Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot may have hit on a brutal truth when she recently made remarks about the carjacking of the head of Chicago's film office, which resulted in his hospitalization.  She said carjackers, and by implication, other young lawbreakers, feel unloved, and that is the impetus that carries them into a life of crime.

You may remember the 60 Minutes reports from the '90s about the orphans of Romania.  Those children were horribly neglected in the grossly understaffed national orphanages.  The failed policies of  Nicolae Ceauşescu necessitated those institutions.

The Romanian dictator came to power and immediately instituted Decree 770, which mandated a rapid increase in the nation's population.  He felt that this was the key to his nation's emergence as a regional power.  Abortion and birth control were outlawed.  As the infant population soared, the Romanian economy cratered.  Communism did its usual damage, crushing any possibility of a decent life and leaving thousands of infants and small children whose parents could not afford to support them at the mercy of the state.

Romania created hundreds of orphanages in which the average infant through three-year-old got approximately five minutes a day of human contact.  Reportedly, the orphans were left all day, unloved, untouched, and unsupervised as the untrained and unmotivated attendants lolled about the hallways smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee (as well as other potable liquids).  Those same infants, when later adopted into good families, showed a near-universal inability to socialize and live a normal life.  Government planning thus proved disastrous for the young Romanians.

When LBJ pushed legislation creating "The Great Society" through Congress in 1964–65, he, along with many co-sponsors of the legislation, predicted a great uplifting of previously downtrodden portions of our population.  What happened was precisely the opposite.  The various laws passed by Congress provided financial incentives for the one-parent (almost universally the mother) families.  It made more financial sense for young mothers to remain unwed.  Marriage would have removed those subsidies, which allowed them to profit from being the heads of single-parent homes.

In 1965, 24% of Black infants and 3.1% of White infants were born out of wedlock.  By 1990, the rates had risen to 64% for Black infants and 18% for Whites.  The cycle of poverty that condemned these young mothers to lives of financial desperation was ensured continuity.

Cynics might say the intention of LBJ and the Democrat party had all along been to condemn these single-parent families to a lifelong dependence on government subsidies for survival.  Democrats would be rewarded at the voting booths.  Whether that was the intent or not, it is undoubtedly the reality. Government planning proved disastrous to these young Americans, just as it had done for the Romanian orphans.  Are you sensing a pattern?

No matter how ferociously the single parent loves her child, that child is still deprived of half of what every child deserves: two parents who love him.  If elements of our population culturally embrace this government dependence and reward, they are doomed to the same fate as those Romanian orphans.  Maternal love might well provide survival.  But lacking fathers in the home, the paternally unloved have shown an inclination to migrate toward crime.  Many young criminals have been known to hijack cars and inflict bodily damage on the rightful owners of those vehicles, much like what happened to Lightfoot's employee.

So Mayor Lightfoot was likely correct.  These young criminals whom we read about every day do need love.  But it is unlikely she will ever address the reasons for the correctness of her statements.  She and her Democrat comrades are not going to demand or even recommend behavioral changes that would improve the lives of these young people: get educated and don't have babies until you are ready, both financially and emotionally, to bring them up in a loving, two-parent home.  That might cause a decrease in the Democrat voting rolls.

I believe that Lightfoot and her ilk are more likely to ask the rest of us to solve the problem for them.  Rather than make any serious attempts at solutions, we should all just "Hug a Mugger" and give the miscreants the love they so badly need.

Image: MacLean Center via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (cropped).