It's not the only factor, but I am convinced it is a major contributor, and too little discussed. At a minimum, we should have mandatory drug testing for people applying for welfare benefits. I suspect that if we tested the professional underclass, we would find that drug (and alcohol) dependency is the norm.
What to do about it is a tougher question, but the authorities currently refuse to even identify the problem. At the same time, millions of people who are systematically demotivating, and often incapacitating, themselves are being indoctrinated to believe that their problems are all society's fault.
Technology marches on. Touchscreen fingerprinting at the immigration counter at Dulles surprised me a bit last year, but I was glad to see it. When it gets cheap enough, it will appear at ATM's, and eventually we can deploy the technology at polling places to address in-person vote fraud. (The dems, of course, will argue that minorities disproportionately lack fingers and thumbs.) Down the road, it would be nice to have a quick, cheap, non-invasive field test that screened for alcohol and other drugs. If you don't test clean and sober, you shouldn't vote. Alternatively, if you are on welfare, you shouldn't vote. I'd settle for either rule.
That is antithetical to the liberal ethos, in which drug addicts are victimized so they liberals can claim a moral superiority in helping (subsidizing) them (at the cost of others while they remain in the rarefied atmosphere of a Starbucks culture), in order to foster their own all-wise elitism as part of an ever increasing scope and intrusiveness of government, (perhaps staffed much by liberal students to get their student loans forgiven);
so they can dictate what all should do. That of the devil's will being done in earth as it is in his realm. As he was the first to engage in an "occupy movement" and "share the wealth" campaign, (Is. 14; Gn. 3) climbing up some other way than merit and in grace.
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