The Structural Trap of Libertarian Sentiment and Dependent Populations

This is about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but give me a minute. Let’s work our way into it.

In California, a state senator has introduced a bill that would forbid local governments from imposing any form of civil or criminal penalties on the homeless — or, as we say in California, on our unhoused neighbors. If SB 634 is signed into law, then “a local jurisdiction shall not adopt a local ordinance, or enforce an existing ordinance, that imposes civil or criminal penalties on a person who is homeless for any act immediately related to homelessness or any act related to basic survival.”

The premise is that there can properly be no penalties of any kind for “any act immediately related to homelessness.” This means that all governmental approaches to homelessness, and to disorder caused by homeless encampments, become incentive-based, with no disincentives on the table. No matter what you do, if you’re homeless, we should only give you more free stuff, or else we’re being mean. In the text of the bill, look at the long list of opening declarations, which include statements like this:

(3) The solution to homelessness is affordable housing and robust supportive services, as demonstrated by years of peer-reviewed research.

And

(6) Homelessness is disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other groups in California that have experienced historical and continued discrimination, and excessive penalties related to homelessness contribute to and exacerbate the racist outcomes in housing and criminal justice.

A press release from the author of the bill, Senator Sasha Renée Pérez, offers an approving quote from a community activist: “California’s goal should be to fight poverty, not to fight the poor. This becomes especially important when we consider our current national landscape, with ongoing attacks on vital public programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, attacks on the VA, proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and tax increases for everyone else, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.”

Programs, programs, programs. Always. More programs. Fight for programs. Resist budget cuts for programs.

So.

In 2018, after a major fire in Los Angeles that started in a homeless encampment, I took these pictures in the Sepulveda Basin, the site of an enormous homeless encampment:

Several acres of heavy brush, literally tons of trash, big piles of butane canisters. The only permissible response to this exact combination of circumstances is “robust supportive services.” No form of you must stop doing that is ever acceptable. You must never forbid or penalize any form of this behavior; you may only offer the people who engage in it more services, more subsidies, and more support.

If you remember the discussion that took place during the Palisades fire, which wiped out most of a historic Los Angeles community, the fire department had tremendous difficulty responding, and had been complaining for years about budget cuts and inadequate staffing. Here’s the current budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department:

Here’s the current budget for homeless services:

Homeless services — Senator Pérez’s “robust supportive services” — are eating everything. The Los Angeles Fire Department is badly understaffed and underequipped, and our fire stations are becoming uninhabitable, but the city is out of money. We have…other priorities. Los Angeles is in the midst of a devastating budget crisis, by the way, and is almost certainly about to make deep cuts in basic government services: reduced library hours, reduced police and fire staffing, and so on. Weirdly, the shortfall seems to be…somewhere in the neighborhood of…uh…$961 million? Right around there? Anyway, a little less than a billion.

So the prevailing narrative is about the critical need for a light-touch governmental approach that focuses on rights and liberties and rejects “criminalization.” We’re not going to take a cops-first punishment approach to homelessness. For crying out loud, we’re not authoritarians. We’re not going to punish people for being poor. Homelessness is not a crime, and the tripwire for the CRIMINALIZATION alarm is remarkably easy to trigger.

We reject an approach in which the government punishes and oppresses; we embrace an approach that respects rights and liberties. So government keeps getting bigger and more expensive, right up to the limits of unsustainability and collapse, while producing ever-greater chaos. From an old post:

The libertarian paradox of leftist faux-libertarian Los Angeles: A refusal to use government force leads to…much more government, alongside a metastasizing NGOcracy that also lives on public subsidies. Government isn’t going to use coercive measures, so government is going to spend a lot more money and intervene in every aspect of the life of a large and growing dependent population. Less hard government, so more and more and more and more soft government. Which is founded on, and funded by, the premises of hard government. It’s a trap.

Infamously, California spent $24 billion, with a B, on homeless services in five years — and doesn’t know where the money went.

“Didn’t consistently track outcomes,” wink wink. We’re not going to take a heavy-handed approach to homelessness, so we’re just going to hand out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars without tracking how the money is spent. Less government, so more government. No disincentives, so endless incentives. No punishments or coercion, so metastasizing subsidies.

So.

A massive influx of migrants into the United States between, you know, somewhere right around January 20, 2021, and January 20, 2025, caused an explosion in the size of the population living illegally in the country. No one knows how many came, because by definition they sneaked in and weren’t counted. But millions, by any guess you can find. In response, government at every level set up a giant network of migrant shelters, for a population that has received housing, food, and medical care from public funds.

This week, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s plans to remove 532,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — until the administration can provide “case-by-case justification” for the removals, a half a million times, one at a time. You see, immigrants have due process rights, a fundamental principle of a constitutional republic. Each and every one gets full access to the Article III courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, millions of times. A United States senator will personally fly to El Salvador to fight the removal of a single immigrant.

And so, because we’re a free country that doesn’t tolerate excessive state power, we’ll provide health care and housing and food and financial support to millions of migrants, demonstrating our firm commitment to limited government.

Our government is limited in its power, so it becomes more and more expensive as it provides for all the needs of a growing population of completely dependent people. Try to imagine that structure as a diagram. Limited in authority, therefore unlimited in scope.

This is a suicide pact. We can’t throw you out, because that would be authoritarian, so we’re going to pay for every aspect of your existence, proving our commitment to limited government.

That ends. Structurally and inevitably. That paradox of premises is racing toward unsustainability.