Ep. 457 pits Trump’s economic optimism against Democrats’ apocalyptic warnings—Chuck Schumer’s climate doomsday vs. Sarah Sanders’ Russia collusion hypocrisy—while Stephen Ide of the Manhattan Institute blames homelessness on deinstitutionalization, "right to shelter" laws, and housing regulations, arguing 25–33% of homeless adults suffer serious mental illness. The episode contrasts Peter’s biblical doubt with chaotic systems like the stock market (WSJ’s 3–5% growth vs. NYT’s 1.5%), then pivots to involuntary treatment for resistant mentally ill individuals and critiques political Puritanism, framing solutions as targeted housing and mental health care—not universal fixes. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a story in the New Testament that I've always found kind of bizarre.
I mean, it's about a miracle, so it's bizarre right there, but that's not what really bothers me about it.
The disciples are going across the Sea of Galilee, heading into the wind, the waves are high, and they look over and they see Jesus walking to them on the water.
You've all heard of this story.
They're walking to the water and they're terrified and they cry out, it's a ghost.
But immediately Jesus spoke to them and he says, take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid.
Now, once their fear passes, Peter, who is kind of an excitable guy, he gets excited and he wants to join in the fun and he says, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.
And Jesus says, come ahead.
So Peter gets out of the boat and he walks on the water and he comes to Jesus.
But when he saw how high the wind was, he got scared and he began to sink and he cried out, Lord, save me.
And Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt?
Now, obviously, it's strange that the guy's walking on the water.
But what always gets me about this story is Jesus says, oh you of little faith.
And I think, really?
The guy, even if you took one step on water, that would be a lot of faith.
Why is Jesus saying that he doesn't have enough faith when he actually there for a minute was walking on the water?
But Jesus was in the tradition of Hebrew prophets.
And a lot of what he did, like the Hebrew prophets, the Jewish prophets, is he would act stuff out as a kind of a story that he was telling.
And so everything he did had double meanings.
And it strikes me about this story when I think about it that everybody, all the time, all of us, are walking on water, right?
We never know what's going to happen next.
We can be hit by a bolt of lightning.
We run over by a car.
We can lose everything we love.
We can, you know, terrible things can happen.
Great things can happen.
We just don't know.
If you've ever talked to a hypochondriac, and I went through in my youth, I went through a very brief, horrible period of hypochondria.
They make perfect sense.
They tell you, you know, people really do get ill.
This really could happen and the statistics, and they make perfect sense.
In some ways, in some ways, it's unreasonable to face life with confidence.
And yet, of course, if you face life with confidence, if you do what Jesus says and you take hold of his hand and you walk on the water of our uncertainty, you're going to have a much better life.
And part of this is because life is what's called a level two chaotic system.
Level two chaotic systems are systems where you can't predict what's going to happen next because even your predictions affect the outcome.
So for instance, if I said to you, you know, remember that Tom Cruise movie?
It was based on a Philip K. Dick story where they had these people who could tell crimes and they would go and bust the criminal before it took place.
Minority report, right?
The problem with that is you would go, well, wait, the guy didn't commit the crime.
You arrested him for a crime you said he was going to commit, but you don't know if he was going to commit it.
That's a level two chaos system.
The prediction of the crime causes them to stop the crime and therefore the crime doesn't take place and the prediction is incorrect, right?
The stock market is a level two chaos system.
So you've noticed the stock market is going up, down, took a terrible plunge yesterday.
It wasn't that terrible if you measure it in percentages.
It's gone so far up that it was only a 3% or 4% drop, but it's climbing now today.
It's coming back.
And you're seeing the different reactions to it.
People saying, oh my God, mostly the Republicans saying it's going to be fine.
Don't worry about it.
And of course, the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, the Democrats and their media are saying, oh, it's a disaster.
Trump has killed us all.
It's going to kill us all.
The thing about in a level two chaos system, the reactions to uncertainty don't tell you anything about what's going to happen next.
They only tell you about the person who is speaking.
What do they tell you?
Well, we're about to find out.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety blue.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, tipsy, topsy, the world to zippity zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Kurt Warner, not Tim Tebow, you know.
I thought for a minute I had gone nuts.
Yesterday, I was talking about the fact that the quarterback for the Eagles believed in Christ and it brought him back from his moment of need.
And I said it was like Tim Thibault, but I meant, and Rob was saying, no, he never won a Super Bowl.
And I thought, I must have gone insane.
I remember him winning the Super Bowl, and he was a stockboy and he was out of football.
It was Kurt Warner.
They even look alike Kurt Warner and Tim Tebow.
But it was Kurt Warner.
And the message remains the same.
Have faith.
Speaking of faith, here are two nice things that happened to me that I just want to tell you about.
One of them is last year I wrote a short story called All Our Yesterdays, a mystery story.
It took place in England during World War I and it was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
And when the Edgar Award nominations were announced, I was very disappointed that it wasn't nominated for an award because I really did think it was one of my better short stories.
But I just heard that it is going to be included in the Best American Mystery Stories anthology from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is a very prestigious anthology and really does keep stories alive.
So that's like the third time I've been in it and I was really happy to hear that.
Comparing Trump's Vision00:15:24
Also, I got a note today from a guy I know in the sort of speechwriting staff of the White House.
And I don't know if this is, I can't vouch for this, but he told me that when they were writing the State of the Union address, they read my piece about George W. Bush and the movie Batman, The Dark Knight, and that inspired them or helped inspire them to put the hero theme in this speech.
So if that speech has an effect, it's all me.
All me.
All right.
So I'm off after this.
You're just going to see a streak at the end of the show.
My airplane, I hope it's parked outside because in LA traffic, I'm never going to get there in time.
I'm going to Washington, D.C. for the prayer breakfast, which I really enjoyed last week.
I will actually get to see from a distance, you know, the president in the distance.
So, you know, while I'm there, right, remember I was talking about Da Vinci and how they will rent you an office?
I'm not doing that.
But they have another service.
They have another service that is really also very good.
If you were running a business, like I have a business, my writing is a business.
My literary career is a business.
And it runs out of my house.
Not only out of my house, it runs out of a little outhouse on my patio.
You guys, well, you have it because you didn't come to my Christmas party, but everybody else is here.
So it really is the size of an outhouse out on my patio, and I go in there and write, and that's my business.
And it's not the greatest business address, and I don't always want people writing to my home.
DaVinci now has what they call a virtual office where they will give you a business address that is actually at a place of business that you can, if you want to, rent from them if you need it, if you need to do a meeting.
So for starting at $50 a month, you can now have a—you're looking at me like I'm such a team dude.
No, it's a really good.
Starting at $50 a month, you can have an address that people can write to, people can contact, that will be a really nice business address in your locality.
And you can use it if you need a meeting.
It's affordable.
It enhances your image and enhances your credibility.
This is the thing, because otherwise, if you have a P.O. box or you're in a strip mall, not as good.
So DaVinci provides you instant access to thousands of high-profile business addresses in impressive upper-scale office locations in all 50 states.
And business addresses from DaVinci, as I said, they start at just $50 per month.
You can address to impress.
I actually did not make that one up.
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And Adiospel Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-S and Victor A-N for a limited time.
That will get you 50% off your first purchase.
That's da VinciWork.com slash Clavin.
Terms and conditions, conditions do apply, but for 50% off your first purchase, go to da Vinciwork.com slash Clavin, and all the details are there.
So off topic a little bit, but I'm going to come back to this.
I have to start with this Justin Trudeau thing.
If you haven't seen this, it really is worth seeing.
Justin Trudeau held a town hall.
I'm going to get back to the stock market and the reactions to it and the FBI and all that.
But Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, held a town hall and received a question from the audience, and here is his answer.
Maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind.
So we'd like you to look.
We like to say people kind, not necessarily mankind.
Now, I'm going to come back to this at the end of the show, but I just want you to know if anybody does that to you ever, ever, there's a simple answer.
You say, I didn't ask you how to speak.
I don't accept your right to tell me what words to use.
I repeat the question in the same language, answer the question.
That's what you say.
Whenever they do it, whenever they do it, when they tell, you know, Bill McGurn had a piece in the Wall Street Journal, they're trying to get rid of the fighting Irish logo from Ireland.
Just say, we didn't ask you.
We don't care what you think.
We will move forward as we see fit.
We're not here to be told.
So, all right, the stock market took a dive yesterday.
I hear it's climbing back as we speak.
No one, you know, the thing about the stock market is nobody knows why the stock market does what it does.
Best analysis I've heard is it has to do with this quantitative easing where they basically force everybody into riskier stocks.
And it's over, you know, the stock market has been climbing so fast that it's kind of outstripped the assumed worth of some of the companies.
But even that, the worth of the companies is just something people make up.
It's just something people, you know, think those companies have.
Here are two visions of what happened.
First from the Wall Street Journal, which is all about Wall Street and they know about money.
They say the paradox of this correction is that it's taking place as the economy looks stronger than it's been since at least 2005 and maybe since 1999.
The ISM non-manufacturing index for January rolled in at 59.9 on Monday, which means a near boom in the service economy.
New Orders Index surged to 62.7 from 54.5.
In December, the Employment Index hit 61.6 from 56.3.
This is the latest signal that the U.S. economy has climbed to a new higher growth plateau from Barack Obama's secular stagnation.
Discounting for noise in the GDP figures, the economy has grown at about 3% on an annual basis since last May.
And with tax reform now kicking in, growth could be even faster in 2018.
It could, at the extreme, even rise above 5%, which would be insane.
Now let's travel over to our friends at the New York Times.
And let's go right to Knucklehead Row.
So on Knucklehead Row, of all the knuckleheads there, the knuckleheadiest has got to be Paul Krugman.
I do not believe a word that comes out of him has any reference at all to the truth.
Charles Blow is a hysterical girl, you know, like a hysterical 12-year-old girl.
That's one thing, but Krugman is just like saying stuff.
And he's won the Nobel Prize for Economy, which apparently he deserved because before he became a partisan, he invented some theory that was very important for economists.
But since then, it's all been this kind of nonsense.
And he writes a piece.
One day, this is two days, I guess, where their stocks took a die for two days.
Has Trumphoria hit a wall, finally hit a wall?
So this is the guy who said when Trump was elected and there was a stock dip, he said, they're never going to recover.
So now he says, first he goes through this long thing about how the market has nothing to do with the economy.
Doesn't mean the economy may be strong.
There's good news.
But, but market turmoil, and you know how it is.
Everything before the butt is always nonsense.
Market turmoil should make us take a hard look at the economy's prospects.
And what the data say, I'd argue, is that at the very least, America is heading for a downhill shift in its growth rate.
The available evidence suggests that growth over the next decade will be something like 1.5% a year, not the 3% Donald Trump and his minions keep promising.
So we're hearing 3 to 5 from the Wall Street Journal, 1.5 from the New York Times.
Let's see in the next year who comes closer to the truth.
You know, by the way, just to put this out there, Trump is foolish to keep using the stock market as an indication of how the economy works.
That's on him.
That's on Donald Trump, because the stock market will dip at times.
It's going to go down, and then you get the blame if you took the credit.
There's all kinds of good things happening in the economy that he definitely can take the credit for.
He should just say it is wonderful that the stock market, we know that goes up and down, but that's a wonderful thing that is going up.
But he does take too much credit for it.
So I just want to just compare, just overall, the attitude that Donald Trump is bringing to the country after eight years of Obama apologizing for America, and just compare it to what the Democrats are actually trying to sell you.
Trump gave a speech yesterday touting the economy, and he called the worker up to talk about what he's going to do with this $1,000 bonus that he got because of the tax cuts.
And here is the worker.
Yeah, you got the cut?
Okay.
With the tax cut and the bonus, I will be trying to save up money to start a family and eventually get a bigger house.
Oh, I like that idea.
That's good.
In terms of the bonus that corporate America received versus the crumbs that they are giving to workers to kind of put the schmooze on, is so pathetic.
It's like there's Trump standing with the worker, the guy got a thousand bucks.
He says, hey, you know what?
If I save this, if I do this right and I work, maybe I'll get a little extra pay.
I can start a family.
I can buy a house.
And Trump is going, yeah, babe.
Yeah, this is the way to do it.
And, you know, what's so offensive about what Pelosi says is that they keep telling you like Snopes has this left-wing fact check, they call it.
And Google rigs it.
So Snopes comes up when you Google Pelosi saying crumbs.
They say, what's the context?
Well, the context is envy.
It's not what you have that matters.
It's that the other guy has more.
What's it to me?
I don't care if some guy's got a billion dollars.
As long as I've got what I want, what do I care?
This guy's starting a family.
He's not a billionaire.
He's starting a family.
He's buying a house.
He's thinking about my house.
I've got to hope for the future.
That's crumbs.
It's crumbs compared to them.
They got it all.
I mean, it's amazing.
And the other thing, I mean, even moving away from the stock market and just talking about this memo that came out that the left is trying to.
Now, this is really interesting.
Now they're going to release, they voted to release the Democrat memo.
And interestingly, all the Republicans said, release the memo.
Whereas when they released the Republican memo, all the Democrats said no.
You know, I never know with this whether it's smart for the Republicans to play nice and say, we're much better than you, or they should play the same hardball as the Democrats and say, no, we have the majority.
You're not releasing it.
Take a hike, bounce in.
But just even the way this is going, I just want to compare the attitude of these two sides, right?
I mean, here is Trump with the entire media and the Democrats selling everybody that this memo is a conspiracy.
It's a nothing burger.
It's a dud, right?
And Trump comes out.
I think this is cut.
Yeah, it's number nine, cut number nine.
Listen to his reaction to the memo.
Or it all goes back to where it was and worse.
Oh, but did we catch them in the act or what?
You know what I mean?
Oh, did we catch them in the act?
They are very embarrassed.
They never thought they were going to get caught.
We caught him.
Hey, we caught him.
Great sleuth.
Great sleuth.
He's having a great time.
It's so much fun.
Let's see if Chuck Schumer is having a great time.
Play that Schumer clip.
We are dealing with probably the most dangerous and worst man in the presidency we have ever had in the history of this nation.
But we are going to win the fight.
Well, if we can take back the Senate, that means that I will have the sole power to determine what goes on the floor of the Senate.
And that will mean we will not get another backward right-wing judge on the Supreme Court, period.
It means we'll be able to stop Donald Trump from putting all his junk on the floor and stop the anti-LGBT cascade of things that come into the United States Senate.
So keep up the activism.
Keep up the protests.
Keep up the calling.
Keep up everything that you do.
And we will take this country back.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Chuck does not look happy.
You know, it's just... All...
All I'm saying here is, you know, history is a level two chaotic system.
And some of the predictions and some of the attitudes you bring to it determine the history.
I'm not talking about the power of positive thinking.
I'm not talking about Joel Osteen stuff where you just always expect the best.
I'm talking about having confidence that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, using your wisdom, cultivating your wisdom, using that to guide you, having confidence that God will be there in a fix and a necessity, and going forward, believing that you're going in the right direction.
Who's doing that right now?
Who is doing that?
The stock market is reacting to Trump.
The stock market is a completely irrational system, as far as I can tell.
And it really is reacting to the absolute attitude of fun and optimism that this guy has.
Sometimes you look at him and you think like, I don't even know what he's so happy about, but he is absolutely having a good time.
Let me, again, compare Adam Schiff.
And I have said everything I have to say about Adam Schiff.
I just think he's a McCarthyite bad guy.
He really is.
He's not an honest guy, and he's not an honest broker of information.
But we're talking about, you know, let's do it this way.
Sarah Sanders was talking to, they were saying to her about this Donald Trump Jr. meeting that they think is treasonous and all this, and she just gave the entire Russia collusion story.
She just put it in perspective.
This clip is a little bit long, but it really is worth, this is clip number six.
She puts the entire thing in perspective.
Everybody wants to try to make this some story about misleading.
The only thing I see misleading is a year's worth of stories that have been fueling a false narrative about this Russia collusion and based on a phony scandal based on anonymous sources.
And I think that is, if we're going to talk about misleading, that's the only thing misleading I've seen in this entire process.
If you guys are focused on a meeting that Don Jr. had no consequence when the Democrats actually colluded with a foreign government like Ukraine, the Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that's been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news.
And if you want to talk further about a relationship with Russia, look no further than the Clintons, as we've said time and time again.
Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank and was personally thanked by Putin for it.
Hillary Clinton allowed one-fifth of America's uranium to reserve to be sold to a Russian firm whose investors were Clinton Foundation donors.
And the Clinton campaign chairman's brother lobbied against sanctions on Russia's largest bank and failed to report it.
If you guys want to talk about having relations, which you seem obsessed with doing, look no further than there.
If you want to talk about somebody who's actually been tough on Russia, look at President Trump.
He wants more fracking, more coal, more energy.
So she's telling you there's wrongdoing on the Democrat side, and Trump is being tough on Russia.
Now listen to what Adam Schiff says about this Russia collusion thing.
Listen to the vision that he's putting forward.
Again, this is cut number five.
As you have seen, they parroted Black Lives Matter to try to broaden the racial divide in this country.
Fascinatingly, they also trumpeted the Second Amendment.
Apparently, the Russians are very big fans of our Second Amendment.
They don't particularly want a Second Amendment of their own, but they're really glad that we have one.
The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!
So he's saying not only Black Lives Matter, which was virtually a creation of Barack Obama to cover up for his malfeasance in office, but he's saying our Second Amendment is a Russian, the Russians are promoting the Second Amendment, so we'll all kill each other.
I mean, he's giving you not a vision of Republican wrongdoing, which would be one thing.
Why Shaving Ads Matter00:04:12
He's giving you this complete vision that your country is completely taken over, is completely out of control.
And I just want to finish this with Hillary Clinton, because if you want to be happy, I'm sure some of you are just so sorry she was not elected, ha ha ha.
But if you want to just remind yourself of how happy you are that Hillary Clinton was not elected president, she was giving a talk and answering some questions the other day.
All I'm talking about is a vision of the world, a vision that helps create the world that will be, what kind of people we elect and what kind of visions we have actually help create the world that's going to be.
So Hillary is out there and she was asked about climate change and she was asked if women, you know, like the old funny New York Times headline, world ends, women in blacks worst affected.
They were asked if women would bear the brunt of climate change.
Listen carefully to this response as Cut 12.
With respect to the rest of the world, I would say that particularly for women, you're absolutely right.
They will bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all of the grass is finally gone as the desert vacation moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock or your crops are no longer growing.
They're burning up in the intense heat that we're now seeing reported across North Africa into the Middle East and into India.
So yes, women once again will be the primary, primarily burdened with the problems of climate change.
It's the apocalypse.
In her imagination, it's the apocalypse.
And the girls, you're talking to all these young girls at Georgetown University and they're smiling and nodding.
Yes, well, it's going to be Mad Max and we're going to get, you know, it's going to be bad for women.
That's the worst thing.
It's going to be unfair to women.
Not only is the world going to end, it's going to be unfair to women.
The stuff that you imagine, the attitude that you take into life, is going to affect the way the future goes and it's certainly going to affect the very moment you're living in.
Who do you want in power?
I mean, who do you want in power?
The guy who thinks that tomorrow it's all going to be desert and despair or the guy who's having a good time and thinks we're doing pretty well, which in fact we are.
So you're probably looking at how clean my shirt is and thinking that I'm about to do a tide ad, but no, you should have been looking at my head.
This is a dollarshaveclub.com.
Oh, stealing a little postmodern advertisement.
The dollarshaveclub.com.
Boy, today I was loading my dopkit for my trip, you know, and I'm choosing my razors.
I think this is great because dollarshave.com says a range of razors you can take.
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They choose it and it comes once a month or as often as you wish.
Or you can choose their level 12 blade or whatever the executive they call it, which has 152 blades and actually takes you three days to shave your head.
every single nub.
I'm making that up.
But it's really great.
That's the one I use today.
It's just got a lot of writ blades and it actually does give you a closer, faster shave.
They've also got stuff like Dr. Carver's shave butter, which I love because I can put it on.
I can actually see it's clear so it's not like cream.
You know, you can see what you're doing.
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You sign on to the Dollar Shave Club.
I was a member long before I started doing commercials for him, years before I started doing commercials.
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It comes with all kinds of other things that you can get if you choose shave butter, body cleanser, all kinds of accessories that you can use.
And it really is a great way to stay, to keep out of like going to drug stores where if you open up the razor thing, the alarm goes off and they carry you away and you go to prison for years.
So if you don't want to go to prison your years, now is a great time to sign up for the Dollar Shave Club or even give one as a gift.
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And you're probably thinking, look at that great shave on that guy's head.
If you come on over to the dailywire.com, you can hear it.
If you subscribe, you can watch the whole thing on the show.
And I forgot to mention it's the mailbag tomorrow.
Mailbag tomorrow.
Come on over, subscribe to thedailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, and you can ask any question you want, religion, politics, personal problems.
Answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Come over to TheDailyWire.com.
All right, we were going to have Howard Kurtz on, but they screwed up their schedule.
He's going to come on, what, next week, maybe?
All right, he'll be on next week.
But I did have a previous conversation with Stephen Ide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Dr. Stephen Ide.
He works on public administration, public finance, political theory, and urban policy.
That's Manhattan Institute is the institute that publishes City Journal where I sometimes write.
I am a contributing editor there.
Ide has worked on his work, has appeared in Politico, the New York Post, the Weekly Standard City Journal.
And I wanted to talk to him because he's an expert in homelessness.
And I've just been noticing, certainly in LA, it's partly in New York, it's just getting so bad.
And this has nothing to do, you know, Republicans complain that they only talk about homelessness when a Republican is in power.
This to me is something we should be, leftists and conservatives should be able to agree on, that people should not be living in the streets.
And I just wanted to ask him where this came from and why it got started.
Here is Stephen Ide from the Manhattan Institute.
Stephen, thanks so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
You know, and the reason I wanted to talk to you is I was in New York over Christmas.
It was maybe, I don't know, it felt like it was five below zero.
I was walking around and all over town.
And I remember this when I lived in New York in the 70s, all over town, people, there were homeless people on the street.
And I thought to myself, this is not right.
This is not right.
And conservatives know it's not right.
And leftists know it's not right.
And somehow, between those two sides, there ought to be something we could do about it.
So I wanted to talk to you about it.
First of all, we didn't always have this problem.
I mean, this is one of the things that really bothers me.
When I was as a kid, there were not homeless people.
I mean, obviously there were always hobos and beggars, but there was not this kind of villages of homeless people on the street.
What happened?
Well, yeah, it was not a problem that we called homelessness.
As you say, we had different terms that we used, hobos, bums, vagrants.
In most American cities going back, you know, the earlier part of the 20th century, you know, cities did serve as kind of pools of transient labor for an industrializing economy.
Cities attracted guys to come and work for temporary periods of time and then they would be, you know, the work would be interrupted.
And they would congregate in neighborhoods and neighborhoods started to form around the kind of housing and employment opportunities.
that service transient laborers.
Like I'm thinking of the term Skid Row neighborhood.
In LA, there's still this neighborhood called Skid Grove, but there are Skid Row neighborhoods all over American cities.
And then in New York City, it was called the Bowery on the Lower East Side.
And that was a place where, you know, single men, probably, you know, high rate of alcoholism, who had, for whatever reason, had been detached for their family.
These were kind of like the losers of industrial capitalism.
But they had a place where they could like find a room for the night at dirt cheap prices, these single room occupancy hotels, opportunities for spot labor if they wanted to do that, bars, etc.
So there were these kind of neighborhoods that were like just for what we might call now homeless guys.
Those neighborhoods were dismantled as a result of housing regulations, urban renewal pushes, but basically because we didn't want people to live like that anymore.
We didn't want these conditions to persist.
So we got rid of those neighborhoods.
So we spread the problem out throughout this city, as opposed to having it concentrated in one neighborhood.
So now they're in libraries and parks, train stations.
A lot of those guys would have been in the Skid Row neighborhoods, traditionally speaking.
So that's why the presence has become more visible, as you say.
Interesting.
And it also seems, I mean, I know that a lot of our psychiatric hospitals have kind of disappeared and the idea of institutionalizing people.
And a lot of the people I see on the street seem to me to be mentally ill.
Does that feed into this?
Is that part of the problem that there's no care for the mentally ill?
Yeah, the process that we now refer to as deinstitutionalization got going in the 50s.
The institutionalized population peaked at 560,000 in 1955, and it's been going down since.
For various reasons, we decided we didn't want to keep people in an inpatient setting.
We wanted to try to provide them with mental health care in communities.
It was a disaster.
Everyone agreed it did not play out in the way that its architects envisioned.
And so at present, somewhere between a quarter to one third of the homeless adult population have a serious mental illness.
And that is certainly an important driver of the problem as well.
Okay.
Now, you've been very, you wrote a piece in City Journal.
I don't mean to read you your own stuff, but our audience hasn't heard it.
So just read one little paragraph here.
You said, during New York's bad old days, which I remember, during New York's bad old days, mayors got re-elected while presiding over murder rates that look like a humanitarian crisis from a contemporary perspective.
The voting public is now at risk of settling into a similar complacency on homelessness.
We see this in LA.
I mean, if you go down to City Hall in LA, there are tent villages there and nobody seems to care.
Nobody seems to react and be saying to the government, what are you going to do?
You have been very critical of your communist mayor de Blasio there.
What is he doing wrong?
Well, you know, the New York City has this system of homeless services that has been built up over many decades.
You know, we got wrong on, we got off on the wrong path in this thing a long time ago.
There is, for example, in New York City, this right to shelter law, which confers on everybody the immediate right to, for the city to provide you with temporary housing that night.
And this has caused, this has probably pushed down the unsheltered population somewhat, but has caused the homeless population in general to swell and has also caused the quality of services that the city can provide to homeless people to really diminish because they're just constantly in triage mode.
So, you know, we do have like quality providers of homeless services.
There are good shelters who work to like, you know, connect guys with job training, get them back on their feet.
But it's harder for those people to do their work when there's just this constant pressure from the right to shelter and other factors pushing the population, the homeless population up and up and up and up.
I mean, it's a structural problem.
The economy's bad, homelessness goes up.
The economy's good.
Homelessness keeps going up.
And, you know, it's like the murder rate was.
Well, it's just, you can't help it.
We've got 2,000 murders a year.
That's just the kind of city we are.
Well, then, I mean, like I said, as I was walking around New York and I walk around here and I just, I can't help thinking to myself, you know, it ain't right.
It ain't right that people should be living like this.
Is there a government policy that you do recommend, a positive policy that you think would help?
Well, I think, you know, now it's more sensible to recommend trying to manage the problem, trying to reduce it than trying some dramatic strategy that's going to end homelessness.
There's been a lot of talk of ending homelessness over the past 10, 15 years, meaning mostly providing permanent housing benefits to anyone who's homeless.
I don't think that that's a logical solution to the entire homeless population.
For some people, you know, people with chronic mental illness who have no system of family support.
Yes, we've got to provide them for, we've got to accept the fact that we're just going to have to care for them for the rest of their lives.
For a lot of the homeless population, you know, if they have just sort of lost their job, if it's just a temporary state, I don't think we need to be giving them, you know, a permanent housing benefit.
But we do need to figure out some way in which, you know, to bring the rent down.
We have a desperate shortage of low-rent housing, certainly in New York and also in San Francisco, LA.
And we're going, you know, these problems like serious mental illness, which is not a problem for all the homeless, but the hardest cases, that is also something that we need to do something about.
So they don't make their homes on the streets, but actually, you know, make their homes in places where we can actually help them.
Why is it these essentially left-wing cities have such expensive real estate?
Is it just because they're such swell places to live or is it the way they control the rents?
Well, housing regulation has been a big driver of homelessness.
If we didn't regulate away the SROs, a lot of the homeless would have a place to stay.
A private landlord could tend to their housing needs as opposed to the government.
The government is always playing catch up with the affordable housing game because if you regulate housing above the reach of low-income populations, well, then it's going to be more expensive for you on the other end to use taxpayer funds, try to build housing for those populations.
Clearly, in the old days when we had these Skid Row neighborhoods, the private sector actually did a sort of okay job at providing housing for many of these populations.
And it's very hard to say that government is doing a better job than the private sector did now.
One issue we have is we have a lot of government subsidized housing.
We have the enormous NYCHA units, the projects in New York City.
Can't miss them.
That is an asset that is possibly underutilized in terms of what it could do for the homeless population.
There are a lot of units, people that units that are overhoused, people who have more rooms than they actually need.
And while at the same time, we have 60,000 homeless people.
So we have a lot of affordable housing.
We're not making the best use of it, the most efficient use of it.
What about, I mean, an individual, a church, you know, people want to go out and work in soup kitchens and feed the homeless.
But at the same time, I know that a lot of guys are running games on the street.
I mean, I've worked with the police who've shown me videos of people sitting in wheelchairs and then at the end of the day, packing up their wheelchair and walking away after they've, you know, gotten a lot of money from begging.
Nobody wants to incentivize people to be homeless, but is there anything that individuals can do to help people that would actually help people?
Well, you know, I don't want people, I want people to be compassionate.
I think anybody who's in favor of civil society doing as much as it can for these pressing needs, you want to encourage people to help them out.
And there are, you know, worthy non-profits.
If you can find a good non-profit with a long record of success, then, you know, it's good to attach yourself to them, support them in any way you can, because these are groups who are trying to work on long-term solutions to this problem, dealing with, you know, substance abuse treatment, mental illness treatment, job trading.
You know, if you feel the need to give somebody, you know, to give some money to a panhandler, then I don't want to say, you know, you should shrivel up your heart and never do that.
But, you know, that's there is a sense in which that does make it easier for that person to stay on the treat where we're not going to on the street, where we're not going to be able to help them.
And it's certainly not going to lead towards any sort of long-term solution to the problem.
Well, then let me take it from that angle.
If I wanted to be an activist of some sort, what should I be saying to the city of LA?
Or what should I be saying to the city of New York?
If I'm holding meetings, if I'm organizing, if I'm giving money to something, where should that go?
I mean, there should be, it seems to me that there ought to be a path forward toward eliminating essentially this kind of massiveness of this problem.
I mean, I remember in the 80s walking out to go to work early in the morning, and they were homeless people were lined up along the Morgan Library heating ducts to stay warm.
They were just sleeping head to toe along the heating ducts like mosquitoes on a tree, you know, just the way sleeping in a chain.
And I just thought, like, you know, does it have to be that way?
Does that really, is there, is that a necessity or is there something that people, activists should be doing to stop it?
Well, I think, you know, we could you separate the problem and you have to make a decision about which parts of the problem that you really feel like you need to address.
I mean, one big driver of the problem is single parent families.
Most of the family, most of the homeless population in New York City, families with children, mostly hitted by single-parent families.
That's a really tough nut to crack.
Hard to know what government should be doing.
But something like, you know, the mentally ill, we made a lot of mistakes over the years.
We can point to specific places in which decisions were made that made things worse and worse and worse.
So, yes, we need to provide them with housing.
We need to get them into treatment.
People who are resistance to treatment, we need to be talking about perhaps an involuntary in a temporary basis way of treating them.
And so that at least makes the problem, as I say, more manageable.
And, you know, we know that we're doing more for the hardest cases as opposed to, you know, providing everybody wants housing.
Everybody wants affordable housing, you know, but some people really do need it more than others.
So my last question, I mean, if you could basically snap your fingers and there would be one policy that changed that would help this problem, what would it be?
I would focus on the mental illness related homelessness.
And I would focus on connecting the seriously mentally ill with high quality providers who not only can give them housing, but provide them with case management and treatment to ensure that they will not be on the streets potentially threatening people,
potentially pushing people in front of oncoming subways, but caring for them in a way that a civilized society would do instead of the very unique.
We think of ourselves as very tolerant, very compassionate as opposed to former times, but people from the 19th century, if they would come to cities these days and look at these people living in squalor, they would have a lot of questions about how truly compassionate our society is.
Yeah, no, that is exactly what struck me.
And I know I said that was the last question, but I just want to add, ask one last thing.
To go back again to the actual government housing that is being used, you feel that you seem to feel that a private solution that something like a SRO hotels, Bowery neighborhood that's not a good neighborhood, but at least there's people to live, that that was actually a better solution than the one than government shelters.
Government Shelters Crisis00:04:53
Did I get that right?
Well, in government shelters these days in New York City, the conditions in many cases are truly appalling.
And we are spending far more on these facilities, I can tell you.
I mean, I recently, in 1980, you could have gotten a night stay in a Bowery hotel for three bucks at the time.
It's about $10 now.
You could panhandle that, no problem.
It wasn't much.
It wasn't high class, but it was a modicum of privacy and it was a place to stay.
We're spending a lot more than that these days.
And in many cases, the results are not that great.
So the private sector system, and we had a variety of private sector housing options.
There weren't just SROs, they're rooming houses, boarding houses, depending on which city and which time you're talking about.
So there was this kind of flexibility that the private market didn't have.
Sometimes the conditions were not optimal, but they were cheap.
And for many people, I think that was a better solution than the one that government has been, the solution that government has officially committed itself to since the 1980s, but is really keeps falling way short of delivering on.
So you reach your point where it's like, well, maybe this is, you know, government is reaching a little bit too far.
Yeah, yeah.
Stephen I, thank you very much for coming on of the Manhattan Institute.
Really interesting, just a mind-boggling problem.
And it really, I want to hear more about it and learn more about it because I feel like there's got to be some way forward that is not just having people living in tents on the street.
Really interesting talking to you.
I appreciate your coming on.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's a pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Stephen Ide of the Manhattan Institute.
We'll be talking more about homelessness because I expect to solve this problem by the time I go off the air, which is probably next Tuesday.
All right.
Sexual follies.
You know, I started this program with this Justin Trudeau telling people how to talk.
And I, you know, judgmentalism is one of, to me, one of the most offensive things that is coming out, sometimes from the right, always from the left.
You know, I've said this many times, that if you opened the gospel and every sentence had been removed, except Jesus saying, judge not lest ye be judged, you could deduce the crucifixion.
You could look at that and say, oh, they're going to kill that guy.
You know, nobody gets away with that because this is the one thing we all love to do.
And Christians, you know, a lot of Christians just hate that command more than any other.
They want to tell you which movies to watch.
I want to tell you how to have sex, which words you can use and be a good Christian.
And of course, the left is just constantly, constantly policing everything we think and say and do.
And yet, on the other side of this, on the other side of this, as Christians are always fast to point out because they want to get back to telling people what to do, on the other side of this is the fact that, of course, you have a higher likelihood of living a good life if you do certain things and don't do other things, a life that is moral, a life that lives into the self that you were supposed to be when God made you.
And so, you know, what do you do?
How do you communicate that to people if you feel you know something that they don't know?
And I would say the difference, it's the difference between purity and Puritanism.
The difference between purity and Puritanism is in one, you are focusing on yourself and fixing yourself, taking the plank out of your own eye.
And Puritanism, you are incredibly busy telling other people about the moat in their eye.
I just want to end with this cut that I found on the Daily Wire that just really, really moved me.
A woman named Brittany De LaMora, who was a porn star, and she came to God and suddenly it occurred to her that she was not, this was not making her feel good about herself.
This was not the way she wanted to live.
And she got into a relationship with a pastor.
She decided to become sexually chaste outside of marriage.
And she's lived this life.
And listen to the way she talks about this.
Purity is not an external thing.
Purity really is an internal thing.
So the reality is, is like you can't just have an impure heart with wrong motives and be a pure person because it's not the abstinence of sex that makes you pure.
It's, you know, the relationship and the right standing that you have with God that makes you pure.
I think that that is a brilliant statement.
And, you know, it's the thing is because she's thinking about herself.
She's making herself into a living example, a living testimony of the gospel.
Instead of coming out and telling you what you should do and it's your fault, she's not blaming the porn industry.
She's not blaming all the people who I'm sure abused her and used her in horrible ways.
And yet she's not thinking about that.
She's thinking about herself.
And that means that she's going to have a better life and get closer to the person God made her to be.
And that is the way of changing.
That is not just the way of changing the moment.
It also is the way of changing the future in a level two chaotic system.
Making Ourselves Into Testimonies00:00:46
Tomorrow, the mailbag.
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You'll be cured.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
I got to get out of here.
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you tomorrow.
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