MORE SUPPORT FOR MICKEY KAUS’S TERRORISM-WELFARE HYPOTHESIS, BUT IS ANYBODY PAYING ATTENTION? ISIS fighter received welfare in Maine while being radicalized.

Make ’em work for a living and they’ll have less time for that crap. I mean, Kaus was writing about this in 2001, but has the lesson sunk in? No. Wrote Mickey:

In fact, there’s a good argument that “welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism” is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there’s less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)

Still true, still an important consideration for policy. Still ignored.