Kevin Dahlgren on the Allure of Homelessness, the Danger of Compassion, and Portland’s Progressives
Nobody comes out of the homelessness issue looking good. Not the left, the right, and certainly not the homeless themselves. Instead we have, respectively, (1) people who put feeling good about themselves above the lives of the most vulnerable, (2) people who blame the most vulnerable for said vulnerability and then subsequently wash their own hands of any culpability, and (3) people who have failed, been failed, and are now reduced to living in addiction, violence, filth, and a degradation of the human spirit rarely paralleled in history.
How did we get here? Kevin Dahlgren asks that question to the homeless themselves. He ventures into encampments, drug dens, and black markets to capture raw interviews with thousands of homeless people across Portland, Oregon. His videos are disturbing, raw, and unscripted. And they’re honest.
We talk about a video of Kevin’s in which a man says he came to Portland after watching a news segment (while incarcerated). It reported that in Portland, you could get heroin on any street corner. We watch another in which a young pregnant woman uses fentanyl.
There’s nothing easier in the world than to bash the left for the state of the country’s homelessness epidemic—and the left deserves it—but they’re far from the only culprit. I want to take a moment to talk about the system-wide, bipartisan failures that have brought us here.
I’ll start by criticizing the Left for something which I don’t think they have literally ever before been criticized: Not being identitarian enough. Specifically, for screeching about how “It’s not HOMELESS people, it’s people who are UNHOUSED!” while women who are unhoused become human trafficked into sex-slavery because the government can’t force them into safe housing. I want to criticize the Right for refusing to spend money on desperately needed social services, like women-only homeless shelters where they can be safe from rape and partner abuse.
I want to criticize the Left for denying the most vulnerable women in our society the right to safety by pretending not to know what a woman is, and in doing so, vitiating women-only spaces. I want to criticize the Right for finally getting in power, and then spending their political capital going ape-shit and culture-warring over what a woman is instead of passing laws to protect tax-paying, law-abiding citizens from random acts of violence by mentally ill, drug-addicted homeless people.
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There is not one city in America where two men can walk down the street holding hands and not be attacked by a homeless crack addict. To my mind, there is no clearer indication of the fundamental failure of both parties. I encourage you to watch my conversation with Kevin as we grapple with the system failures that have brought us to this point. It’s a grim conversation, but that’s more reason it’s necessary.
Peter
“I want to criticize the Right for finally getting in power, and then spending their political capital going ape-shit and culture-warring over what a woman is instead of passing laws to protect tax-paying, law-abiding citizens from random acts of violence by mentally ill, drug-addicted homeless people.” The right is fighting about what a woman is because the left keeps allowing men in women’s spaces and in women only homeless shelters. Until that is solved how can the right fix the problem?
Government is not a solution to this problem, or to any other social or economic problem. Its infantilizing and enabling welfare schemes, morally bankrupt due to them being funded by tax-theft--legalized theft, but theft nonetheless--are not a solution. Government's control of money and its control over every sector of the economy and wages and other prices, and their impact on employment is not a solution. Government control of medical care of every type, and insurance is not a solution.
Since the primary unit in any society is the individual, not any group qua group; since human beings possess the essentially-human-defining faculties of reason and volition, thus are autonomous, self-owning, self-governing, and self-responsible agents of self-determination and personal well-being, the foundation of the solution to one's hardships, self-created or not, is the individual.
Since no one is a slave to any other human being, the only morally sound (i.e. sound by an objective, factually based standard or morality) and just assistance one may receive, the only one that is conducive to a free and civilized society, is charity--and only charity--i.e. assistance that is 100% privately and voluntarily funded, and voluntarily offered, in whatever form it may take, in accord with the giver's private property rights, and personal standards of giving.
Government operators and their fellow employees, whether on the "left" or the "right" (meaningless terms, as Ludwig von Mises noted), have no rational or realistic solutions to offer because government is a tri-level (local, state, federal), massively bureaucratized and politicized Leviathan that, like all of its employees, is funded by tax-theft and inflation, thus not-answerable and not accountable to the civilian population. Its mismanagement and waste of resources, negligence, and inefficiencies are features, not bugs; so pointing accusatory fingers at its operators is childish folly.
Since truly free markets and self-determination and self-responsibility are anathema to government operators on the "left" and "right", and to their citizen supporters, the status quo, with all of its wreckage, and waste, and human tragedies will continue unabated.