People can’t and/or won’t bury their dead, and the city of Detroit is too broke to bury them as well.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job.

Some bodies have been at the morgue for 5+ years. I think this article has too much emphasis on this problem being caused by poverty on the part of families. The county’s chief medical examiner, Carl Schmidt, says, “One way we look back at a culture is how they dispose of their dead.” It’s not just a money/economic issue, it’s also a cultural issue. We’re talking about the same generations of people (my generation included) who dump their family members and parents into decrepit nursing homes because they don’t want to be bothered with them, yet they can’t wait to get their hands on the dough when they die.

As an aside, when exploring this topic online, I came across this great kid, from Alaska, and his 5-minute analysis of the Detroit dead, Obama, unemployment, and his thoughts on fascism and corporatism. He’s young, and he’s already thinking about things that people twice his age have no clue about. I think Lew Rockwell should invite this inquisitive young mind to Mises University …