I don't have to make up things after the fact to say "he probably chose the polygamy example because polygamy is weird". It's obvious.
He claimed that monogamy was rejected by the upper class sufficiently enough to cause divorce and single parenthood to spike
There are various types of opposition to monogamy. Outright support of polygamy is not the only one.
I can’t make up and apply new criteria like “bizarrely unconventional”,\
Yes you can. Of course, it's not "making it up", it's "figuring it out". If there are obvious explanations why he might want to use that example other than "he's biased against leftists", you shouldn't jump to "he's biased against leftists". And "polygamy is a lot weirder" is too obvious an explanation for you to just ignore it.
nor can I just accept Henderson’s framework when I’m critiquing it.
If you're criticizing his version and not your version, you pretty much are required to accept his framework.
I believe the relevant phrase is "aged like milk".
Sure, polyamory is bizarre and unconventional, but that only further undermines Henderson’s assertion that it was widely adopted (enough to have an impact) by both the upper and lower class of society circa 1960-1970s.
He's not asserting that the upper class rejected monogamy in a way that was widely adopted. He does say this about his classmates, but his classmates aren't the entire upper class.
You may be assuming that if the lower classes did it, and the upper classes promote it, that implies that the upper classes must be responsible for the lower classes doing it. That doesn't follow. A luxury belief is something that people have on an individual level, so there's no requirement that the individual have any influence. (In this case, I'd say that there are several aspects to rejecting monogamy, and some are common enough beliefs that the upper class may have some influence, and some are not. Polygamy falls in the second category.)
I didn’t present the oil tycoon story as a luxury belief example, but rather as an example of a story that carried the same “saying but not doing” lesson.
You said that he didn't use such a story because he thinks anti-leftist examples are uniquely compelling. "It isn't bizarrely unconventional" and "it isn't even a luxury belief" are alternate explanations to "he's biased against leftists".
I did present “support for a harsh criminal justice system” as an example of a luxury belief that Henderson would contest, even though it perfectly fits his template.
Support for a harsh criminal justice system isn't bizarrely unconventional, so there is still a reason other than "he's biased against leftists".
And luxury beliefs should imply a more extreme elite/non-elite imbalance than just "somewhat fewer people support it". A substantial number of poor people support a harsh criminal justice system, even if not as many as rich people. For the same reason, supporting Trump isn't a luxury belief.
I cannot fathom what Henderson finds so uniquely compelling about his particular version of the parable, except that it features a blatantly hypocritical leftist. Had his classmate been a Republican oil tycoon who extolled the virtues of going to church but didn’t go himself, would Henderson be repeating that story for so many years after the fact?
What makes it compelling is not that it features a hypocritical leftist, but that the belief he actually follows is the one professed by the vast, vast, majority of society, and the one that he claims to believe is bizarre and unconventional. The Republican not going to church wouldn't be a compelling example because the belief in going to church is not unconventional, and the belief in not going to church is, while common, not as overwhelmingly believed in as monogamy.
(And if you think that monogamy isn't like this, you're in a bubble. Remember when Scott claimed that exclusive marriage vows were just boilerplate that you weren't supposed to obey, and he got the biggest pileon ever saying otherwise?)
It's also questionable whether the Republican example is a luxury belief at all. In order for it to be a luxury belief, church would have to be harmful to church-goers and he would have to be avoiding the harmful effects by not going. You might try to say "well, church is time-consuming and that's harmful", but that's a very noncentral example of harm caused by church.
If the lower class copies one upper class trend but not another, isn’t that evidence they’re not impressionable lemmings aping everything they see?
Trends take a while to trickle down. So if the upper class returns to monogamy, the lower classes may not have gotten that far yet.
There's also trends that stick around because they are overall harmful, but they do benefit someone, and the benefit is also greater for poor people. If it was trendy to shoplift cheap items, the upper class wouldn't gain much from following the trend, so it would end easily. But the lower class would gain from successfully shoplifting even cheap items, so they would be much more willing to continue the trend, even though they also lose more from stores passing the cost of shoplifting on to their customers.
I'd ask you to estimate the distribution of the loss leader among customers and compare your usage of it to the average rate, and maybe the high end rate. I necessarily have to make up numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of airline seats were cheap seats. It would then be impossible for you to use cheap seats at more than twice the rate of the average person. I'd also expect that even without you, there would be a substantial number of customers who use cheap seats all the time. If a substantial number use them all the time, you being a person that uses them all the time is not greatly far from what is expected. And I'd expect that the rate at which you take trips doesn't differ greatly from the rate at which those other people take trips.
It's true that if everyone only bought cheap seats, the price structure would be unsustainable. But there's a big difference between something that would be unsustainable if everyone did it and something that would be unsustainable if done by even a relatively small number of people. If 5% of the population used public restrooms as often as a homeless person, public restrooms would become unsustainable, never mind "everyone".
Also, some of the amenities in question are run by the government. The government doesn't do loss leaders; it doesn't let you camp out in public parks because it wants to attract more paying customers who incidentally might want to sleep there. It's a government, it runs on taxes.
Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals?
It's on both.
The rest of it, about shoplifting, seems hard to connect, as no one is advocating doing something illegal.
The shoplifting comparison has nothing to do with whether shoplifting is illegal. The point of the comparison is that you can endlessly speculate that something really has a positive effect by imagining some scenario where it does. I am able to imagine such a positive effect for shoplifting, but it would not convince you that shoplifting is positive. I'm not going to be convinced that homelessness is positive by you imagining some scenario where it is.
If I guess I am contributing more than I am taking by my level of noise then is this okay?
My answer to this is the same as for the similar question about shoplifting: I would expect that if homelessness or shoplifting had a positive effect, stores and governments would act as though it does. You personally cannot become "okay" on your own--you don't get to decide that your shoplifting is actually contributing more to tourist publicity than it harms the stores, and you don't get to decide that your homelessness creates a positive contribution.
So then the first question is, “Did I personally contribute to an increased crime rate or decreased safety on the island?” I think the answer is obviously no, but I would be interested to hear if I am overlooking something.
You didn't commit extra crimes, but it requires more resources to protect you from crimes. (And again, since you are a single person, the extra resources get lost in the noise. But if many people did this, there would be more crime.)
You still aren’t giving any reason why I should assume I am contributing to bad outcomes instead of good ones or neutral ones.
I could say the same thing about the shoplifter. There are scenarios where shoplifting might, in theory, be a benefit to the stores. It would not be possible to prove that these scenarios are false. Maybe it really is true that tourists like being able to occasionally shoplift and otherwise spend enough money to make up for the loss. You can invent an infinite number of such scenarios.
What I can observe, however, is that stores don't gather together to promote an area of town as the shoplifting district, and nobody's trying to legalize shoplifting. The people who would best know about the consequences seem to think the bad outcomes are the realistic scenario. Likewise, Taiwan doesn't take out ads saying "come to Taiwan and experience being homeless" or even have designated homeless encampment areas, shopping malls don't compete on how good their homeless person amenities are, and I really doubt that being homeless gives you high status among your colleagues at work, if you even told them.
I’m normally suspicious of zoning but “you can’t put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood” seems pretty basic.
Such zoning would itself raise the taxes you pay on your land.
The issue is not whose fault it is for the crime, but whose fault it is for the using up the extra resources to prevent the crime, which is not an issue in the lifeguard example. And that itself is a specific case of "how much more than average do you have to use the commons before you can be blamed for overusing the commons". Which is partly a matter of degree and depends on things like how much you use it, what people's expectations are, what reasonable expectations are, and what the intentions are of the people providing the resources.
I've done that myself (for busses to Atlantic City). Since the owner can change the price freely, and can change it incrementally or for specific customers, I'd generally not consider it to be overusing the commons if there is a price. In the case of loss-leader trips, it's also very hard to overuse the trips anyway, as opposed to just using them more than average--you probably couldn't use more than one trip every couple of days.
If stores in Taiwan charged for use of bathrooms, and the government rented out spaces for homeless on the ground, and charged a "homeless stay tax" which covers the costs of police and such, I would agree that it would be okay to go homeless and use them at the given prices. (If there is a two tier price where the homeless are charged more, the homeless tourist would have to pay the homeless tier price, and not cheat even if it isn't enforced well.)