Tom, that is self-serving bullshit and you know it. Do you mean to tell me that if we eliminated all public assistance and the safety net the world would once again revert to some idyllic suburban Mayberry RFD? There never was such a time.

Were the world's great city slums surrounding your much-missed turn-of-the-century
satanic mills such Edens of bliss and community peace and love? For Chrissake, read your Dickens. Go watch Gangs of New York, reflect for a moment on the criminal cesspools of urban life that made up "home" for most of those who toiled in the Gilded Age, or Victorian London, or modern day Calcutta.

Poverty causes crime. No, it is not so simplistic that the hungry must steal bread to eat, although that happens too. There is much more to it than that. Poverty causes a breakdown in social structures, institutions, communities, and eventually families. This leads to hopelessness and despair. These are then replaced by the Mafia, Gangbangers and other organized criminal elements. And this is aggravated by the dislocations caused by changes in employment and settlement patterns brought about by the way people earn their living, whether it be the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or today's massive shifts in employment patterns and population, or that bought on by yesterday's influx of blacks into the cities looking for work, or immigrants brought here to meet the demands of business for cheap labor. Economic change causes social change and cultures cannot adapt quickly enough, so they degrade. It doesn't take mass riches to reverse this trend, all it requires is the hope that things will improve in the future. It means jobs.

It's happened before, you know, read your history. Do you think removing welfare is going to suddenly make people virtuous? It didn't work in 1890 when no one had ever heard of welfare, it didn't work when slaves displaced the landless peasants in first century Rome, and it didn't work when they converted England's farmland into sheep runs in the 16th century,either. It sure as hell isn't going to happen now. In fact, its the middle class today that's starting to get a taste of that despair and hopelessness now.
We can hear them whining from here.

Urban crime and dislocation occurs when the society can no longer provide a means for all its people to achieve some level of decency, dignity, peace, justice and prosperity. The mechanisms that serve to maintain social order, the nuclear and extended families, the community, even the nation itself, start to break down. And without that social structure, people become individuals, lone wolves out for themselves only, with no thought for anyone but their own comfort and wealth. Hell, you should feel right at home. That sounds like the ultimate capitalist society. We are no longer a community of producers, we are now a herd of scavengers. This is what happens when you do not give everyone an opportunity to participate in the economic system.

The only way to solve the problem is how we solved it in the early 20th century and after the war, with jobs that will allow the wealth to be spread back into the community. But that takes time. It took the European immigrants a long time before they left the tenements and moved into the suburbs. We don't have a frontier of free land any more to expand into. We have to make do with what we've got.

And what we have is too many people. We have a surplus of people. We have more population available than is required to operate this economy, and those that are left over are becoming stagnant and foul, poisoned by their own products of decomposition. And as a group, they are growing. This pool of uselessness is expanding into the middle class now. People haven't just turned ugly for no reason, and certainly they haven't gotten that way because they've been spoiled by too much cheap education or health care or housing.

Maybe I just believe this because it was that cheap education and housing and health care that allowed me to escape that world, and because I was brought up in a family that still had faith and hope that hard work, with a little helping hand, could help us out of that hole. I spent the first ten years of my life in a government housing project. But it was in a time of rising expectations.

We have social problems because the economic system is failing at doing its job, providing all the people with employment and prosperity, not just those who own it or help administer it. Welfare is not the cause of the problem, but it isn't the solution, either. It's a short-term fix to keep the mob at bay until you can give them the tools they need to get themselves out of the mess you've put them in.

Yes, you. Because until you stop looking at the economy as your own private little computer game of career advancement, and see it as the means by which the entire society itself benefits and progresses, you are part of the problem.