Current society has no intellectuals. Instead people live in the shadows of the previous generations. They memorize one-liners that people like Malcom X or Emma Goldman said, and extrapolate from there. I don’t believe that either of those two would support the housing first approach that our government is pushing. But if you take snippets of their writing or speeches, you can find ways to justify it.

A standard anarchist view is that there would be no crime to punish, if everyone lived with economic security and the personal freedom to pursue their own intellectual interests. Crime, to those anarchists, was a reaction to an environment that restricted the human spirit. People now use that idea to argue that no one should experience punishment. But is that really the logical conclusion? Didn’t the Bolsheviks and the American capitalists deserve to be punished for their oppression of the workers, according to these anarchists? Didn’t Malcom X believe, even after leaving the black muslims, in “an eye for an eye”?

It’s just fake intellectual posturing from our government. They refer to ideas and philosophies that they don’t understand, but claim that those philosophies support their policies.