The question of "the deserving poor" versus "the underclass" has a long pedigree. I think I first had this conversation with my grandfather; he explained How It Used To Be. In classical England the deserving poor got the workhouse, a.k.a. "the poorhouse"; maybe indenture. The insane got the asylum alias, "Bedlam". Criminals got Australia, or the rope. (What can I say. Product Of His Times.)
We see a similar tripartite division in Deep Space Nine's 1990s jeremiad against the "haven" - San Francisco's streets approximating our near future. In our times, nobody gets anything. They just get stuck on the streets or maybe in some fenced-off part of the streets, with Social Services. Which services then get cut, because who cares about street scum. Welcome to Joker World. Soooo much more enlightened than the Victorian days for which dear Granddad pined.
Ilana Mercer recently posted two articles concerning Seattle, admitting that under half the homeless were addicts, implying still that the (bare) majority were Deserving Poor. Mercer relied heavily upon the Official Record, publications like TIME magazine which have never lied to alt-righters like Mercer before. To test that hypothesis (whether or not she read it from Mercer) Heather mac Donald has gone to a homeless encampment in San Francisco to ... go ask them.
If there be Deserving Poor from San Fran among the homeless, most such have long since fled that particular city. The city is an open-air Bedlam now. The homeless are prey to a criminal element who have homes of their own, far from there. As in - Honduras far. I doubt matters differ so far in Seattle. Maybe Mercer could go ask them.
Dame Mac Donald is very brave to give us this article - which even admits to an illegal drug deal on her own part, to test the cost of fentanyl. She could be busted for that and probably will be; less for the act itself, than for making the city, the state, and the Federal deep state all look bad.
My instinct is that Mercer is right about the situation that is driving the wealthiest cities' downscale working-class out of house and home. But there is a great difference between "Pursuit Of Happyness" and the disaster that is developing in the streets. If a man is priced out of city A, the man can move to city B, earn up a little nest egg, and maybe move back. For Europeans, we've been doing that literally before we had a literature to record it.
This disaster isn't being driven by Big Tech. It is being driven by a failure of law enforcement.
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