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Comment by loldk | Hacker News Reader

Here's a radical idea: invest in mental health, food security & education, and community programs to directly combat the source of the gangs and bad behavior, rather than try to control people's behavior.

That is the distinction you've seemed to miss here.

Controlling others' behavior is ineffective at best. It's treating symptoms with pain killers while ignoring the source of the problem. It's weak leadership, and, it gives broken people the ability to manipulate the system to hurt others.

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We have been doing those things since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. After government transfers, real consumption of households at the bottom have gone up dramatically since the 1960s. Conversely, many much poorer countries that don’t have that sort of social spending don’t have gang problems like we do. Gangs aren’t an economic problem, they’re a social problem. Specifically, they’re a social problem caused by a vacuum in authority and hierarchy for young men. That’s why Wilmington has a gang problem and my dad’s vastly poorer village in Bangladesh doesn’t.

It is not a radical idea. That type of massive wealth transfer is only possible on the federal level, where it simply has no political chance.

All the non federal governments can do is like removing bus stops (or letting drug addicted communities flourish when the pendulum swings the other way).

Welp, we don't have the political capital, guess we can't fix anything, only thing left to do is beat the shit out of poor people in the streets. Society!

The problem is lack of economic capital at the non federal level since there is no way to control immigration.

The solution is canvassing, campaigning, voting, and running for federal office where that change can be affected.

You've just written a lot of applause lights. What's a substantive proposal do you believe will have a realistic chance of being passed through Congress? If you can't think of one then it may not be as straightforward as you believe.

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