They just wanted to do the right thing. The small town of Middletown, Ohio, a town of 49,000 people, has opened all manner of homeless services. There is everything from soup kitchens and shelters that allow you to be high and drunk to rehab facilities to sober up.It turns out that since their initiatives were put in place, the homeless are swamping the town and residents are shocked - shocked I say! - to find that many aren't even from their town!
And that's the problem. You can come to Middletown to stay drunk and high and get three hots and a cot without having to do much.
Seriously, they're that naive.
Middletown is learning the lesson that when they incentivize something, they get more of it. Some of it is voluntary migration of the homeless, but some of the homeless they've added have been dumped by other cities. It's not just New York City that gives homeless a one-way bus ticket to somewhere out of town (it's reported that NYFC spends more than half a million bucks on tickets every year), it's a widespread practice.
Listen, Middletown, I'll let you in on the secret. It's not a new secret; it's been known for millennia. Benjamin Franklin, put it this way:
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”The author of that PJ Media piece is Victoria Taft, who is also a radio and TV personality with talk radio show in California and TV appearances on One America News Network, OANN. She has some interesting anecdotes from covering the California homeless situation, but concludes with the bottom line:
Helping the homeless requires a delicate balance. This is a fragile population of people. But there's one thing you can bet on: if there's free stuff and if it's easy to get, they will come.
I wonder how long until Middleton needs the street cleaning treatments for human waste, like this one in Seattle? (Getty Images, Yuri Kadobnov)
Stupid should hurt.
ReplyDeleteMiddleton evidently hasn't had enough pain yet.
- Aesop
Agree 100% with you SiGB.
ReplyDeleteHowever that last picture is definitely NOT Seattle. It's somewhere in either Russia or Ukraine, would be my guess. I mean, they're socialists and whatnot, but they haven't started decorating buildings in cyrillic. Yet.
Sure does look like Cyrilic on that one building on the left. Mea culpa. But it has an extra dimension that makes it funnier.
DeleteThis is one of those instances where I re-run a picture I ran before: It's from July of 2017. My article is here and the source of the picture was The Blaze.
Do these people really think that they're *helping* those homeless folks?
ReplyDeleteWiser men have understood the lunacy of making "the poor" comfortable about being public charges. Have some Thomas Mackay:
ReplyDelete"...the cause of pauperism is relief. We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for."
Herbert Spencer was equally scathing on the subject of "sturdy beggars." Of them he wrote in The Man Versus The State: "They are simply the good-for-nothings, who hope to exist at the expense of the good-for-somethings."
Bring back the workhouses, damn it all!
"Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees
ReplyDelete"The soda water fountain
"Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
"In that Big Rock Candy Mountain"
I guess bums haven't changed in 100 years. Or 1000 years. Or . . .
I'm with Borepatch -- are they really about helping poor people or something else? Namely making themselves feel good throuhg fiscal virue signalling. Well it's all a larf until Middletown runs outta cash and becomes a sh*thole.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's the scandal which the left's hardly even bothering to hide anymore -- they scorn poor and low paid people. But I won't bang on.
Feed the poor, but you don't have to provide them endless calories or more than one hot meal a day - and, that chili or stew. Enough to keep them alive, but - other than children - not long-term nutritious.
ReplyDeleteAND, for any meals served, the recipients have to use their EBT cards to get them. No freebies, other than bologna sandwiches/cold cereal and milk type of meals.
They have to commit to sobriety. Use drugs on the street, and you get dumped into the drunk tank, while waiting for a psych evaluation. Mentally ill go to institutions, and, if released before 6 months, have to be placed in a tent on the releasing physician's property, or under PERSONAL bond of the staff releasing the guy. Let THEM suffer the consequences of the release, not the rest of us. By personal bond, I mean that the staff that thinks it's a good idea, need to find an insurance company to agree to pay up for the cost of the guy's actions after release. The price of that bond should insure that the staffer has skin in the game.
And, for those not going to the loony bin, any release must be underwritten by PERSONAL bond of the people arguing for it. They may not get reimbursement from their employer, nor other entity for the cost.
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