Government failure UK edition

A rather interesting discussion at Restoring Anatole France by Tyler Cowen.
Situation: A large grocery chain in the UK, TESCO (something like our Walmart), has a problem as reported here. "Customers told us they were intimidated by antisocial behaviour outside our Regent Street store." Their solution was to "put studs in place to try to stop it." Homeless advocates identified this as an anti-homelessness strategy and mustered considerable, outrage, protests, and criminal mischief (one group poured concrete slurry over the inch high spikes. City government as represented by the mayor, took umbrage at TESCO's actions. TESCO immediately committed to removing the spikes and finding some other solution.

But this is interesting. TESCO here is the victim of illegal behavior (sleeping on TESCO property). They are a food related business so hygiene is obviously a significant policy issue. Customer safety is obviously a significant issue. The police are obviously unwilling or unable to address the problem.

So why is TESCO the bad guy, victim of demonstrations by homelessness advocates, berated by the government? They broke no law, they were seeking to comply with hygiene regulations, they were looking after the interests of their customers.

Well you can understand why advocates would exploit this. It is what advocates do. While there are some who are well intentioned and even effective, there are very many who are simply interested in being seen to be altruistic, though usually at someone else's expense. Protests like these do wonders for raising contributions.

I can't even begin to explain the Mayor's stance other than diversion. It is the failure of the state to enforce its own laws which is the nominal cause (the root cause being homelessness itself) so blaming the victim is a convenient strategy, particularly when the scapegoat is a large corporation.

Cowen looks at this in terms of economic principles, casting TESCO's initial response as a means of raising the cost (by raising inconvenience) to the homeless of sleeping on the TESCO property. As is often the case, a lot of variance in the comments as well as insight.

Yes, it seems to me that the issue is not about raising the costs of being homeless to deter homelessness. The issue is that the cost of dealing with homelessness is being borne disproportionately by Tesco instead of society as a whole.
There’s a cognitive/behavioral anomaly at work here. If we were to levy taxes on a small subset of randomly chosen people, or even corporations, to pay for homeless shelters, most of us would consider that to be unfair. It would be considered similarly unfair if the government were to randomly choose households that would be required to allow homeless to camp on their lawns or front porches. However, when homeless people “naturally” cluster around Tesco’s stores, it is considered “inhumane” for Tesco to not want the burden of dealing with the homeless to fall solely on their shoulders. I suspect that very few of those criticizing Tesco are volunteering their own homes to house the homeless.

As is so often in these cases, the advocates create a small sensation around a symptom (sleeping on TESCOs property by the homeless) without choosing to address the disease (homelessness itself). Homelessness (addiction, mental health, behaviors, etc.) is a notoriously difficult issue to effectively address. Better by far, in terms of advocates, to focus on the symptoms than the disease. Here, take an aspirin