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Homeless shelters to the homeless are like whiskey to an alcoholic. They may help someone get through one more day, but they do nothing to address the root causes of homelessness. In a very real sense, by enabling the homeless - making life "easier" - shelters make the problem worse by removing the most immediate incentive to get off the streets.

That sounds extremely callous - and it is. The fact remains, however, that simply supplying shelter addresses only the immediate needs of the homeless. While essential, by themselves shelters do nothing to put themselves out of business. More than one cynical commentator has noted that when you have people whose jobs depend on helping "the poor," it becomes to their advantage to ensure that there will always be "poor" to help. It's a matter of economics and job security.

Homeless shelters at best are only a temporary expedient, a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Like a tourniquet, however, shelters help for a very short time, but when they become a way of life end by doing more harm than good. Leaving a tourniquet in place is tantamount to sentencing someone to amputation or death.

Homeless shelters can only be effective when part of a larger program designed first to address the serious psychological problems that are often at the root of homelessness, and then the economic problems that are the immediate cause. There is no easy or quick answer to psychological problems. They are as many and varied as the people afflicted with them. Some can be assisted with a simple dose of common sense and a quick reality check. Others can be helped with a modicum of psychological counseling. Serious cases may require treatment by a clinical psychiatrist, possibly institutionalization. Workers in homeless shelters need to be trained to spot potential problems, and steer people to appropriate places where they can obtain help.

Steering people to where they can get help, however (while all very well) is a useless exercise unless there is money to pay for it. Unfortunately, over the past century we've seen a steady decline in the economic value of human inputs to production, both "white" and "blue collar" work. Incomes have only been kept up artificially by union pressure and government redistribution and welfare. This, however, is a self-defeating strategy, for it drives up the cost of all forms of labor, and makes it attractive to replace human workers with technology, or shift production to areas where labor is cheaper - globalization.

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