Liberal policy analysis.

Heather McDonald writes of the liberal response to her making the connection between “black family breakdown and astronomical rates of black youth violence.” This on the extent of that violence:

In Chicago, black juveniles commit 78 percent of all juvenile gun assaults while white juveniles commit under 3 percent—though blacks comprise just 35 percent of the Chicago population and whites 28 percent. Nationally, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.

Not surprisingly, the liberals misread her and they have persisted in ignoring or demonizing those who have made the same connection in the past. No, you see, it’s classroom overcrowding and other “school-based” factors, as one of them argues, and what’s needed is not the strengthening of the black family but “direct social services.” True to form, the liberal sees government bureaucrats as just the tool to fix the problem.

Is there no end to the genius of those social workers?!

Do the arithmetic on the stats above and you get a rate for black juvenile gun assaults -- juvenile gun assaults -- that’s 1,980% of the white juvenile rate. On top of which, that’s a black male juvenile homicide rate that’s 900% of the combined white and Hispanic male juvenile rate. Homicide!

I’ll go out on a limb here and just come right out and say this is evidence of an extraordinary pathology at work and liberals ought to bring more intellectual horsepower or integrity, one, to bear on identifying the “root cause” of this. It’s this hellacious crime rate that turns black areas into wastelands and the larger urban community into a fearful, suspicious -- hopefully, by now, well armed -- camp.

But the liberal solution is laughable.

There seems to be something that liberals ingest with their frappucino and reduced-fat Peruvian breakfast muffins that draws them like moths to the wrong solution -- or away from the obvious one.

Problem: Astronomical black youth crime rate?

Diagnosis: White indifference.

Solution: Give the teachers’ unions whatever they want Better public schools!

Problem: Faltering economy due to massive government interference with capitalist dynamism and incentive-killing taxes?

Diagnosis: Corporate greed.

Remedy: More regulation and higher taxes.

"Same Old Drumbeat. A response to the Huffington Post on Chicago youth violence." Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, 1/28/10 (emphasis added).