Crime and dumbishment
“The leap from a welfare state to a crime ridden ghetto state is but a small step.” I said that yesterday and, what with the Japanese tourists avoiding Saipan due, in part, to crime concerns, maybe the crime issue deserves some thought here.
Crime and economics can’t be divorced. Looking at it one way, our unsafe reputation will have an economic impact here, and is just another nail in the coffin of our moribund tourism industry. Crime, then, has economic consequences.
And economics has crime consequences as well. The social engineering that began in the 1960’s created an entire subculture of people who are socially and economically dysfunctional. Welfare state structuring essentially paid people to remain outside of the economic mainstream. And– bingo–a permanent, self-perpetuating ghetto class was born. I’ve seen it in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, and it even extends into the sunny Caribbean into the mean and sweaty streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Ghettos, of course, are nothing new, and they certainly predated the 1960’s “Great Society.” But in a lot of cases, ghettos were ethnic enclaves of the poor working class, and many of these folks bootstrapped their ways into the middle class. For many immigrants, the ghetto was the first step on the American ladder, not a permanent perch.
Now, of course, these urban jungles are the criminal equivalent of perpetual motion. As long as that sweet and easy government money flows into the place, all sorts of nasty behavior will continue. If you were to fly over east Los Angeles and drop stacks of hundred dollar bills onto the streets, what would the results be?
Would the phones start ringing off the hook at the neighborhood banks, as folks called in to inquire about savings account interest rates?
No way. The crack dealers would enjoy a booming business, malt liquor sales at the corner store would increase, and maybe a few more amplified radios would be in evidence. Cracked up, drunked up, rap-music’ed up ghetto rats–of the two legged variety–would be even meaner and nastier than they were before. Crime would go up, not down. A few more drive by shootings just to pass the time…and everybody would blame everyone but themselves for their own behavior.
Uncle Sam sends a lot of freebies out here, and the good times, they have been rolling. But there’s an economic Newtonian force that has an “equal and opposite reaction,” and the Japanese tourists are smart enough to want no part of that. It doesn’t take a lot of crooks to pee in the economic punch and spoil the tourism party for everyone.
At this point, the crime issue isn’t the key driving force behind the tourism industry. It is, however, a potentially important factor. The social snowball is rolling, and it’s just going to get bigger and bigger.
