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I am not excusing this behavior, just saying that is what results when a young person has no hope.

Wow... if you think hope comes from a job, you might want to check re-check your manual. As far as I know, no one in America has ever been denied hope. Some of had it tough, sure, but "no hope"... never heard of it here.

The US is not the nation it was in the 30s when the people pulled together, it was a time of high church membership, and most people then had a moral core. The crime in the 30s actually went down . And hate to break it to you dawg, but the truth is unpleasant, when a young person loses hope, sees no future but low wage jobs, they become people with nothing to lose.

The Calvanistic approach to society is unworkable, and leads to revelutions and upheavals. The hereies of John Calvin helped in the long run give rise to Social Darwinism that in turn gave rise to communism.

How silly you are.

You think it is an accident that America has absolutely staggering incarceration rates vis a vis the rest of the industrialized world ? You think it is an accident that the vice industry in all forms has taken off ? You think it is an accident that LA South Central gang culture is spreading from city to city ? Is it such a reach for you that when you disempower the good people the bad people take over ?

When you sow your sort of libertarian Social Darwinist callousness, you reap viciousness and depravity. And JNB is absolutely right. We no longer live in a world where poor people assume their "station" in life is "God's Will". People with no hope because they will never be able to legally earn enough to be able to better themselves will generate social pathologies. Without hope, without God, they will turn from working class to underclass. After all, weren't the underclass of "Oliver Twist" the descendants of the stalwart, God-fearing yeoman peasantry kicked off their farms by enclosure (i.e., when the gentry deemed it more profitable to convert farmland into pastureland for wool and kicked off their tenant farmers) ?

The answer to Dicken's underclass problem came in the new jobs generated by the industrial revolution, emigration, and the victory of Methodism over cheap gin. Macro factors. Now, on the other hand, we see the inverse of all these. Free trade/deindustrialization which destroys the economic ticket out of the urban underclass. Unrestrained immigration which keeps low-semi skilled labor cheap. The declining power of the black church over young black males in an increasingly pagan culture that no longer respects piety, chastity, or deferred gratification.

I know the libertarian, Ayn Rand view is to see yourself as some kind of thing chiselled from granite, untouched by the world around you, but that is pure foolishness. No one is above history.