The Wasteland of Leftist Compassion By Edward Ring for American Greatness
Compassion is not compassion when it is manipulated to fulfill a corporate socialist agenda of turning America’s cities into high-tech pens for human livestock and
depopulating rural areas.
Compassion is one of the greatest of human virtues. But effective compassion comes with an obligation to do more than what merely feels and sounds good. Public policies motivated by compassion must also consider the full complexity of the challenge—the unintended consequences and the reality of human nature—and strike a balance between what is desired and what is possible. Often the most beneficial expressions of compassion appear harsh and punitive, yet in offering more lasting and comprehensive solutions, do more to alleviate human suffering.
Without taking a balanced and holistic approach to compassion, special interests hijack public policy and reap perpetual profits working on problems that never go away. For them, ineffective compassion is good business. But it leaves behind a wasteland.
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If envy and resentment are the currency of the Left—driving, as it does, their attacks on privilege and their demands for equity—then compassion is the gold that backs their currency. Emotional appeals to voters and politicians demanding displays of compassion are the means by which the Left claims the moral high ground. And in those appeals, and the misguided policies that result, entire industries are created—industries populated by individuals whose careers depend on perpetuating the fraud.
In many cases, the consequences of unbalanced compassion are obvious, as anyone can see if they visit the coastal cities of California. It was compassion that motivated state legislators to decriminalize hard drug addiction, now dubbed “substance use disorder.” Compassion was the moral justification to empty California’s prisons and downgrade property and drug crimesfrom felonies to misdemeanors.
Compassion compelled politicians and judges to rewrite laws that kept mentally ill people safely off the streets.
