Almost everyone, including welfare mothers, knows that our welfare situation is a tragedy and we ought to change it drastically. Almost everyone knows we have dumbed down our schools and have to undumb them. Not everyone, but almost everyone, knows that preferential treatment is a threat and we ought to stop it. It is important to understand in greater depth just why these social issues are even more important now than in the recent past. Why These Values Matter Most Crime.
Crime is probably the worst of the worst.
The FBI's violent crime rate has increased sixfold from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. Every integer represents a human being who was murdered, raped, robbed, mugged, or subjected to an aggravated assault. When it became plausible for a potential predator to believe that crime does pay, or even that crime might pay, crime went up. By the late 1970s society began to toughen up. As the number of prisoners went up, the rate of violent crime continued to climb but was increasing at a decreasing rate.