Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
Once a child has learned the basic powers of logic and deduction, he can understand relationships between concepts pretty intuitively. For example, a kid would understand that if you pay someone to not work, they will be lazy. Similarly, if you fail to punish someone when they do evil, they will continue to do evil. We know that children can figure this out because when they don’t have consequences, they misbehave more. Most people take this ability to logically see relationships between different concepts into adulthood, but there’s one kind of person who actually loses this ability as they grow older. That kind of person is called a politician.
Today, American cities are synonymous with high crime rates. It has become so pervasive in places like Saint Louis and Baltimore that it is hard to imagine it could be any other way. NGOs, nonprofits, think tanks, and universities receive billions in taxpayer money to research the causes of crime and how it could be solved. They will obviously never solve the problem, because they make money by researching the problem.
The solution is quite simple, as El Salvador has demonstrated over the last year. The country was ravaged by criminal gangs, which were notoriously violent and had captured whole towns. In 2015, El Salvador’s murder rate was 106 per 100,000. President Naib Bukele decided that the country had enough, and so he gave the simplest and clearest answer to crime: arrest all the criminals. It should surprise no one that this worked. Now, some cities boast murder rates of 2.4 per 100,000 people, a 98% reduction.
It is remarkably simple to clean up cities and stop crime. Last year, even Gavin Newsom showed his capabilities by cleaning up the San Francisco streets for Xi Jinping’s visit. Our leaders have the power to save our cities and stop crime, but they don’t. For the basic negligence of their duties as elected leaders, these politicians should go down in history with the greatest shame.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/liberalism-and-conservatism/crime-is-not-complicated/
