention of the law isn't to get rid of homeless people it is all about food safety  ::)

Maybe they will head to the Satoshi Forest and Sean's Outpost?

Just make sure they're "voluntary" free bus tickets.  :-\

I think that helping others is a virtue, why should be limited, not to help others at their own expense can ease the burden on the state, so the state does not need to be hard to take care of his people who are poor, it should be improved, so that the poor will soon diminish ...  ::)

Nobody is "making charity illegal."  That's a strawman you created to prop up your otherwise unsupportable argument.

Time, place, and manner restrictions don't make charity illegal any more than they do free speech.

You sound exactly like the Occutards who insisted that camping in public was protected by the 1st Amendment.

All you accomplish is turning off reasonable people and setting back your cause.

If you want to help feed the hungry, good.  Do it at a church, food bank, shelter, or soup kitchen.  Not in a public park.

Why should there be time, place, and manner restrictions on free speech if it is a virtue?

Shouldn't I be able to camp in the park/street/sidewalk next to your house and scream about the virtues of anarchy from 2AM until 8 in the morning?

You stupid kids make minimal statism look bad with this idiocy; no wonder the Libertarian Party is stuck in single digits as a permanent joke.

The first thing anarchists and minarchists must do is figure out how to deal with the fact that the vast majority of people do not want to live in an anarchist or minarchist community and work out a way to accommodate them.  That solution is called federalism.

Is handing out sandwiches now illegal in this jurisdiction? Oh, it is? I'd say that makes a charitable act illegal. Your passionate defense of state power is noted though. You're such an obedient citizen.

Handing out sandwiches is perfectly legal (and even encouraged by the tax code's treatment of charitable contributions) when done in the proper manner, at an appropriate venue like a soup kitchen, shelter, church, or food bank.  Obviously.

Creating a messy situation in a public park by handing out sandwiches that were not made in accordance with local food safety regulations is illegal.  Duh!

I am against any Federal regulations on sandwich distribution.  I support the right of individuals to form communities that do regulate sandwich distribution if they so please.

Your antipathy to freedom of association and demands for an individual's altruism to be subsidized by the unwilling participants who must pay for the nasty externalized costs of that altruism is noted.  You're such a cool anarchist; nice trenchcoat BTW.