Leftists have a tactic that is often effective in generating support for their policies. They tell a really sad story, sprinkle in some horrifying statistics, and then evade relevant facts. A story about the eviction crisis illustrates this tactic.

The article begins with a story about Samantha, a mother who worries where she and her six children will sleep every night after being evicted from their apartment. Unable to find a job, she depends on welfare and charity to sustain her family. Her children have developed physical and development problems from their housing instability.

And Samantha’s family is not alone, the article tells us. Between 2000 and 2016, more than 61 million eviction filings were made in the United States. And today, nearly 18 million households have little or no confidence that they can pay the rent. Not surprisingly, the article calls for more government programs to prevent evictions and secure affordable housing for all Americans.

No decent person would find any pleasure in the plight of Samantha or the millions facing eviction. However, a sad story is not a valid argument for more government programs. More importantly, a sad story is only a part of the story. And the rest of the story is what Leftists don’t want us to hear.

For example, the article doesn’t explain why Samantha has six children that she can’t support. Apparently, the author doesn’t consider that important or relevant. We are supposed to ignore details and simply feel sorry for her. While going on for seven pages about the difficulties faced by renters, nothing is said about the landlords who are being forced to provide free housing to non-paying tenants. Instead of addressing all of the relevant facts, the article considers the eviction crisis in isolation—out of context.

Of course, considering the full context would require an objectivity that Leftists seldom exhibit. If they presented the full context, we might not feel so sorry for Samantha and the millions facing eviction. Motivating us to feel sorry for the poor and down trodden allows the Leftists to cash in their trump card—the widespread belief that we have a moral obligation to serve those in need.

If serving others is a moral imperative, then the reason for an individual’s suffering is irrelevant. Whether his plight is the result of years of self-destructive choices or an isolated misfortune doesn’t matter. His need is the only fact that must be known or discussed.

If we want to defeat the Left, then we must reject both its methods and its premises. We must consider the full context, including the past choices that individuals have made. More importantly, we must reject the premise that we have a moral obligation to serve the needy. Until we declare that our life is ours to live as we choose, rather than in servitude to others, the Left will continue its endless parade of the indigent.

Brian Phillips is the founder of the Texas Institute for Property Rights. Brian has been defending property rights for nearly thirty years. He played a key role in defeating zoning in Houston, Texas, and in Hobbs, New Mexico. He is the author of three books: Individual Rights and Government Wrongs, The Innovator Versus the Collective, and Principles and Property Rights. Visit his website at texasipr.com.

Over the past decade, California has made a number of significant reforms to its criminal justice system that not only made important steps toward turning around a deeply troubled prison system but retained voters’ support on the 2020 ballot. Now the state is implementing a set of reforms to its juvenile justice system that, while low‐​profile, are set to replace California’s historically flawed state Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ).

The plan to close DJJ reflects two important realities: California imprisons fewer juveniles than before, and the cost of incarcerating those who remain is unsustainable (almost $300,000 per person). There are causes for not only optimism about the reforms, but to think that they could be a model for other states.

As Governor Newsom’s original proposal noted, juvenile detention facilities at the county level have more than enough space to accommodate offenders currently held in state facilities, and housing offenders in county facilities allows them more access to their families and home communities, who can be important resources in the rehabilitation process. DJJ, on the other hand, has a higher recidivism rate than California’s adult prison system does, and has failed to eliminate perennial reports of abuses.

Governor Newsom and the legislature took the first steps toward closing DJJ in last year’s legislative session, passing SB 823, and added further details this year with SB 92. These bills started the process of zeroing out DJJ’s population by barring it from accepting most new inmates after July 1, 2021, and transferring any remaining inmates to their home counties by July 1, 2023. SB 823 would also create a Juvenile Justice Realignment Block Grant program to fund county‐​level services for the children who would have otherwise been wards of DJJ. Alongside the Juvenile Justice Block Grant, SB 823 created the Office of Youth and Community Restoration (OYCR) to collect data from counties and use this data to identify best practices and policy recommendations.

California’s plan to close DJJ includes several provisions that will help ensure that the reforms amount to an improvement rather than an exercise in bureaucratic buck‐​passing:

• Collecting data to evaluate counties’ performance
• Providing a resource with best practices so counties know what works
• Ensuring accountability and maintaining oversight through the block grant program

SB 823 established new data collection requirements and the requirement to make data publicly available online. This system will collect, compile, and publish data from California’s 58 counties, which is necessary for transparency and for outside researchers and watchdogs to understand and constructively critique the new system. Too often, California’s 58 county governments collect or store important data separately, making it hard for citizens to understand how — and how well — their government is working. One example of this is data about the recidivism rate for county juvenile justice programs, which (in contrast to DJJ’s statistics) are decentralized and hard to find.

The data collection requirement could also enable counties to experiment with new, innovative models that could prove to be a significant improvement over existing systems. San Francisco is one such example, with its plan to close its juvenile detention facility and replace it with home‐​like rehabilitative centers. If San Francisco’s experiment is a success, and admittedly, there is no guarantee that it will, this reform should be adopted by other counties.

California’s juvenile justice reforms also include an important potential incentive for counties to adopt best practices compiled by the state and work toward improving their systems. The new Juvenile Justice Block Grant takes roughly the amount of money spent on DJJ and provides it to counties toward their spending on juvenile offenders who would previously have been sent to DJJ. Notably, this makes realignment budget‐​neutral relative to the previous system. The block grant program, in exchange for providing additional funding to counties, imposes additional reporting requirements, and requires counties to provide their plans for using the funds, with these plans published by OYCR. To ensure that the block grant money is spent responsibly, California should condition funding on counties’ juvenile justice systems being adequate, instead of turning approval and funding into a formality as in other policy areas. California policymakers have not only the opportunity but the duty to incentivize counties to adopt evidence‐​based practices to improve outcomes for youths in the justice system, as well as to collect the data from which to derive these best practices.

There are, of course, reasons for optimism about California’s juvenile justice reforms to remain measured. This is not the first time that California transferred responsibilities from a scandal‐​ridden state agency to its 58 counties. In large part due to a 1991 reform law, California transferred the responsibility for providing mental health services from the state level to the counties. At the least, this parallel should inspire great care in the plan for juvenile justice realignment: mental health realignment was flawed in many ways, and California’s mental health system has serious shortcomings.

Juvenile justice realignment, on the other hand, has a number of provisions that allay some of the concerns about parallels with mental health realignment. After mental health realignment, despite some measure of legislative tinkering, the reform program strayed from its intended goals. After California voters approved a new tax that provided a designated funding stream for mental health services, a state audit found that county mental health agencies had poor processes for spending the funding, and that they received insufficient oversight from the state. In juvenile justice, on the other hand, the state is maintaining the capacity for oversight through OCYR, and a capacity to hold counties accountable, through the juvenile justice block grant authorized by the legislature instead of mandated by a ballot initiative.

It’s also necessary to give DJJ credit where it is due: leading up to the Covid pandemic, DJJ made reforms intended to shift the facilities to a more rehabilitative model, taking Missouri’s juvenile justice system as an example. These reforms provided a degree of momentum in the right direction, and California can maintain this momentum at the county level by putting its Missouri Model plan in writing, and providing it to counties as a recommendation. Of course, as noted above, San Francisco has its own plan for shifting to a more rehabilitative model, as does Los Angeles (although Los Angeles’ plan has already encountered problems). But the shift from state to county‐​level responsibility for serious or violent juvenile offenders must continue the progress that DJJ appeared to be making, however limited.

Some of the causes for caution are more structurally ingrained than a realignment plan, however detailed, can address. In some ways, California’s county governments are designed in a way that makes them susceptible to poor governance. Counties (with the combined city and county of San Francisco being the only notable exception) are governed by Boards of Supervisors, who are, in general, lower‐​profile than mayors, but farther removed than city council members. Without a centralized authority or comprehensible separation of powers at the county level, voters can have trouble understanding who to blame for poor management — a major obstacle when deciding whether to throw out lousy elected officials.

This governance problem with California’s county governments underlines the importance of a robust state‐​level source of oversight to spur transparency and good management. But it would be, to some extent, naive to expect proper oversight: the only guarantee of decent government management is an active, educated bloc of voters who care deeply about the issues and hold elected officials accountable. Coincidentally, voters are paying more attention to criminal justice — and considering more drastic reforms — than they have before. While the center of today’s criminal justice reform movement is policing, the movement can expand its impact by demanding a new focus on rehabilitation, or at least good management, at county juvenile justice agencies.

Admittedly, transferring responsibility from the state to counties has a checkered history, but California has an opportunity to change that, and this set of reforms has meaningful details designed to avoid possible pitfalls. The stakes are high not only for the 800 young people locked up by the Division of Juvenile Justice, but for California’s adult prison system and the nation’s emerging prison abolition movement: these new reforms are too important to get wrong.

This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction.

The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so forth. And can we really count on private charity to fully provide for all the situations of genuine need among the population? Thus the result: Although the details vary greatly, every country with an advanced economy has an extensive system of “need”-based distributions of benefits to those designated as needy. But how many and which people should receive benefits, and how much?

In practice, the number of beneficiaries and level of generosity of a social safety net are inherently unstable. As soon as such a safety net comes into existence, there must inevitably be a line drawn between those who qualify for the benefits and distributions and those who do not. There will always be some elements of arbitrariness in the line-drawing; and the difference in “neediness” between the least-needy person who qualifies for benefits and the most-needy person who does not qualify may be so small as to be imperceptible. So shouldn’t the benefits then be expanded to include the next guy up the ladder? And how about the next guy after that?

An even worse problem than the fineness of the necessary distinctions is the arbitrariness. No matter how carefully eligibility criteria may be crafted, I submit that there will inevitably be many less needy people who qualify for and receive government safety-net benefits, while objectively more needy people fail to qualify. As one obvious example, some people with no income or significant assets at all may nonetheless be able to draw on substantial family resources (from parents, siblings, children, or more distant relatives) in times of need, while others may have just enough income or assets to fail to qualify but no family back-up of any kind. I personally know multiple twenty-somethings with well-off parents who nevertheless qualify for and use the Medicaid and food stamp programs. You probably do too. Hey, nobody said that parental income is part of the eligibility criteria!

Back in 2017 I had a post about downtown Manhattan City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who at the time of her election lived in subsidized “affordable” housing (via a federal housing voucher), even though her husband was the son of a partner of the law firm of Cravath, Swain & Moore — average per partner income of over $3 million per year. When caught, Rivera and the husband did not slink away in shame, but rather aggressively claimed that they had done nothing wrong — they had reported their “income” (including a substantial write-off for the husband’s business) accurately in the year in which they qualified for the voucher. Rivera remains as a sttting City Councilwoman today.

Let’s compare how families deal with lack of independence among members, to how governments deal with the same issue:

-Families. Nearly all families deal at various times with the issue of transitioning members, generally offspring, from being dependent on family support to being independent and on their own. Sometimes the transition happens without need for much of a push from the parents, and other times a big push may be in order. But essentially all parents that I have known (and almost all of my friends of my generation have gone through this) have made it a priority to encourage and cajole and help the kids to become independent. I have observed every sort of technique being deployed, for example: gradually reduce and ultimately eliminate direct financial support; demand that the kid get a job; cut off payment for the cell phone; demand rent for continuing to live in the family house or, in the end, throw the kid out of the house; make the kid take care of the dog and the plants; put the kid to work for a family business; etc., etc. These techniques and others may ultimately fail, particularly in the case of children with some kind of serious mental or physical disability. Still, I have never observed a family where developing independence of the kids was not at least an important goal.

-Government “safety net.” The issue is essentially the same, and the goal should be the same. But instead, in the real world, the dynamic is the exact opposite. Here are three factors that come into play:

– The safety net programs are run by bureaucracies, and the fundamental imperative of every bureaucracy is to grow the bureaucracy. In the case of safety net programs, growing the bureaucracy means increasing the number of clients of the programs, rather than decreasing them. The bureaucrats are happy to sign up new beneficiaries, and it is no part of their priorities to try to move beneficiaries off the program and into independence.

– Potential beneficiaries realize that the bureaucracies are soft touches, and quickly learn how to present themselves to qualify for handouts. Where mom and dad would not be fooled for a minute, the bureaucrats are eager for more clients and only too happy to help create and maintain dependency.

– And then there are the elected officials in the legislative and executive branches. Many to most of them recognize the beneficiaries of handout programs as bought votes who will remain loyal to the incumbents as long the the programs and the benefit streams are maintained. This is clearly a fundamental strategy of the Democratic Party, although I would not say that Republicans are innocent on the issue.

And thus we come to the current blunderbuss Democrat “budget reconciliation” bill, stuffed with new and expanded “need”-based distributions to expand the “safety net,” from child care payments and tax credits, to higher education subsidies, to expanded Medicaid, to more home health services, and on and on. (Nobody even knows everything that is included.). The whole idea is a massive increase in the numbers of people relying on a government handout.

In general, the pushback to this bill from Republicans has been that all this is wildly expensive and unaffordable, and will be extremely destructive of the economy. All of that I agree with. But the much bigger issue is the transformation of the basic relationship between the people and the government into a situation where many more, and probably most people will expect to be taking government handouts and support that they don’t really need and could very easily live without. Who looks on this as a good thing? Shouldn’t the goal be to have as many people as possible develop the ability to live independently, without government support? It’s terrible for people to live on government handouts. It saps the spirit. Who would want it?

Francis Menton