San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

“What ends up happening with a lot of progressive liberals in San Francisco,” said Tom, “is they get to go home to their nice house in Noe Valley and six-figure job and kids in private school. They can afford to vote progressively for social justice because they don’t have to walk their kids through the Tenderloin and play hopscotch over the feces and needles.”

In other words, for Mizner and the ACLU, the mentally ill are too impaired to be held accountable for breaking the law but not impaired enough to justify the same kind of treatment we provide to other people suffering mental disabilities, such as dementia. Understanding this, and the power of the ACLU in progressive cities and states such as San Francisco and California, goes a long way toward understanding the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homelessness crisis.

The lesson for anyone who cares about expanding human freedom, as opposed to trying to control others, is that we should be communicating to people that they have far more freedom, not less freedom, than they realize. The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.

Roth views the public’s belief in the legitimacy of “the system,” as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling,” solidarity with one’s fellow citizens, as the most important factors when it comes to homicide.

“The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” says one psychologist. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.”

How and why do progressives ruin cities? So far we have explored six reasons.

They divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insufficient shelter space.

They defend the right of people they characterize as Victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks, and along highways, as well as to break other laws, includi...

They intimidate experts, policy makers, and journalists by attacking them as being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the si...

They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, an...

They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the m...

And their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm reduction, Housing First, and camp-anywhere policies, leading them to misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty a...

What happened during the 1960s in the counterculture’s attempt to escape traditional obligations was an extension, not rejection, of the American frontier notion of freedom as the absence rather than presence of strong ties.

The demand that we give Victims special political authority is thus really a demand to give special political authority to those who claim to represent the supposed Victims, namely homelessness advocates.

Wrote Haidt, “self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-group” are values necessary to the functioning of civilization.

Psychologist Viktor Frankl agreed. “Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth,” he wrote. “In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”