Sensible? He points at miles of Baltimore housing projects where "fathers" consider themselves responsible only for impregnating women and the state to be entirely responsible for the child after that as the fault of libertarians. Neighborhoods where everyone assumes from birth that they are permanently exempt from any responsibility for supporting themselves, because that is and always will be the state's responsibility, and are free to spend every day doing what they feel like, are blamed on libertarian ideas.
Yet several million people born far away in Mexico with even less education have managed to find viable forms of income in the US without resorting to the drug trade. They didn't have the same welfare system, though.
Before the welfare system made housing entire communities in Baltimore the permanent responsibility of the state, the residents of those neighborhoods worked in construction and built homes for each other. Before the state made feeding themselves and their families from cradle to grave the job of state, they cooked for each other, worked in grocery stores, ran restaurants, drove delivery vans, repaired appliances, did the plumbing.
Before the state permanently eliminated the need to find ways to support themselves and provide for their offspring, the residents of those neighborhoods spoke of hard workers with admiration not derision. Before preparation for supporting themselves was made completely irrelevant, they didn't hold teachers and school work in contempt. Parents used to paint their small schoolhouses and do what they could to scrape together money for schoolbooks that their kids would need to share. Now, painting the much larger school is job of the state, and the kids amuse themselves by destroying the books that nobody they know had to pay for.
This is said to be the fault of the "system" for not taking even more responsibility for the community, without a hint of irony. Yet back when the state did even less and the community supported themselves, they had fewer smart phones but more loving fathers, had fewer schoolbooks but better readers, had less financial stability but far more physical safety.
Yet the article proposes that it is post-war libertarian influence that produced "the horror" of these blighted Baltimore neighborhoods, as if the decades since have been characterized by a rapidly shrinking government.
