It is telling that the Muslim terrorist and unemployed electrician, Ibrahim Abdeslam, arrested just prior to the Brussels bombing, was struggling by with his wife on just 1,000 euros a month from welfare. I raise that question because, to me, there is nothing more important to a terrorist than an independent income. How can you plan your bombings and sew your suicide belts if you have to show up at the construction site to wire up junction boxes?

Naturally, we all think the Muslim problem is unique, and so it is. Except that we have seen all this before. Of course, when the Irish were tumbling off their coffin ships into New York and Boston they sent their own women out onto the streets, as the “nymphs of the paves,” whereas the Muslims of Rotherham sensibly use fatherless white girls for that purpose. But the Irish were lucky. They had Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral right there on Fifth Avenue, and the “shanty Irish” dragged themselves out of the gutter and became “lace-curtain Irish.”

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and every immigrant wave, in the United States at least, has filled respectable people with terror. Angry, jobless males? Check. No-go areas? Check. Criminal gangs? Check. Liberals pandering to immigrants and delaying their integration into the market economy? Check.

All along, liberals have been playing with fire. Their conceit has been that they could control the tribalism in the latest immigrant wave in the same way that firefighters think they can fight wildfires with controlled burns. But the liberal record isn’t so great. Liberals legislated monopoly rights for unions, and the unions burned down big steel and big auto. How did that help the workers? Liberals encouraged African Americans with race quotas and tolerance for gangs, and blacks burned down their ghettos. Liberals vowed to smash the patriarchy by devaluing marriage and made a generation of women angry and desperate. Hey, why not encourage Muslims in their religious ghettos and no-go areas! What could go wrong?

Politics is violence, writes the great Kevin D. Williamson. But the corollary is that politics is needed where violence is needed, as in fighting urban crime, as in smashing urban gangs, as in breaking up no-go areas. That is what politicians are for: defending against enemies, foreign and domestic.

Liberals prefer to fight a different game; they only defend against enemies foreign and domestic after they have tried everything else. Instead, liberals “fight” for the victims du jour, encourage their pre-industrial era tribalism and buy their votes with other peoples’ money. All tremendous fun and it gives liberals power and trillions of other peoples’ money to spend on themselves.

Maybe the Muslims will be the victimized group whose tribalism educated evolved liberals cannot manage. Maybe liberals have been playing like kids with dangerous fireworks for decades, and the Muslim Candle is going to explode and blow their hands off, and a lot more besides.

There is nothing to make adults nervous like a kid playing with fireworks.

But pretty soon, the liberal kids are going to be called into the house and sent to their rooms, while the rest of us wage economic, political and moral/cultural war on Islamic extremism with a new ruling class. A good start would be “broken windows” policing with CompStat, similar to what Ted Cruz has just proposed.

The most obvious task in the war will be economic, making it really difficult for would-be terrorists to fry their brains on welfare. The worthy Muslim shopkeeper in Scotland, murdered for wishing his customers a Happy Easter, tells the story. When you are actively engaged in the global capitalist economy you want to be everyone’s friend -- you must be everyone’s friend -- because the whole world could be your customer, or your employer. When gainfully employed, your mind gets diverted from the vital task of blowing up the infidel to the more mundane task of how to keep your customer happy now that the schedule has slipped a couple of weeks.

Young men instinctively want to be warriors and plunderers. The great achievement of Western civilization was to teach young men to battle over customer satisfaction and market share during the week, and simulated mob action at the game on the weekend.

The west has done an amazing job in turning its young men away from mayhem, no thanks at all to the left and to liberals.

For a start the next President of the United States could reverse the Obama executive repeal of the 1996 welfare reform act. That could put Muslims to work, and blacks, and the drugged-out white working class. Why, with a policy like that, we could make America great again.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.