New Yorkers are generous, compassionate, charitable — but we’re nobody’s fools. That’s why even confirmed liberals like Mayor Bloomberg are starting to realize that New York’s court-ordered system of taking care of the “homeless” has gotten out of control.

On Friday, after our Benjamin Smith reported that one in six families seeking housing in New York City’s shelter system have been in the city for a month or less, Mr. Bloomberg spoke some sense on his radio show. “Unfortunately, the advocates are never rational about this,” Mr. Bloomberg said, according to reports in Newsday and the New York Post. “They are so absolutist they think we should pick up all of the burdens of the entire world society. We can’t afford to do that.” The mayor said, “I think we have a moral obligation to take care of our citizens. I don’t think we have one, nor can we afford, to take care of people from other states. They could go back to whatever state they came from, or have that state pay for it some ways or another.”

At fault is a consent decree dating back to a 1979 court case, Callahan v. Carey. Robert Callahan was a homeless man; Hugh Carey was governor of New York. To settle the suit, Mr. Carey, along with Mayor Koch, agreed in 1981 that the city would provide shelter and board to each homeless man that applies for it. The decree set out standards for homeless housing in painstaking detail, mandating everything from the kind of pillow the homeless are entitled to — “clean, comfortable” — to the nature of the bedrooms — “above grade level” and lit and ventilated “by means of windows in an outside wall.”

As the president of the Doe Fund, a private charity, put it, “The word must be getting out about New York City’s unique housing policy: you come here, and the taxpayers will pay for you to have an apartment by midnight tonight or pay you $150 a day in fines.”

Even the homeless “advocates” concede that New York City hosts the homeless like nowhere else. A senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, Patrick Markee, wrote last week that if the Bloomberg administration gets its way, “New York City would lose its distinction as the only city in the United States that provides a legal guarantee of shelter for homeless adults and children.”

This is a guarantee that other cities don’t offer for good reason. Imagine if, say, Short Hills, N.J., or Honolulu, Hawaii, or Beverly Hills, Calif., announced that it would offer an apartment or hotel room with windows and a clean, comfortable pillow to anyone who showed up claiming to be homeless. The cities would be inundated, the way New York is now. Not that New York’s shelter system is any day at the beach. But, hey, it is New York City, which is a wonderful place to live. And the city’s shelter system can lead to hotel rooms. Or it can jump you to the top of the list for the city’s public housing, some of which is in prime locations. Under the current system, homeless persons can even reject offers of apartments if they don’t like the location offered. Without the leap of homeless persons to the front of the line, the waiting list for an apartment in the city’s public housing is years-long; once tenants get such a slot, they stay for an average of 17.7 years. For a subsidized rent voucher, the city’s non-emergency wait list is 10 years long and has been closed since 1994; if you’re “homeless,” you can get a voucher in a month.

It’s cold outside, and our heart goes out to the truly homeless, wherever they are from. But those who belittle the seriousness of the current abuses do no favor either to persons who are without homes or to other unfortunate New Yorkers who require assistance. As the city heads into state court on Friday to start trying to untangle the excesses of Callahan v. Carey, it’s worth reminding that if New York City tries to solve the entire nation’s housing and homeless problems, word will get out.