It’s generally a sign of a weak argument when something that is a plain and obvious disaster, which must be fixed, urgently, is allowed to flourish because of constitutional theories and scientific studies. … Without common sense, all the verbal gymnastics on earth will not find the truth. 

So Edward Ring writes at American Greatness.

He quotes a Democrat who objects to dangerous Democratic policies concerning the homeless:

I live in a city, Portland, OR, plagued by homelessness. I do not want homelessness to be criminal, but I also want to remove homeless camps and tents from my city’s sidewalks, fields, under bridges or overpasses. … The objection is far greater than a distaste for the appearance of the homeless or their camps.. … Portland’s waterfront is plagued by the smell of urine under bridges, large number of rats (they come out at night), danger from discarded drug paraphernalia, and threatening nature of many homeless people.

He writes that citizens fear “walking by large numbers of people sleeping in filthy towels, sleeping bags and tents”; that “a business owner’s objections to having a homeless person sleeping outside her store” is not unreasonable, nor is the preference of householders who live near a homeless camp “to live without fear, or worry their children will play with a discarded syringe”.

Many, perhaps most of the homeless are lunatics. They need to be in asylums for their own and everyone else’s sake. They are on the streets because way back in the last quarter of the last century, theorists who made academic studies insisted that those we commonly called raving madmen were “really” sane and the rest of us, designated “society” or “the community”, were “really” the insane. These theorists sprang up simultaneously in many Western countries – notably America, Britain and Germany –  singing the same song. An international chorus hymning a momentous discovery, a breakthrough in the understanding of human evolution: what seems insane is sane; what seems sane is insane. 

The compassionate thing to do was to “release these men and women into the community”. The homeless wretches reel about the streets of the cities, bewildered, helpless, desperate, lost. Drugged and diseased, they lived on the streets and died on the streets. Unless they were caught for crimes and died in prison. Successive generations of them do the same.

But now theorists who make academic studies are insisting that homeless deranged criminals are “really” the victims of social crime, and we, “society” or “the community” who obey the law are “really” criminals. The compassionate thing to do is to let them commit crimes.

We’re not making this up.

Edward Ring makes it plain that it is not compassionate to tolerate crime:

As anyone who lived or regularly visited New York City in the early 1990s will attest, “Broken Windows” worked brilliantly. Crime and disorder fell precipitously virtually overnight, and for the first time in decades, the city felt safe. It worked so well that most of the rest of the country quickly followed suit with similar results. It is the rare social science theory that actually worked. … Abandoning it wholesale is folly. Do people really want more disorder? How is that good for anyone and how will it not lead to more crime?

He is talking about all street crimes, not just those committed by the psychotic homeless. In California now, the theorists who make academic studies have enlarged their exonerating cloud of compassion to enfold and protect all street criminals.

He comes to the nub of the argument. What is and what is not compassionate?

Beyond constitutional theorizing and scientific studies, which can be posturing rationalizations as often as they are valid, is the moral value of compassion. That value is priceless.

“Priceless” meaning precious beyond price, extremely valuable. We would join issue with him over that, qualify the claim, but not here and now. We continue to follow his argument.

But common sense requires tempering the value of compassion with common-sense recognition of human nature. Compassion comes with obligations. Compassion is one of several moral virtues that need to inform common-sense solutions to public policy challenges.

For example, according to University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, there are six universal moral foundations. These virtues (and their opposites) are: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Progressives … apparently place the virtue of compassion above all others. But true compassion cannot do good unless it is balanced with fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty.

We would omit “sanctity” and substitute “honor”.

Is it fair to anyone … to permit people to defecate on public sidewalks? Is it compassionate to allow people to stagger about a busy shopping district, stupefied on heroin? …

[A] “new breed of Democratic prosecutors” … is part of the problem, not the solution. They have placed a highly selective compassion before common sense.

It is true that, somehow, Americans need to figure out how to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated.

But the obligations of commonsense compassion …

“Commonsense compassion” being not an oxymoron in his view, but an alliance, or at least a truce, between head and heart? …

… require policymakers to accept unpleasant realities: When you downgrade crimes you encourage more crime. When you decriminalize possession and personal use of hard drugs, you encourage more drug addiction. When you provide benefits and services to homeless people, you encourage more homelessness.

These realities don’t mean we shouldn’t have compassion for people who are homeless or who are coping with drug addiction, or even for those who have turned to a life of crime. …

There he goes too far!  To condone “compassion for those who have turned to a life of crime” is to condone the rape of justice.

But he turns back to commonsense.

Compassion has become so corrupted by progressives and the special interests who benefit from disorder and misery that the policies enacted in its name have made the problem worse. How is it compassionate, when supposedly compassionate policies lead to more victims; more homeless, more drug addicts, more criminals?

He’s right: it is not compassionate. It is cruel.