OT. Harm from the Welfare state

If he actually wants any of them - few do, given any kind of choice. Pretty much everybody prefers a job that can - amongst many other things - let them pay for better wine and decent shoes

Actually a collection of misleading assertions ...

A claim that isn't actually supported by any statistical evidence. Everybody's families came apart in the wake of the expansion of the welfare state - people could suddenly afford to divorce unsatisfactory spouses, and the the traditional approach of waiting around until an unsatisfactory spouse died of some infectious disease became less practical.

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Which doesn't explore the question of how everybody's net worth increased more, and where.

When US unemployment was remarkably low for everybody.

as been

Reflecting a general worsening of the employments prospects of the unskilled since the 1950's rather than any specific decline in the job prospects of blacks.

So what? This is all rhetorical nonsense - the energetic comparison with apples with pears - and you are too dim to realise that you've been conned, once again.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

cts of blacks.

More white paper is produced than any other color. Mikek

That's a great endorsement.

At least toward the end of the slaver era, marriage among slaves was _illegal_ in the US, because it constituted a contract, and one's property could not make contracts from their owners.

Slaves were routinely taken from their families, mated like cattle, refused the opportunity to worship, etc., etc. They were generally treated worse that we allow pigs to be treated today.

The statement that you are quoting is, at best, fantasy, and at worst is an intentional lie. The only question is whether you knew it was false when you decided to quote it as fact.

Huh? The black family began coming apart as soon as LBJ's wondrous "Great Society" made absentee fathers result in a better welfare benefit than when fathers remained with their family unit.

The Left has never had any capability of anticipating unintended consequences... which I guess implies that those on the left make lousy engineers ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Gee, I know shitty right wing engineer in Arizona, but I don't assume all right wing engineers are shitty.

You might want to take that up with Dr. Thomas Sowell. He lived it.

Paying black women not to marry, and minimum wage were especially harmful.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Dr. Sowell hints at that here:

"Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers -- which it will not -- the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.

Children born and raised without fathers are a major problem to society and to themselves. There is nothing "fair" about increasing the number of such children."--T. Sowell

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"Paying black women not to marry"? Sounds discriminatory. I'm sure that feckless white women could have done equally well.

The destructive effects of the minimum wage do constitute a significant part of right wing myth and legend.

Left wingers have their own stories, one of them about the way the introduction of the minimum wage in Texas made fast food shop owners quite a lot of money. Before the legislation, the fast food shops had competed to pay the lowest possible wages so that they could sell food as cheaply as possible.

This had the direct effect that nobody worked in a fast food shop for any longer than they had to, staff turnover was high, cooking and service were unskilled, and the food unappetising.

The minimum wage legislation made the jobs a little less unattractive, staff tended to stay long enough to get experienced and the shops became more attractive to the customers. Whence more customers for slightly more expensive, but much more edible, food.

Choose your political opinion and you get to hear the stories that go with it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And you seem to not even know why.

Remember 'carbon copies'?

Most especially a manifesto of any type - is eXplicitly called a "white paper"..

I have a ball-point pen that makes three carbon copies but no original!

We always used this one:

Just threw that out to see if Sloman wanted to argue. ;-) Mikek

The problem is the way the argument is presented, focusing on race. Sowell has a personal interest in that but it's not the right argument for the general population. As Bill Sloman pointed out (in the post to which I replied earlier), the welfare state is destructive to everyone. That it had a more detrimental effect on African American families is not the point.

It is relevant if you want to point out that African Americans are badly misguided (*) in their voting habits but not if you want to argue about welfare in general. The fact that it destroys social mobility, by making poverty more permanent and advancement less likely, applies to everyone whether their families were broken up or not.

The Democrats have succeeded in creating a system with so many hundreds of different programs (about 900 in 1982 IIRC which was possibly the last time they were counted) so that now half the population is on at least one of those "drugs". Most of those people have a total net loss because of the programs (**), but they are too dim to figure that out. So their self-perpetuating voting block may be set in stone.

(*) Obama even thinks LBJ was one of the greatest, and he blocked civil rights legislation in the 50's, then supported it when it was popular.

(**) People who enter a Ponsi scheme early and get out early make a profit, just like people who retired soon after Social Security started. It's interesting that SS resembles a Ponsi scheme even by its incidental characteristics.

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Argue? It's just the usual half-baked right-wing twaddle. You don't argue with that, just point out the gaps in the logic and pass on.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I certainly didn't say that it was destructive to everybody. The changes in society which Sowell sees as destructive certainly upset conservatives. It's less clear that people affected would think that they were worse off.

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A curious claim, since better welfare provisions in Europe have lead to European social mobility over-taking American social mobility. Will Hutton's "The World We're In" makes the point in some detail.

Americans do dislike the book, but that doesn't make it's thesis invalid.

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Right-wingers do like making this claim, along with alleging that effective social security creates a dependency culture.

Effective social security - as practised in the advanced industrial countries of western Europe - invests more (in retraining amongst other things)in getting people back to work than its US equivalent, which is quite the opposite of creating a dependency culture. It generates more social mobility, rather than leaving people to fester in prisons and slums.

America's problem is that it doesn't invest enough in social security, and what it does invest is too focussed on short-term solutions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But the sky-rocketing rate of unwed motherhood is mostly due to people not bothering to get married any more.

Children born and raised without fathers are a small and decreasing proportion of the children born to unwed mothers. Sowell is ignoring reality for rhetorical effect, and James Arthur - who is also enthusiastic about for this form of dissimulation - can't contain his admiration for the smoothness of the prestidigitation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's how dimbulb was created. Over 100 copies, but nothing original.

It wasn't the welfare state that dismantled the families, as I went on to point out in the in rest of the sentence, which you've snipped without even marking the snip.

What I actually said was

"Everybody's families came apart in the wake of the expansion of the welfare state - people could suddenly afford to divorce unsatisfactory spouses, and the the traditional approach of waiting around until an unsatisfactory spouse died of some infectious disease became less practical."

The families that came apart needed to come apart, and the welfare state finally made it possible for a lot of wives to walk out on mean or brutal husbands. It didn't support them or their kids in luxury, but at least they didn't starve.

"Traditional values" trapped a lot of people in unhappy - sometimes downright unhealthy - relationships.

Sowell neglects this aspect of the welfare state, and implicitly claims that holding marriages together by economic blackmail is a morally desirable. There's a lot of this kind of sleigh of hand in his thoroughly dishonest rhetoric.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen