Normally when I write a piece on Substack, I overwhelm readers with data and links. But I’m short on time today and most if not all of the situations referenced below are public-domain concerns, you might say. We’ve been reading about these things for several years now.
To get down to cases:
Shopkeepers who have spent decades building a generational family business are being forced out by homeless encampments where people defecate on the sidewalk.
Consumers who like to patronize downtown shops are accosted or even carjacked by thugs who are back on the street the next day thanks to “restorative justice.”
We pat down dangerous students and worry about their privacy and/or the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, rather than booting them out and protecting their better-behaved peers. (I know, there are laws; change ’em.)
We set up safe houses for drug addicts, thereby enabling a habit that (a) bleeds billions in annual productivity, (b) endangers innocents, and (c) eventually kills a fair number of the users themselves.
We handcuff cops by obsessing over incidents where an arrest results in injury to a suspect, as though oblivious to the fact that few such encounters would ever take place were it not for people behaving criminally to begin with.
We effectively pay women $1000-a-month to have babies—and not just any women, but chiefly poverty-entrenched inner-city single mothers, who are by far the least likely to produce stable, successful children.
The supposed rights of would-be immigrants who seek illegal entry into America take precedence over the peace of mind of homeowners who live in proximity to what used to be our southern border.
We tell shy teenage girls to get used to the idea of seeing an intact transgender “woman” unzip, whip it out and urinate in their bathroom or traipse around their changing spaces.
***
We must get off this kick of prioritizing and incentivizing the outliers. It’s one thing to be humane, and no one (who’s nonviolent) should be needlessly castigated or mistreated. But what sense does it make to privilege the needs of those who, far too often, contribute nothing while destroying what others have built? Moreover, you do not fix problems by accommodating them.
As I’ve written before in this space and elsewhere, the oldest rule in behavioral science is: You get the behavior you reward.
As a society, we risk committing suicide by compassion.
Thank you for these provocative comments, which you obviously spent some time putting together. (If you just dashed these things off, I'm jealous.) Based on your responses I think you'll be interested in some of what I have upcoming. In the meantime here's a link to my author page at Quillette; I think I've done some nice work for them, if I so say so myself:
https://quillette.com/author/steve-salerno/
Our country has historical amnesia. We tried going soft on criminals and other antisocial types in the 60s and got runaway crime waves and social dysfunction in the 70s and 80s until the tough-on-crime and welfare-reform laws and policies got enacted in the 90s, leading to dramatic improvements in quality of life in the cities and incredible reductions in violent crime. But then a new generation thought they knew everything and nobody before their time knew anything at all, so they ignored the lessons of the past and made all the same mistakes from the 60s all over again, except that they went even further with it. And in no time, the same catastrophic consequences returned. It would really be nice to see the imbeciles who championed these disastrous changes face some accountability for it, but these days, the only direction people go when they fail is up, while the regular rubes get stuck with the costs. Hopefully, at the very least, these policies get reversed before they do even more damage.