Subsidized Housing, often referred to as 'Section Eight,' is, in Harm City, no longer a matter of putting all of society's dependent eggs in one basket, but of spreading the burden. This is a form of privatized government welfare.
Israel Flood is a land lord who, at the time of the following interview, owned five houses in a bad portion of Northwest Baltimore known as Park Heights.
"I buy's me a house for five-ten thousand dollars, puts another five or ten into it, does the work maself, and then rents it. Now your poor folks—white and black—they always behine on they rent, and eventually leave without paying a dime—just up and move with their trash bags, leaving their plastic furniture for me to dispose of. En they destroy you good work, ruin things, holes in walls, mess in the basement.
"Now your section eight people are the same low down folks, but they only have to come up with but ninety-nine dollars of the rent, en the government cut me a check for the rest. I never even expect to see the ninety-nine—they 'ill shoot that shit in they arms and smoke it. I prefers the Section Eight! That way I gets paid, end collect money fo damages so I can fix it up for the next fools to destroy."
"A course collectin' the ninety-nine dollars sometimes ain't worth it no how. That time I walk up to my rental and dem five boys waylay me and knock my teeth out with that pipe or brick or whatever they had, weren't worth no ninety-nine dollars."
Yesterday morning I walked in past my land lord's office, from which he runs his refrigeration business, and he called out, "Hey, Mister Jim, you are a person who understands the low-life mutherfuckers and pieces of shit of the world. Perhaps you could give me your thoughts on this."
I walked over to his computer monitor as he pulled up photos from his two must recent estimates. "Okay, here we have a section eight rental in Reisterstown. We know who that is [an all black area]."
He then shows me how, before moving out, the tenant has not only removed the copper line that ran from the exterior unit to the interior unit. But the water damage, from where a disgruntled non-paying renter had run a hose through the duct work in the ceiling, causing $20,000 worth of damage.
"Now, I understand this yo is still pissed off at slavery and getting back at whitey. I understand. My technicians also need to eat, so I'm glad to get the work. But it feels wrong; feels like I'm sucking off of the welfare teat too. What I don't get is the amount of work they are doing. They've got to cut this line, risk being burned by the refrigerant while they're capping it, then fold this copper up and maybe get forty dollars for it. Forty dollars?"
"Well, Mister S., that is four hits on a crack pipe, or, if you're a drinking man, eighteen Steel Reserve twenty-two ounce malt liquors."
"Okay, then, Mister Jim, what about this?"
He pulls up photos of a rural location that had had the copper piping from interior and exterior units professionally removed without gratuitous damage.
"Okay, this is Upper Co—hillbillies, instead of yos. He uses tools, probably hauls this off in his pickup truck, gets sixty dollars and in the process destroys a four thousand dollar unit. This is like removing the bricks in your city wall—this is the fall of Western Civilization and it's become my business! When I was a kid this was a beautiful town. I was taking college level math—we were going to the moon, were going to beet the Rooskies to the moon. Now we're paying these illiterate motherfuckers and hillbilly pieces of shit to tear the guts out of our housing? Where do we go from here?"
"Tyrone has got his crack and malt liquor, and Joe has got his Oxys and Budweiser. It's a happy ending in the hood and at the trailer park."
He just shrugged his shoulder as his phone rang and another land lord called for an estimate for replacing the guts of his house on the State dole.
My considered answer is that we are on a long descent, beset by the urban barbarians within and the rural raiders without. If the economy does take a sudden nose dive expect to be sandwiched between the 'yos' maliciously pillaging one dwelling at a time, and the redneck raiders, swooping into residential zones in their pickup trucks, siphoning gas, and cannibalizing your machinery for their own use. In Rome they had the mob within and the barbarians from without. All the rulers did was lean more heavily on their Praetorian Guard until society pancaked. I suggest you look for the modern counterpart of the Roman Praetorian Guard if you want to find the third of the three-pronged threat to your property, liberty and survival.
James, How about a routine we call, the rich guy remodel, some how the heat gets shutoff, we go to check out the high usage on his water meter. We find instead a frozen wasteland that the warm weather has thawed, something to think about when you pay higher insurance premiums. It always seem to be an older home, older meaning at least 10 yrs, I lost count at 25 before I was removed from, oops, moved to another position. Ishmael.
My two cents:
In a functional society, the law answers to G-d, man answers to G-d, his neighbors and the law, the wife answers to her man and G-d, the children answer to the man and wife. Everyone does their part, and everyone is looking upwards.
In a failing society, everyone knows there is no G-d, or He doesn't care, or whatever. Everything is worth what you can get out of it Those with the law in their hands use it to get over, and everyone knows, so nobody obeys the law against their own interest unless there's a gun in their face, which is a minority of the time. Neighbors prey on each other. The wife gets over on the man, by cheating or by taking him to divorce court and turning him into a slave. The man gets over on his wife, maybe by divorcing her when her tits start to sag, maybe in other ways. Of course, the kids rebel because it gets you points from friends and teachers.
So in a society like that, why wouldn't I wreck thousands of bucks of your equipment to make a couple dozen on my end? After all, you'd do the same to me.
This should be carved in stone somewhere, perhaps on two matching tablets.
Carving it on tablets won't help. We needed an extensive system of mnemonic devices and codes for every aspect of your life to achieve any sort of stability, and even then people constantly slough off almost as fast as you can keep making new ones. Just tablets end up as a Charlton Heston movie, and then a meme.
The alternative is stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius embraced. But stoicism, being the flip side of Epicureanism, is a train to nowhere, as Marcus Aurelius found out. Maybe they serve good wine and steak on the train, or you can enjoy the gruel as though it were wine and steak, but the train still goes nowhere.
Yes, excellent points from B and Ishmael. I believe we should also point out that although they are white, the "hillbillies" of Appalachian origin have always believed themselves to be poverty stricken outsiders as much as any racial minority group. Consequently that meant they had to live outside the law in order to earn enough to keep body and soul together, and to protect their rights as well. In the past that meant they indulged in moonshining, poaching, theft and extra-legal violence (AKA feuds). The distant ancestors of these Appalachian dwellers were even poor outsiders when they lived in the lawless borderlands on the English/Scottish border. Raids and cattle theft were common. Then they were transported to colonize a wilderness that was just as dangerous and where it was just as hard to make a living. Hence the outlaw culture in Appalachia is deep rooted. Nowadays the decedents of these Appalachian hillbillies are engaging in copper theft and welfare fraud, just like the racial minorities. So if the white hillbillies don't feel they have a stake in the greater society, it is in large part because they never did. It's also important to note that Harm City isn't the only place where this epidemic of metal theft occurring. It is happening across the land, in my area and on the west coast as well. Victor Davis Hanson has long written about the crime wave of copper threat in the central California valley where he lives: pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-the-road-warrior-is-here/?singlepage=true. In central California it is mostly Hispanics that are doing the looting of course. Likewise they come from a peasant/bandit culture that collectively believes it has no real stake in the larger society. Besides, all non-white groups think American white people are magic. They can build anything and fix anything as good as new. No matter how badly it was trashed to begin with. And they have huge rooms full of money hidden away, like Scrooge the Duck in the comic books. So what’s the harm? I observed this attitude in Iraq as well. The Arabs figured we Americans could fix everything good as new, no matter how much they sabotaged and undermined our efforts to reconstruct the country through their theft, fraud and incompetence. If we couldn’t fix or remedy something the Iraqis imagined it was really because we just didn’t want to and were being difficult for some strange American reason.