They Can’t Handle The Truth

The Associated Press carried this recent story.

“On just a single day this year on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, police and investigators received emergency calls about a suicide, a murder, three stabbings, two shootings and multiple incidents of domestic violence.”

I received a solicitation in the mail recently for donations to a Native American charity that claims the rate of alcoholism on Minnesota reservations is 90%. How could people who were once the most self-sufficient on earth be afflicted to this extent?

It’s what happens when you subsidize people and excuse them from the requirement to make their own way. Without any need to work, people atrophy. Give them money they don’t earn and soon the boredom of doing nothing will coarsen their behavior.

Unfortunately, we are duplicating this dysfunction across the country including a wide swath of our cities. A rapidly growing population of chemically dependent citizens constitutes a problem of such magnitude that it threatens the stability of society. It’s the main reason for crime and a host of other pathologies. It renders a large segment of the populace helpless and unable to function without government money.

What’s most puzzling about this huge predicament is the refusal of people on the left to see the damage that’s done through subsidies. Why don’t they see the human toll it takes? These social welfare programs turn people into drones and derelicts. The evidence is overwhelming. In most big cities you can’t walk the streets after dark without trepidation.

Liberals don’t see it because they are culpable. It’s their social programs that have created this behavioral disaster. If you turn millions of people into alcoholics and addicts it would be terribly inconvenient to have your conscience bother you.

Nevertheless, this atrocity rests on their doorstep. When the left hears this and similar arguments, they seethe in anger. The truth does not set them free, it alienates them further and hardens their position. Not only do they have blood on their hands they brazenly argue for more of the same. The left is great at claiming intellectual superiority, but this is the mindset of people who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are.