The left puts effort into responsibility and care for community. Why do you think the right advocates for dismantling social services and the left champions them?
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (or good things used to advance perverse incentives).
Too Much of a Good Thing: Methadone and "clean needle" clinics on 125th and Brooklyn under the guis of "harm reduction". The goal should be to reduce drug usage. Not make a shopping mall for dealers and zombies. Another is the total hands off approach of the mentally ill and aggressive homeless on the subways and on the streets.
Good Things Use To Advance Perverse Incentives: The entire homeless industrial complex in California, which does absolutely nothing but syphon money to these homeless "nonprofits". I lived in both San Jose and LA and frankly the situation was addressed in a maddeningly regressive fashion.
You sometimes have to ask yourself WHY someone is championing something. Very often it's not because of altruism.
Criminalizing drug addiction increases harm. Treating it as a disease provably reduces harm. And, in fact, reduces drug use.
Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
I also said nothing of criminalization of addicts. Seller's, sure.
> Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
This makes no sense. The halfass'd effort is worse than nothing at all.
Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.
Most people live in towns, cities, states and nations, not communities. State and national governments cannot rely on the good of the neighbour. Larger, more equitable systems need to be put in place.
Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.
I think it's similar, at least where I live. With a better support system, people seem to be less likely to get dependent on it. Seems like a good thing to do in the long run, even if you just think about it economically.
Unless, perhaps, you need a class of people that are in a sort of benefits bondage. I don't really want to think that this is by design though.
