Chicago suffers from a very high rate of violent crime. What’s the mayor to do? Easy — give money away to black residents to lower the racial wealth gap. That will settle all those criminals down.

I’m not making this up. Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, says he’ll hand out money (“reparations for slavery”) to blacks as a means of reducing violent crime. Hans Bader covers this absurdity for Liberty Unyielding.

He points out some glaring problems with this idea. There is no connection between poverty and crime. People don’t change their behavior when they receive windfalls. Paying out money based on race is unconstitutional.

Johnson, like all “progressives,” thinks that government power is the solution to every problem. But as Bader points out, reducing poverty requires changes in individual behavior, not government handouts:

There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for poor Americans of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” People who don’t follow that roadmap are more likely both to become poor, and to turn to a life of crime.

I suspect that Johnson knows that his “reparations” program won’t do anything to reduce crime, but politicians have to look like they’re concerned about visible problems, so it’s necessary for him to do something, no matter how foolish.