“The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years”
The states were already well on their way to deinstitutionalization at the state level long before Reagan was president, it was the fulfillment of patients rights advocacy and a general trend away from forcible incarceration for mental illness. Blaming Reagan is a cherished liberal myth supported by people who never bothered to learn anything about the history of mental treatment and refuse to put it in the context of an evolving sociopolitical response to SCALE.
The cultural context is especially significant: liberals at the time bemoaned involuntary treatment for mental illness and took Kesey's “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” for a documentary.
Deinstitutionalization actually started in 1955, when mental hospital patient populations began a long decline as mental health treatment "evolved". Patient populations didn't just drop per capita, but in absolute numbers. ORBA barely had any impact on psychiatric patient populations, which is a fact liberals always forget to bring up.
There was a good reason to deinstitutionalize beyond cost reduction: the hospital environment is poorly conducive to mental health and is really only suitable for the worst cases--and is not especially good at treating those. If someone can be functional on meds, it's far preferable to have them living on their own than cooped up in a locked-doors-and-fluorescent-lighting facility. In part because of the introduction of anti-psychotic medication and out-patient therapy, patient populations plummeted in the 1970s and were a small fraction of their peak in the 50s. While some form of involuntary treatment is obviously necessary (and continues), it's a joke to hear these people call for it when everything they did politically undermined public support for it.
It's also extremely expensive--liberals who bemoan the cost of mental illness have never bothered to take out a calculator and figure out the costs of maintaining people in a reasonably controlled environment with full medical staff for years. Not only have medical costs in general rapidly risen (which impacts the cost of mental health treatment of any kind), but institutional costs are also much larger than when men with butterfly nets would capture stray loonies and drive them over to the local nuthouse (which doubled as a workhouse--liberals always forget to mention).
The truth is that had mass institutionalization continued to this day, liberals would be mad as hell about all the people incarcerated in places "just like prisons" for being a little different (the NYMag article complete with cherry-picked examples practically writes itself). Instead today they complain that mentally ill people wind up in prisons. They're complete hypocrites on the subject and have a convenient case of amnesia--not only about mental illness but about their own fashionably stupid tendencies.
What I think really drives the "blame it on Reagan" mentality is that urban liberals come across deranged homeless people created by the soulless urban setting they cherish, and they feel very frowny face about it, so the easiest thing to do is to blame some Republican for not building giant facilities that involuntarily house these people with magically effective staff that fly down from heaven to spoon yum yums and warm feelings into them. Until of course a Republican builds such a place, then it will be called a modern day racist gulag run by "literal Nazis".
In any case what is obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in mental health treatment is that it scales very poorly and becomes extremely complex and unworkable as it scales. There really is no right answer for what it should look like in the overscaled, atomized hellhole we currently live in. Nothing you can do in this dysfunctional environment is capable of solving the large problems it has created, or will not produce equally large problems on its own. QED.
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
The leftist apologists say that the cutbacks in the fire department were just a few percent, so that doesn't count. But just one percent of difference separates a sharp knife from a dull knife. In the fire department most money will be spent on big expenses like rent and basic maintenance, but cutting back a few percent means you don't get the new detection equipment, the new replacement part, etc. To make another comparison, you can spend a lot on the tanks in your military, but they're still blown away in combat because they're the old tanks.
Great idea! But I'll see your "territorial status" and raise you one "free city-state". So many of our country's problems are concentrated in Blue Cities, which, because of their high population density relative to the rest of the states in which they are located, end up controlling the entire state, making them Blue States, to the detriment of rural citizens who are effectively outvoted on any issue that matters to them. I have long been of the opinion that any city or metropolitan area with a population (or a population density) over some amount (say 1 million in population inside the city's current geographical limits or X thousand people per square mile, where X is a negotiable quantity) should have the ability to declare itself a Free City, which, after a negotiable period of time during which inhabitants inside and outside the notional boundaries of such a City would be able to self-segregate based on how they want to live their lives, would become a law unto itself. Metropolitan areas over a certain population density might be required to become Free Cities. Either way, this would allow "deep blue" people in urban areas effectively to secede from the "hillbillies" in the hinterlands that they hate with such a passion, much to the relief of those "hillbillies". These Free Cities would no longer be part of the state in which they are located, and they would have no influence whatsoever on what goes on in the rest of the state. Moreover, they would have limited (or no) representation at the federal level. Free Cities could certainly band together into some sort of federation with its own rules and agendas, and they could certainly negotiate for goods and services they could not provide for themselves. Other than that, they would be free to wave semi-erect penises in the faces of children during Pride Parades all they want, with their adoring rainbow-haired parents wearing Pride T-Shirts festooned with unicorns and clapping like circus monkeys. Meanwhile, rural folk would get their country and their lifestyle back.
It is beyond the scope of a readable comment to elaborate on how such a concept might work in practice (and there are many issues to be resolved that would be highly contentious), but the Free City idea focuses the problem on where it really exists, which is almost exclusively in large US cities run by graduates of Dunning-Kruger University. One obvious down side is that the Constitutional provision you cite for reverting US States to Territorial status might not be applicable to the Free City idea. Moreover, there would be a huge fight against this idea from powerful metropolitan politicians and special interests who have fattened themselves on federal grift. Even so, the idea merits consideration among the pantheon of ideas related to recouping the rights of sane citizens in an otherwise insane country.
The Eaton fire was started by a high tension wire that snapped during the wind storm. Not arson. The Palisades fire was likly started from an ember that got going again in the wind storm from a New Year’s Day fire in the same area. Not arson.
Two smaller fires that were put out quickly were likly arson.
Great article. You summed up how we got here quite succinctly.
Thinking along what you said in this part:
“there is a constitutional basis for this, by the way. Article IV, Section 4 of the federal Constitution tasks the federal government with guaranteeing that every state should have a republican (small-r) form of government”.
While I would love to see this begin, I don’t understand how exactly the guarantee would be implemented. How do you see it happening? The hydra of evil, corruption and incompetence they created is so vast, where does one begin?
It feels like it would take a very concerted effort, requiring a pretty good span of time. Should Trump be installed as POTUS again, be the genuine article, and not be hamstrung by poor choices and active rebellion as in his first term, we could begin to implement this. We’d also need more presidents and congressmen and governors, mayors etc. in the years to come who seek the good of our land and of the people in it to follow, to carry on the task.
If we continue to end up with the model of leaders exemplified by Obama (canny and evil), Biden (corrupt and evil), and Harris (stupid and evil); well I fear our country will be toast and every state fully Californicated in pretty short order. Many (maybe all?) are almost as bad or on their way along the path to ruin right now.
I pray I live to see the better outcome. I do think it’s possible, for with God, all things are possible. But so too could the alternative one manifest. Empires, nations and regimes rise and fall, and His people are often swept up into the tide. May God favor us with His mercy and grace in these days of uncertainty.
“The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years”
The states were already well on their way to deinstitutionalization at the state level long before Reagan was president, it was the fulfillment of patients rights advocacy and a general trend away from forcible incarceration for mental illness. Blaming Reagan is a cherished liberal myth supported by people who never bothered to learn anything about the history of mental treatment and refuse to put it in the context of an evolving sociopolitical response to SCALE.
The cultural context is especially significant: liberals at the time bemoaned involuntary treatment for mental illness and took Kesey's “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” for a documentary.
Deinstitutionalization actually started in 1955, when mental hospital patient populations began a long decline as mental health treatment "evolved". Patient populations didn't just drop per capita, but in absolute numbers. ORBA barely had any impact on psychiatric patient populations, which is a fact liberals always forget to bring up.
There was a good reason to deinstitutionalize beyond cost reduction: the hospital environment is poorly conducive to mental health and is really only suitable for the worst cases--and is not especially good at treating those. If someone can be functional on meds, it's far preferable to have them living on their own than cooped up in a locked-doors-and-fluorescent-lighting facility. In part because of the introduction of anti-psychotic medication and out-patient therapy, patient populations plummeted in the 1970s and were a small fraction of their peak in the 50s. While some form of involuntary treatment is obviously necessary (and continues), it's a joke to hear these people call for it when everything they did politically undermined public support for it.
It's also extremely expensive--liberals who bemoan the cost of mental illness have never bothered to take out a calculator and figure out the costs of maintaining people in a reasonably controlled environment with full medical staff for years. Not only have medical costs in general rapidly risen (which impacts the cost of mental health treatment of any kind), but institutional costs are also much larger than when men with butterfly nets would capture stray loonies and drive them over to the local nuthouse (which doubled as a workhouse--liberals always forget to mention).
The truth is that had mass institutionalization continued to this day, liberals would be mad as hell about all the people incarcerated in places "just like prisons" for being a little different (the NYMag article complete with cherry-picked examples practically writes itself). Instead today they complain that mentally ill people wind up in prisons. They're complete hypocrites on the subject and have a convenient case of amnesia--not only about mental illness but about their own fashionably stupid tendencies.
What I think really drives the "blame it on Reagan" mentality is that urban liberals come across deranged homeless people created by the soulless urban setting they cherish, and they feel very frowny face about it, so the easiest thing to do is to blame some Republican for not building giant facilities that involuntarily house these people with magically effective staff that fly down from heaven to spoon yum yums and warm feelings into them. Until of course a Republican builds such a place, then it will be called a modern day racist gulag run by "literal Nazis".
In any case what is obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in mental health treatment is that it scales very poorly and becomes extremely complex and unworkable as it scales. There really is no right answer for what it should look like in the overscaled, atomized hellhole we currently live in. Nothing you can do in this dysfunctional environment is capable of solving the large problems it has created, or will not produce equally large problems on its own. QED.
Well said, “Live not by Lies”
Reason Magazine
California's Fire
Catastrophe Is Largely a
Result of Bad
Government Policies
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
The leftist apologists say that the cutbacks in the fire department were just a few percent, so that doesn't count. But just one percent of difference separates a sharp knife from a dull knife. In the fire department most money will be spent on big expenses like rent and basic maintenance, but cutting back a few percent means you don't get the new detection equipment, the new replacement part, etc. To make another comparison, you can spend a lot on the tanks in your military, but they're still blown away in combat because they're the old tanks.
Great idea! But I'll see your "territorial status" and raise you one "free city-state". So many of our country's problems are concentrated in Blue Cities, which, because of their high population density relative to the rest of the states in which they are located, end up controlling the entire state, making them Blue States, to the detriment of rural citizens who are effectively outvoted on any issue that matters to them. I have long been of the opinion that any city or metropolitan area with a population (or a population density) over some amount (say 1 million in population inside the city's current geographical limits or X thousand people per square mile, where X is a negotiable quantity) should have the ability to declare itself a Free City, which, after a negotiable period of time during which inhabitants inside and outside the notional boundaries of such a City would be able to self-segregate based on how they want to live their lives, would become a law unto itself. Metropolitan areas over a certain population density might be required to become Free Cities. Either way, this would allow "deep blue" people in urban areas effectively to secede from the "hillbillies" in the hinterlands that they hate with such a passion, much to the relief of those "hillbillies". These Free Cities would no longer be part of the state in which they are located, and they would have no influence whatsoever on what goes on in the rest of the state. Moreover, they would have limited (or no) representation at the federal level. Free Cities could certainly band together into some sort of federation with its own rules and agendas, and they could certainly negotiate for goods and services they could not provide for themselves. Other than that, they would be free to wave semi-erect penises in the faces of children during Pride Parades all they want, with their adoring rainbow-haired parents wearing Pride T-Shirts festooned with unicorns and clapping like circus monkeys. Meanwhile, rural folk would get their country and their lifestyle back.
It is beyond the scope of a readable comment to elaborate on how such a concept might work in practice (and there are many issues to be resolved that would be highly contentious), but the Free City idea focuses the problem on where it really exists, which is almost exclusively in large US cities run by graduates of Dunning-Kruger University. One obvious down side is that the Constitutional provision you cite for reverting US States to Territorial status might not be applicable to the Free City idea. Moreover, there would be a huge fight against this idea from powerful metropolitan politicians and special interests who have fattened themselves on federal grift. Even so, the idea merits consideration among the pantheon of ideas related to recouping the rights of sane citizens in an otherwise insane country.
The Eaton fire was started by a high tension wire that snapped during the wind storm. Not arson. The Palisades fire was likly started from an ember that got going again in the wind storm from a New Year’s Day fire in the same area. Not arson.
Two smaller fires that were put out quickly were likly arson.
Fires start easily in 80 mph winds.
Interesting, I have likened California's governance to a junior high student council - https://jimsmentalgym.substack.com/p/california-dreamin.
But maybe it just is mean girls, with some flourishes of "hopium" added in with the butterflies and unicorns.
I dreamed about going to California one day when I was a kid in the dreary winters of post-Soviet Russia. I don't anymore but I miss my dreams.
Great article. You summed up how we got here quite succinctly.
Thinking along what you said in this part:
“there is a constitutional basis for this, by the way. Article IV, Section 4 of the federal Constitution tasks the federal government with guaranteeing that every state should have a republican (small-r) form of government”.
While I would love to see this begin, I don’t understand how exactly the guarantee would be implemented. How do you see it happening? The hydra of evil, corruption and incompetence they created is so vast, where does one begin?
It feels like it would take a very concerted effort, requiring a pretty good span of time. Should Trump be installed as POTUS again, be the genuine article, and not be hamstrung by poor choices and active rebellion as in his first term, we could begin to implement this. We’d also need more presidents and congressmen and governors, mayors etc. in the years to come who seek the good of our land and of the people in it to follow, to carry on the task.
If we continue to end up with the model of leaders exemplified by Obama (canny and evil), Biden (corrupt and evil), and Harris (stupid and evil); well I fear our country will be toast and every state fully Californicated in pretty short order. Many (maybe all?) are almost as bad or on their way along the path to ruin right now.
I pray I live to see the better outcome. I do think it’s possible, for with God, all things are possible. But so too could the alternative one manifest. Empires, nations and regimes rise and fall, and His people are often swept up into the tide. May God favor us with His mercy and grace in these days of uncertainty.