Bertram's Blog

A delusion is a fixed, false belief that is held firmly even when facts show that it is wrong. The trouble is, today a large segment of the population won’t accept the facts, and instead, tries to force everyone else to accept their delusion. I hate to think that our culture is going insane, but that’s the way it seems to me. As with most of my recent offerings, I’m going to stay away from any of the obvious whateveraphobia examples and go with a more logistical one — poverty and the suicidal empathy that uses it as an excuse for defunding the police, emptying prisons, and hoping people’s good nature rises to the fore. Once their poverty is relieved, of course, by raising taxes and impoverishing the working folk.

The first false premise is that defunding the police decreases crime. It’s no surprise that cities that cut way back on their police budgets ended up with even more crime.

The second false premise is “poverty.” When poverty rates are calculated, any government assistance people receive is left out of the equation. When that assistance is calculated in, our poverty rate drops to 2% and consists mainly of people like the homeless or drug-addicted street people. Even that low number would disappear if all the millions of tax dollars sent to help those people was used to help them instead of disappearing into the bank accounts of the funds’ administrators. Actually, that’s being a bit specious. A lot of people live below the poverty line, like the elderly on a fixed income, though they still manage to deal with life without committing crimes.

Assuming the lower poverty rate is true, then the real poverty is one of consequence, attitude, character, spirit. People don’t steal because they are impoverished. They steal because they can, because there are no consequences, because they want something and want it now.

Young people who descend en masse on a store, break in, destroy it and loot it, are not doing it out of poverty. They are doing it because they can and because it’s “fun.” Will defunding the police stop this sort of thing? Absolutely not, though in truth, the police might as well be defunded since they so seldom show up at such events until long afterward, if at all.

The defrauders who are stealing billions of dollars of our tax dollars are not doing it out of poverty, but again, because they can and because they are greedy. They see an easy mark and go after it. Even those who steal a smaller stake, such as less than $10,000, do it because it’s a cinch since the number was too small for any government to want to go after it.

People who commit murder don’t do it because they are financially impoverished, but because they wanted to do it for whatever reason. Did poverty compel them to murder? No. It’s something within them. Sometimes that “something” is drugs. Sometimes it’s psychopathy. Sometimes it’s a reason known only to the doer.

It’s the same with rape. How could financial poverty contribute to such a crime? A rape in no way gets them out of their poverty-stricken state, unless they end up incarcerated, but too many people are rapidly let out again. Some are not even charged, especially if they are from a culture that believes rape is not a crime. But here’s a clue — when you are in this country, it doesn’t matter what laws hold in another country. If you commit a crime for whatever reason, you need to pay the consequences. Unfortunately, all too often, the consequences are paid by the perpetrator’s next victim.

Socialists and other far-into-delusion leftists believe, or at least want you to believe, that “curing” poverty will cure all social ills. We know it’s not true. Taking more money from hard-working, law-abiding citizens only makes those citizens poorer and fraudsters richer. Why, when socialists talk about “free,” do they never mention clawing back the money fraudsters have stolen? Because it’s not money they want. It’s . . . too be honest, I don’t know what the individual socialists and socialist voters want, though the globalist agenda for more than a century has been to turn the United States into a third world country.

Luckily, I’m not a politician, so I don’t have to come up with a solution, but I do have a couple of ideas, besides clawing back those defrauded funds. One problem is that people on government assistance make more than they would at an entry level job, giving them no incentive to work. So, instead of penalizing the rest of the country by raising the minimum wage and gutting businesses to subsidize these people further, lower the subsidies. Give them a reason to try to better themselves. Or here’s an idea: stop teaching people the oppressed/oppressor ideology. Not everyone fits into those two categories. Most people are not oppressed. Most people are not oppressors. But once you start seeing yourself as a victim, you’ve impoverished yourself to the point of helplessness, where all your problems are someone else’s responsibility to cure. As for the drug problem that creates so many social ills? I have no idea. People who want to drug themselves will always find a way.

I have another thought — since the socialist leaders and their backers in this country are millionaires and billionaires, why they don’t start with themselves? There’s no law I know of that says you can’t pay more income tax than you owe. They and their agenda to take rights away from individuals while charging those citizens exorbitant taxes to do so, would seem so much more sincere if they put their money where their mouth is. As it stands now, they just sound delusional.

Come to think of it, the biggest delusion is that the government can fix everything. Quite frankly, going by the past fifty years or so, they can’t fix anything. The more money they throw at a problem, the more the problem increases because more money is available to pay for the same static services. With all the money thrown at the homeless problem, it’s greater than ever. With all the money thrown at the medical establishment and the insurance companies, the costs of care are greater than ever. With all the money thrown at the housing industry, housing has become less affordable. And people think taking more money from people who are actually solving problems is going to cure anything? Besides more government money causing more problems, it’s the government regulations and laws and licensing at every level of government, down to states and counties, that control the building industry that has caused the problem in the first place, since it’s more cost effective for a builder to build a monstrosity rather than a small starter home with few amenities. (In Denver, for example, total fees and permits add up to $40,000 before a single hour of work can be done.)  Yep. Delusion.

I’m sure you didn’t need to hear any of this, but I needed to get it out of my head, so here it is

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One