Invariably, these rationalizations amount to a license to spend ever more on the social programs that have, at the least, helped to produce the sort of “youths” who will burn homes and cars and beat people to death should the programs be even moderately curtailed. Indeed, according to liberal logic, the mere threat of reforming such programs is enough to cause wholesale violence.

In other words, the cuts don’t justify the violence, but the threat of violence justifies avoiding cuts. It’s a clever rhetorical trick, but policy-wise it’s both appeasement of and appealing to thuggery, pure and simple.

This helps to clarify how economic inequality has come to replace poverty as the most cited “root cause” of social unrest. Poverty, while a more slippery concept than you might think, is still a definable thing. If you lack adequate housing, food, and clothing, you’re very poor. Western democracies don’t have much of a problem, comparatively speaking, with that kind of poverty.