The Outstater
Conspiracy or Stupidity, You Choose
OUR WOES are not the result of a conspiracy — at least that’s what I keep telling myself. But there is a theory that nags at me. It involves the Cloward-Piven strategy and iit works to raise the cost of social-justice programs to the point of societal ruin.
More about that later.
The news clipping in front of me says that the Indianapolis city council this week overturned a veto by the mayor and approved $356 million in new tax revenue to address road maintenance. Suggestions that alternative line items be cut to support such infrastructure were rejected out of hand.
What? For all these years Democrats have thought the roads were just maintaining themselves? When they were spending that money on high-minded BLM and DEI projects, did they assume that the potholes were self-fulfilling?
This brings us to a tipping point, dear friends, at which we finally understand that those who push for higher taxes to pay for supposed social injustices (homeless “service centers,” government grocery stores, welfare for the able-bodied, affirmative action, Islamic centers, etc.) are unconcerned whether our society as a whole survives. Nor are they interested in solving the problems for which they crusade so compassionately. It is just one random emergency, crisis or outrage after another — all to be solved by increasing taxes or regulations.
This can’t be mere incompetence, something more serious is in play. The cynical will point to that neat little conspiracy theory mentioned earlier, the Cloward-Pivan strategy. Let my assistant Grok explain it:
The strategy was outlined in 1966 by sociologists-activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven of Columbia University’s School of Social Work. The two were dismayed by how many people were eligible for public welfare benefits but were not collecting them.
They meant to reverse that, to organize a large-scale drive to enroll all eligible people onto the welfare rolls and help existing recipients claim their full legal benefits (plus special grants for the undocumented). They believed this would:
- Overwhelm welfare bureaucracies with applications and demands.
- Create severe fiscal strain on local and state governments.
- Generate bureaucratic chaos and political crisis, especially in big cities.
In fact, that’s how it turned out. What was only a gleam in the eye of Cloward and Piven has given birth to total societal disruption. The Democratic Party’s urban coalition (white intellectuals and the ethnically identified) has been activated. The party is being forced by its radical elements to respond with the disastrous proposal now before the electorate — specifically, communism.
Whoa, let’s slow down here. Cloward-Piven aside, isn’t the idea of a grand conspiracy a bit strong, a bit McCarthyesque? And the characterization of Indianapolis councilmen as “unconcerned” sounds like an overreach. Surely they mean well.
Well yes, perhaps, but they may not know that collectively we already pay more in total taxes than we spend on food, clothing and housing combined. In other words, they may just be stupid, unaware that they are impoverishing their constituency and destroying the economy.
Somehow this doesn’t make me feel better. — tcl
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