The enduring appeal of destructive utopianism

I know, let’s take from some folks and give the loot to others, turning the most deserving into — millionaires!

This variety of political reasoning is so popular that, instead of being laughed out of the public arena, add in a dollop of “race” and it’s a headline.

At least in California.

“San Francisco’s reparations committee has proposed paying each Black longtime resident $5 million and granting total debt forgiveness,” explains the Fox News Digital story. 

But why just “Black” residents? 

Oppression. Racism. The Usual Suspects of the woke: “due to the decades of ‘systematic repression’ faced by the local Black community.”

What happened to “systemic”? Why “systematic”? Maybe the inconvenient fact that there was no long tradition of chattel slavery in California requires that extra syllable. 

The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s notion is, we’re told, “to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”

So Blacks in former slave states should get ten million each? 

Or fifty. 

Do I hear $100 million?

Fortunately, the report will likely be shelved, as feared by its supporters.

Unfortunately, sufferers of commonsense deficit syndrome don’t realize how their all-too-familiar program negatively affects the actual people they say they serve. When you look at San Francisco’s mass lootings, which group of people do you see stealing garbage bag loads off Walmart shelves? 

The looters are mostly racial minorities who’ve been encouraged to believe they “are owed.” 

So they steal.

But any person — man or woman, black or white — who resorts to open theft throws a monkey wrench into his or her future. It’s no way to get ahead.

Which increases the wealth and income gap.

The utopians themselves make sure the cycle of dysfunction never ends.

twv