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Why America's social policy is not helping the poor
There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.
Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.
Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Or:
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
The Angolans weren’t capable of mounting an invasion of South Africa proper and had no intention of doing so, plus by the mid-80s when the Mig-29 was entering service as an export product the Cold War was winding down. More generally, I don’t think it’s possible to believe in HBD and think any of the Southern African countries could present a serious military threat to South Africa, especially when most of SA’s neighbors relied utterly on South Africa for economic reasons and had no interest in participating. Angola’s annoyance with South Africa extended to South Africa’s involvement in Namibia and the Angolan Civil War (where it was in practice on the American side). The US only passed anti-apartheid legislation in 1986 and frankly I suspect that had the Soviet Union not collapsed the CIA would have found other ways to ensure the Angolan communists continued to be contained. In addition, both the Soviet Union and China traded extensively with South Africa behind the scenes, including in arms, as has only more recently become fully clear. The decline of American power since 2001 and the growth of China, not to mention new opportunities for trading relationships with the Arabs and others who wouldn’t care about apartheid would have further made the system more tenable for longer. The economy had stabilized even under American sanctions by 1989 as, like Russia today, the South Africans figured out how to obtain what they wanted anyway.
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