Thursday, April 15, 2010

Liberalville

Back at work after a week of fixing stuff around the house.

Don’t get me started on the death penalty! Albert Camus said if we want to discourage crime…(Head of the psychology department)

That would be the noted criminologist Albert Camus?

The Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington is now moved back to March, and yet people insist global warming has nothing to do with it. (Psychiatrist, retired medical director)

The Cherry Blossom Festival has started in March for decades. The trees might be blooming slightly earlier the past few years.

The Governor keeps cutting funding for programs. We have enough money for wars, but not to take care of things here. (MSW, Supported Housing Director for SW NH)

I believe the State of NH’s defense budget is quite small, dude. And why the state gov’t should be putting more money into expensive programs that don’t produce better patient outcomes escapes me.

5 comments:

Gringo said...

I believe the State of NH’s defense budget is quite small, dude. And why the state gov’t should be putting more money into expensive programs that don’t produce better patient outcomes escapes me.

Great comeback.For the most part, those who work in social services are libs. I'm really telling you something you didn't know before right? We need more funding for the program that will save the world. You know the drill.

At the same time, an examination of the results of such funding leads towards more skepticism, and a more conservative point of view. IMHO, a factor in my deserting to the dark side was my working for two years in institutions for the mentally retarded and for psychiatric patients while I was an undergrad.

It gave me a deep skepticism towards those who would claim that funding a given social services program would achieve a great result. Yeah, right.

I came to the conclusion that while we have an obligation to fund in some degree those more unfortunate than us, there are limits to what that funding can accomplish. For the mentally retarded, I saw the difficulty that they needed more attention, but got less attention than the normal person. Somewhere there is a funding limit, as no amount of attention will be enough. For psychiatric patients, I saw that there was a huge gap between what one accomplished and what one hoped to accomplish. IOW,a mere increase in funding was no guarantee that more would be accomplished. The "experts" are often as befuddled regarding doing X to achieve Y as are those less educated.

The "liberation" of psych patients into homelessness shows the fatuous nature of much liberal social policy.

Some issues appear to be intractable. While we may need to fund them, we need to be aware of what we can and cannot accomplish.

David Foster said...

Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

Gringo said...

I have also read that shelters for the homeless cost more than if you simply put the homeless in apartments.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Gringo, yes and no on that. It would be cheaper, but because that group - not universally but statistically - destroys apartments when they aren't supervised, you can't find landlords to rent to them even for good money.

Gringo said...

AVI: point taken. Seems to me the old SRO hotels on skid row were the better solution. And they were cheap. There isn't much damage you can do to cinderblock.