One of the hallmarks of the Left is its fervent belief that, if poor people behave badly, the fault is not theirs, but instead it lies with "root causes." For example, a word search in the New York Times for "root causes and crime" returns over 100 articles from that newspaper alone. A significant number of these Times articles, which were especially prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, have a politician arguing that, in dealing with crime, it's pointless to punish the criminals themselves. Instead, it's the government's job to destroy crime at its root, a concept that invariably translates...