It was a comment on this blog which struck me immediately upon reading it. The subsequent discussion in the comment thread was how antisocial behavior on the part of massive numbers of homeless people setting up massive, festering camps in the downtown areas of certain cities was making those cities less and less inviting for ordinary people. In the final analysis, no one really wants to come to work in a place where they have to step around feces on the sidewalk, dodge the aggressive panhandler outside a downtown restaurant, or run from the homicidal crazy looking to shove someone off the subway platform in front of an oncoming train. Downtown retailers can’t keep on in business long when the merchandise walks out the door, assisted by undocumented shoppers; so, eventually the normals – that is, those of us with jobs, property, and a liking for clean, non-threatening surroundings – decamp the urban jungle for something a little less edgy, usually taking our dollars, investments, responsible civic behavior, and tax base with us.
Why on earth do certain cities – San Francisco and Los Angeles being the two which spring to mind almost at once – allow this to continue? What benefit does it give to see gracious, scenic, and culturally-attractive cities descend into a condition which repels longtime residents and new visitors alike? What’s in it for the civic managers of such urban centers … and as it was pointed out, there’s money in it.
There’s money in it, administering programs which succor the homeless … which, if the homeless were ever successfully homed … would mean an end to that mission and money stream. So the civic powers that be have a vested interest in keeping those programs going, and even expanding them to minister to ever-increasing numbers of homeless. Which makes the powers-that-be feel all noble, responsive, responsible and unselfish-like … but which one commenter on the linked thread pointed out … for all intents and purposes they are farming people for a money crop.
And that was where I had that blinding flash of the obvious insight … yes, indeed; they are farming people for the money crop. Civic powers in certain locations are tending a segment of their population most assiduously, for the money crop to be harvested from them. Once possessed of this frame, I began to wonder what other collection of bodies are being farmed for the profitable money crop to be harvested by the controlling powers. Public schools came to my mind almost at once: students in a public school setting are the crop, and oh, they must be a profitable crop indeed for the teacher union farmers who make a gesture of teaching, but which are essentially farming students. What are the various impulses towards a national and universal health-care scheme, but another people-farming project on the part of various powers that be? Discuss as you wish.
In places like Madison, even more important than the money, is the feeling if virtue, and moral superiority engendered by allowing such conditions to exist. ” Unlike you haters, we understand that these people have a different reality, and we are capable of understanding that. All people are welcome here, not just people that serve a useful purpose in society. ”
To a certain extent, I think that they are looked upon , by the social and governmental elites as exhibits in a human zoo, to be watched, from inside their Tahoes and Escaldes. They give not a hoot about any of those people, other than letting them run loose allows the elites to hug themselves, and bask in their feelings of supreme Goodness.
Someone someday needs to explain George Soros, and why he’s tolerated.
There’s a strong incentive for blue state Dems to destroy their regions–drive away the conservatives and make the remaining people more demanding of government services, and you win coming and going…I don’t know how to overcome the perverse incentives.
Consider all the TV advertisers promoting electric go-karts, back braces, non-invasive body scans … “If you’re on Medicare, these tests and therapies are available at little-to-no cost TO YOU.” The card-holding patient is merely a cow to be milked.
Pouncer: “The card-holding patient is merely a cow to be milked.”
Seems like that cow is being very expensively fed — and not producing much saleable milk.
One of the undeniable results of farming is that certain species of crop are selected for, and others selected against. It is an evolutionary pressure. A society that penalizes those who do something productive and care for themselves will find itself running short of them. A society that promotes and cultivates those who are unproductive and counterproductive as their base state, will find itself with a surplus of them.
Eventually you reach a critical point where either you have too many of those you have encouraged, or too few of those you have penalized. And then things fall apart.
I suspect that we will either fall apart or the forces of productivity will have to besiege those urban areas.
Subotai Bahadur
The Peoples Farmers: George Soros, Bill Gates , et al.
I can’t argue with the summation or the theory.
The problem is that we’ve allowed perverse incentive to grow and grow, and as the parasite class has managed to weaponize compassion and care for their fellow man in the class of normies that they have colonized, well… Here we are.
It’s quite obvious that the system is not responding to input from those that pay the bills. The vast “humanitarian” left is off in the vague distance, “doing good” with an ineffectual insouciance that tolerates no criticism.
We never set these assholes any objective standards, nor do we ever evaluate them on actual performance. They merely state the end-goal they want, work to it, and then ignore all the attendant problems that accrue from their various and sundry idiocies.
Illegal aliens!
That idea does explain a lot about our current state of the cities.
Given the known condition of a large share of the homeless population, my first thought is guess where all the money that used to spent on providing them housing and care in mental institutions went, and the second one is guess why certain people are resisting the slowly growing belief that maybe deinstitutionalization could have been a mistake. (As the famous line goes, follow the money).
This is another data point to warn conservatives that we should never sign on to liberal programs because they appear to be ‘compassionate’ while reducing government budgets. The money that doesn’t go out the front door has ways of sneaking out the window when you aren’t looking.
I don’t know if you read Lawrence Person’s blog, but he has been documenting the “Homeless Industrial Complex” in Austin for months (if not years). Yes, they are in it for the money. The virtue signaling is just an added benefit.
EVERY company, EVERY profit-organized endeavor, farms people. This isn’t peculiar to government institutions. The whole point of any organization which is tuned to making money for the people that run it is to treat their customers as a farmer treats his cattle or sheep: care for them, pamper them, while you shear them or eat them. Adam Smith said as much.
The government is just one more large corporation, created by the wealthy elites to help those same wealthy elites accumulate capital. That’s always been the purpose of government. If it didn’t exist, the best capitalists would invent it.
What better way is there to extract capital (taxes) from the vast mass of people who aren’t really interested in your product? Once the government has concentrated the wealth from the long tail, it’s relatively easy to open the spigot from that single source and have the cash flow into your own coffers. Big government is the natural outgrowth of an efficient capital market headed by the most skilled capitalists.
My actual farmer father and his compatriots often referred to the structuring their planting and operating decisions to maximize their payout from various programs as ‘farming the government’.
Here is the story in California and San Francisco.
Prop 47 and Prop 57 that decriminalized almost all petty crime was paid for by billionaires like Zucherberg, Reid (Netflix) and Steyer trying to buy political influence in the Democratic Party and by Jerry Browns huge political slush funds. Mostly union money (straight pay to play) or foundations money. More very rich people trying to by Moral Superiority.
The DA in SF who refuses to enforce the law, pretty much all of them, was paid for by out of state PACs and Soros money. The DA lost the primary vote but won the instant run-off by a tiny margin. The people who voted him into office are mostly 10 Years Tourists. People who did not live in SF ten years ago and wont be living in SF in ten years time. Always moved from some affluent suburb. Usually out of state. The quickest way to shut-up a loud mouth “progressives” in SF is to ask them how many months / years they have lived in SF. If more than ten they are either trust fund babies or have made serious money in tech etc. They are never from SF. They are never ordinary working stiff. If they have little money they are just slumming it at the moment. Before they move on.
The Homeless Industry is worth at least $800M a year employs at least 3,000 people and has made absolutely no difference to the number of street people in SF since the mid 1980’s. About 8K/10K back then, about 8K / 10K now. And pretty much the same kind of people. Winos, junkies who refuse treatment, small time criminals, drifters and runaways, and the mentally ill put on the streets by the ACLU lawsuit in the 1980’s. Less than 20% have any connection with the City. Only arrived in the last 12 months. Maybe 5% were long term residents of SF. Mostly the winos.
The actual number of true homeless in SF has always been the same. A few hundred. And they are very easy to spot. So I will always make time for them. The rest, apart from the mentally ill, the runaways and the drifters, are just parasites looking for free handouts. Quickest way to end the “Homeless Crisis” is to stop free handouts. Seen them clear out very quickly at least twice in the last four decades when quality of life laws were enforced and conditional help was enforced.
So a totally made up problem deliberately engineered by political special interests. A very lucrative one for “community groups” and other grifters. Each of those programmes is an easy $100K p.a each for the “community organizers”. When you track down the accounts.
Public order is a trait of whiteness, along with hard work, timeliness, and integrity, among others, and must be destroyed.
Once public order is destroyed the whole racist society will come down with it. This is why the Soros DA’s refuse to enforce the laws that maintain order. They encourage shoplifting, drug use, car jacking, mugging, riots et al.
When will the normals, the deplorables fight back?
I read somewhere about a California city that paid pretty good money to people employed to clean up human feces. It turns out that they would slip homeless people a couple of bucks now and then to keep them crapping on the sidewalks. Some staff in residential drug treatment facilities here in Pennsylvania were found to be giving discharged clients enough money to go get a fix. There were Methadone clinics here wherein staff would never ween addicts from the “treatment”. Why would they? What about the war on drugs? I worked in law enforcement for thirty years. The vast majority in that field thought the “war” was pointless, but, hey, it’s a job.
The farmed people are an expensive cash crop our voted-in leaders cultivate to milk their power from us. Think two legs bad four legs good. We are told we are not compassionate unless we vote for their crop as we are told we have to work harder and harder.. An ever expanding farm gives the voted-in-compassionate leaders more power think two legs good four legs bad and the pigs are walking on their rear legs dressed like humans.
There’s a very simple truism:
– If you tax something, you get less of it
– If you subsidize something, you get more of it
Our governments have been taxing the productive and inventive out of existence, while subsidizing the useless and parasitic to the point where they are now an overwhelming majority in the Dem-Wing-run cities.
The end-game is obvious.
Yep, the homeless industrial complex.
I also have increasingly come to believe that most of the left-wing efforts on the last X of years (homeless policy, social justice, community grants, defund the police, etc.) are designed from the ground up to be massive conduits of graft and fraud for hard left activism.
Oh, I knew about the Homeless Industrial Complex, if not by that name – and that generally, you will magically get more of what you subsidize and tolerate … but ‘people farming’ was such an vivid analogy: farming people for the cash crop, indeed. I thought of another example of people farming – the ‘refugee resettlement racket’ which amounts to religious foundations like the Catholic refugee organization and Lutheran Social Services farming refugees for the government money crop.
See, the thing is that you get these situations by setting up false incentives. The government wants to “help” the refugees, the “charitable organizations” see a way to milk subsidies, and it all works out well for them. But, the quality of life for those communities impacted by all the help? Nobody ever quantifies the damage done through rising crime, social disruption, or any of the other side effects.
What needs to be done is to break down real social costs, and charge back accordingly. Those do-gooders feeding the homeless? Fine; let them do it. But, at the same time, they need to be paying for the additional policing, the crime, and all the other “minor little problems” that come along with their ego-boo “service”. You ruin the neighborhood by turning your church into an attractive nuisance? Fine; you pay for that–Compensate the homeowners around you, the cops, the rest.
The thing that stuns me with a lot of these people is just how oblivious they are to the ramifications of their little ego-trip self-indulgences. I was talking to a pastor, years ago, about the effect his “helpful” little homeless feeding station efforts were having on the locale. He literally could not see how his activities were causing all the problems, and he was also utterly baffled at why his congregation was shrinking, mostly because people didn’t feel safe near the church, what with all the homeless living in the no-longer usable public park next door.
Majority of the problem here, I’m afraid, is that we don’t assess the true social costs of these efforts, nor do we charge the people creating them the costs accrued by their happy little efforts.
Sad thing is, I can see where this is going, and where it’s going to end. At some point, people are just going to have had enough, and they’re going to start conducting vigilante operations on their own, and I can see a whole lot of “humanitarian” types joining their clients out in the forests. Likely, in shallow graves.
I think an inflection point is approaching, one where a whole lot of people start demonstrating ruthless heartlessness, and we start going “Oh, you want a handout… Really? OK, here’s mine… In 9mm…”. You can abuse human compassion, and I think a large part of why people used to be so uncaring about things was that they were tired of the freeloaders. As slack comes out of the economy, less and less tolerance is going to be available for any of this BS, and we’re gonna get what we get. And, I think that what we get is gonna be a whole bunch of informal social actions going on, that other people are just going to turn a blind eye towards. “Oh, yeah… I saw that homeless panhandler that harassed my wife for weeks get shot, but ya know what? I have no idea who did it. At. All.”.
It has been some time since I’ve seen a story where municipal authorities have cracked down on free lance feeding sites. This had been presented in the media as the height of heartlessness. Possibly a sign that patience is running out. I’m referring to the sane parts of the country, not California.
Banned, Penny. I mean it. Your next comment on any of my posts will be marked as spam – Sgt. Mom
With the homeless and crime issues (which are highly related, both of which show the contempt the Dems have for the cities they rule), the Dems are going to keep bleeding Hispanic support, especially Hispanic men. Note the NYPD cop whose funeral was today was Hispanic, as was his wife. Their “Everybody vs Whitey” strategy isn’t as compelling as they think it is…
S.M. Stirling’s Draka series describes a society that makes no bones about the fact that people farming is what they do. (shudder)
the worst conditions seem to happen in the more prog localities, if i heard right, skid row in los angeles is 50 blocks long, the world they are bringing into being is in hobbes’s word ‘nasty brutish and short’