Who to Blame

Given a situation which everyone agrees is bad, everyone knows who to blame — the other side.

Some examples:

Homelessness

Reading the Wikipedia article, it is clear that a major cause is the failure of the federal government to be sufficiently generous in helping poor people, in particular in subsidizing low-income housing.

In 1980, federal funds accounted for 22% of big city budgets, but by 1989 the similar aid composed only 6% of urban revenue (part of a larger 60% decrease in federal spending to support local governments). It is largely (although not exclusively) in these urban areas that homelessness became widespread and reached unprecedented numbers. Most notable were cuts to federal low-income housing programs. An advocacy group claims that Congress halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 (the government's housing voucher subsidization program) and that between the years of 1980 and 1989 HUD's budget authority was reduced from $74 billion to $19 billion. Such alleged changes are claimed to have resulted in an inadequate supply of affordable housing to meet the growing demand of low-income populations.

Reading comments to my post on homelessness, the causes are also clear. The main one is left-wing city governments letting people camp on public property, providing free beds, food, spending billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness. As one commenter put it, “It's safe to assume that you get more of what you subsidize.” A secondary cause is governments, at every level, following policies designed to enforce a minimum quality of housing. Sometimes it is done with the deliberate purpose of pushing poor people out by making illegal housing they could afford to buy, sometimes on the theory, actual or feigned, that if you don’t allow people to live in low quality housing they will end up in high quality housing instead of on the street, rather like the idea of improving people’s vehicles by making it illegal to sell anything but a Cadillac.

A third plausible cause is deinstitutionalization, releasing most of those who had been involuntarily committed to mental hospitals. When it happened it was broadly supported, so neither the left nor the right is well positioned to blame it on the other, but I expect there are people who opposed it at the time and view current homeless problems as a vindication of their view.

As it happens I agree with my commenters, although with less confidence than they display. My post offered evidence for the position, but evidence well short of proof.

Forest Fires

It is widely, I presume correctly, believed that they are becoming more common. The left-wing explanation is climate change plus irresponsibly careless corporations, in particular power companies. The right-wing explanation is poor management of the public lands due to environmentalists¹ who discourage the harvesting of timber, along with a policy of suppressing small fires instead of permitting and if necessary setting them in order to burn the deadwood before there is enough of it to fuel a big fire. Presumably the explanation for that, as for political short sightedness in general,² is that a fire today is my problem, a fire next decade someone else’s.

In California, where I live, fires are often blamed on careless maintenance by Pacific Gas and Electric, the local power monopoly. For those on the left that is evidence of the evils of capitalism, for those on the right, of the evils of government regulation. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, so the amount they can afford to spend on maintenance depends on the regulators. It is easier to justify expenditures for the fuel needed to produce power today than for expenditures to prevent problems that might happen ten or twenty years in the future.

Crime

The left blames crime mostly on poverty and inequality. Various parts of the right blame it on insufficient support for the police,  low sentences, progressive prosecutors who don’t prosecute, attitudes promoted by left-wing ideology, the lack of religion, … .

Immigration

The right blames the Biden administration for canceling Trump policies to restrict illegal immigration and, on the longer term, for unwillingness to enforce existing restrictions. The left blames the Republicans for failing to support a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year.

High Prices

The right blames the left for fiscal extravagance while largely ignoring the fiscal extravagance of the Trump years. The more sophisticated right adds in regulations that raise costs, government hostility to the production of fossil fuels, biofuel mandates converting a third of the maize crop to alcohol and so pushing up the price of maize and of everything , most obviously livestock, that maize goes into. The left blames greedy corporations, assumed to support Republicans or at least to benefit by Republican reluctance to restrict them.

Unemployment

The Trump/Vance right blames foreign competition and proposes protective tariffs to prevent it. The sophisticated right³ blames minimum wage laws and legal rules that make it hard to fire people and so risky to hire them. The left blames insufficient “stimulus,” aka deficit spending.

Education

The right blames progressive teachers indoctrinating children with woke propaganda instead of teaching them for the low quality of schooling, “special interest groups like the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the higher education lobby,”⁴ along with the high number of non-teaching staff required to enforce progressive mandates, for the high cost.

The left blames insufficient spending on schools and, occasionally, attempts by parents to exert some control over what their children are taught.

Getting away from American politics …

Wars of the Protestant Reformation

Fought primarily in Central Europe, an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians died from the effects of battle, famine, or disease, while parts of Germany reported population declines of over 50%. …

The war can be seen as a continuation of the religious conflict initiated by the 16th-century Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire. (The Thirty Years War, Wikipedia)

The cause of multiple bloody wars of which that was the worst was obviously the heresy of Martin Luther et. al. and the reluctance of them and their followers to accept the authority of the Holy Catholic church.  From a Protestant viewpoint, on the other hand …

The pattern probably holds for most wars. For a more recent example …

Ukraine War

The invasion was made necessary, as Putin and his supporters could explain, by the coup that replaced a pro-Russian government with one committed to joining the EU and eventually NATO, bringing Russia’s enemies dangerously closer. From the standpoint of the Ukrainian government and its allies, on the other hand, it was a naked land grab by Russia seeking to expand its territories at the cost of Ukraine and to convert what remained into a Russian puppet

A Domestic Disagreement

My daughter’s criticism of my dish washing is obviously the fault of her unreasonably high standards, which treat a little flour on the handle of a pot as a blatant failure of kitchen cleanliness. She, however, would insist that the fault is my tendency to put washed things away without first washing the flour off my hands — and could doubtless point to a few other minor failings.

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1. A brief summary of the argument and a response qualifying part of it.

2. The point is discussed in Chapter 3 of my Future Imperfect. Search for “insecure property rights.”

3. Readers may by now suspect that what I mean by “the sophisticated right” is libertarians, or possibly economists.

4. From the Project 2025 chapter on education.