AFDC -- established during the New Deal -- had nothing to do with LBJ's Great Society, whose focus was on getting preschoolers ready for school (Head Start), getting young people trained for work (Job Corps), and poor people in decent housing.
You think that __the Left__ was responsible for denying government aid to women and children if there was a man in the picture? __The Left's__ main goal is to deny help to people unless they can satisfy an increasing number of preconditions to receive it?
If so, as Ann Landers used to say, you have a geranium in your cranium.
Do all right wing engineers lack self-awareness and a basic understanding of human nature?
Decades of Equal Economic Opportunity and Affirmative Action paid off. Good job, LBJ!
Two decades of sending manufacturing work out of the country will have a disproportionate effect on the less skilled. But see how Sowell finesses the difference between income and wealth.
as been
A strange yardstick to use, because the expectation since 1970 has been that 16-17 year old males would be in high school, not in the work force. The market for hs dropouts is unsurprisingly small. (Graduating high school was a feat before 1950 or so, not so much any more.)
Policies designed to turn poor people into productive members of socieity.
Previously innocent conduct has been increasingly criminalized, most significantly the laws against possession, use, and sale of drugs. Since 1970, entrepreneurial risk takers among the poor would rather enter the drug industry that sweat all day for chump change.
Funny that Sowell (accoding to his Hoover Inst. bio) was born to an unwed mother who couldn't afford to raise him, so she passed him on to an aunt. Sowell thus grew up without a man in the house -- apparently without ill effect.
It doesn't seem to have, otherwise it'd still be continuing.
has been
Yet the unemployment rate for other high-school age kids is dramatically less. So, the point stands.
Except that they don't actually have that effect, that's Dr. Sowell's point.
Were black people chiefly dependent on drug sales in the 1950-70's, before the Johnson policies started to weigh?
And thus all mothers should be unwed, and fathers banned? Statistically, that doesn't work out so well.
Having lived it, studied it, written books about it, Dr. Sowell would seem pretty knowledgeable about the effect. If you've ever listened to him, the guy's brilliant.
It's only the point because libs' & progs' rallying cry is "discrimination," even while they create it and speak of elevating the "less fortunate," as they produce more and more of the same.
Socialism is inherently central planning, which is inherently intolerant (e.g. the 0bamacare Catholic mandate), and inevitably coerced (ditto). It's also economically inferior, and ultimately unstable, a tragedy of the commons. Hence all of Basitat's quips about everyone wanting to live off everyone else, using the government to rob their neighbors for them. That eventually falls apart.
Modern socialism does centrally plan what can't be left to the free market. It is intolerant of organisations that peddle irrational superstition - they tend to act irrationally (as in protecting paedophile priests rather than the priest's child victims) and there's always some coercion of people who voted against the legislation that's being enforced. Your preferred alternative have other problems, mainly because they don't actually work too well.
As exhibited in Germany's decline and fall, which hasn't actually happened yet, and seems unlikely ever to happen. Compare and contrast with the economic success of Franco's Spain, which didn't book any economic progress until Franco got around to dying.
Any fool can claim that any form of organisation is ultimately unstable. Modern socialism doesn't seem to be showing any immediate signs of collapse, while US capitalism has been running a huge balance of payments deficit since Regan was president. Stability can be more reliably judged after something has collapsed.
He was talking about France, and is an example of the long series of out-of-touch-with-reality French politicians who have lumbered the country with a long series of dubious administrations. France is now on its fifth republican constitution (introduced by de Gaulle in 1958 and designed to keep him power for as long as possible). It's not as antiquated as the US constitution, but it's a poorer piece of craftsmanship than the 1948 German constitution.
Bastiat's irrational phobias about socialism don't seem to have generated any realistic predictions, but that suits you, since you love unrealistic predictions that chime with your political delusions, and churn them out at every opportunity.
What point? As spamtrap points out, the 16- and 17-year-olds shouldn't be in the work force.
When the capitalists exported most of the less skilled jobs to Mexico and China the whole US working class became less productive. That's not something you can count against the policies that were designed to make them more productive (when there were still jobs around for them to be productive in).
Probably not, but then again, back then America hadn't yet exported quite a many low level jobs.
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Sowell confuses the situations where the parents haven't bothered to get married with the situations where the father is no longer around. The former is statistically innocuous, the latter is tough on the children.
He;s certainly brilliant at putting together impressive sounding strings of facts which don't stand up to close examination - the sort of intellectual sleigh of hand that you practice whenever you think that you can get away with it.
Your argument is that Johnson's Great Society policies continued under Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes? Fascinating.
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Is it? Sowell left that interesting fact out of his essay completely. But I agree his essay was written to mislead the reader.
Where did Dr. Sowell make the point that early childhood education and job training were ineffective at helping people out of poverty?
Huh? All I'm saying is the more crimes are defined, the more criminals, and thus the more convicts. The War on (some) Drugs has been discussed at length elsewhere; I'm no expert.
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Why, this Sowell must be superhuman. Of course he's too modest to acknowledge how remarkable his feat was, growing up without a daddy. Or maybe he despises all other fatherless boys who did not happen to get into Harvard.
Genius is defined as anyone who spiels ideas that I happen to agree with.
He's written it many times--he can't put every fact into every essay.
In his many writings.
Early childhood education has been widely debunked--it confers no lasting advantage. I got it, FWIW.
Job training for menial positions is poor competition for a slightly increased misery, but which comes free in the mailbox every month.
And I'm suggesting that the poverty inherent in single-parent households, the poor education, and the well-intentioned public housing of the Great Society all created a critical mass of misery, despair, and resort to drugs (use, and sale). IOW harm, the subject of this thread.
Before that poor black people were poor, but they had pride. Their houses were clean and well-kept. Their kids worked hard. Johnson's G.S. robbed many of them of their dignity, perhaps its cruelest blow.
Naturally I'm not talking about everyone, but of the down-and-out.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 1:24:40 PM UTC-4, Tim Wescott wrote: =20
Excuse me but that's a bunch of bull. There is a difference between not leg= ally recognized under the law and being prohibited by law. There were no la= ws prohibiting the usual church administered marriage between slaves. The s= outhern churches were on a mission to inculcate the christian marriage into= the slave population,and to counsel married slaves on family values. The s= outhern churches also strongly influenced slave owners to respect those mar= riages by doing things like keeping them together, which many of them did.
That is such a bunch of crap... wrong on every count. They were always embr= aced by their churches. There were instances of forcible separation but the= y were rare.
I find that hard to reconcile with my knowledge that one of Alinsky's biggest clients, through the 1950s and 1960s, was the Archdiocese of Chicago. (The Archdiocese noted that fear of black people was motivating their parishioners to flee the city, and wanted to use Alinsky's community organizing skills to bring blacks and whites together. Not only was white flight immoral and unchristian, but it was costing the church a fortune that it had invested in infrastructure -- churches, schools, and hospitals -- and costing the church another fortune to duplicate the infrastructure in suburbia.)
Or is your position that the Catholic Church uses the language of morality to advance immorality, in which case their hiring Alinsky was consistent with this modus operandi?
No, it was my clearly-stated position that it is the habit of today's Democrat politicians to use the language of morality to advance causes which are immoral.
The great Walter Williams elaborates, in part, on the welfare state's harm in the black community:
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pe "Crime is one of the results of the liberal agenda." Walter E. Williams
That's immoral. Robbing people of their independence and pride is immoral. Yet, these are justified as exactly the reverse, as "fairness," or making someone else pay their "fair share."
As to Alinsky,
"Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or use of ends or means. Machiavelli's blindness to the necessity for moral clothing to all acts and motives-- he said 'politics has no relation to morals'--was his major weakness." --Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p43.
So, Machiavelli was a piker.
The Carter Administration had boxes and boxes of that book, distributing to teachers IIRC. Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky, and there are photos as Obama taught it as a college instructor (once featured on his website).
The book itself is obsessed with "change," and "community organizing," terms the president has vigorously injected into our daily lexicon.
So, it's quite plain the new radical left values, studies, and practices this philosophy.
Your inability to understand simple, objective figures listed in official gov't publications does not make them lies. That they contradict your world-view impugns your world-view, not mine, and not the figures.
If you invested half the time you spend being rude into being right, you'd be right more often, and wouldn't have half the cause for rudeness either.
Wikipedia says the book ("Rules for Radicals") is quite popular with conservatives as well.
"Community organizing" to, e.g., kick out drug dealers and get people off of poverty by organizing job fairs seems like the kind of thing everyone should be able to get behind.
I don't fail to understand them - that's a lie - but I don't interpret them in the same way the you do, so they don't mean the same things to me as they mean to you. They don't impugn my world-view - I've never said anything that could be taken to mean that - so that counts as another lie.
By "right" you mean "far-right". If I was somewhat more nonsense- tolerant, I'd post less, but I'd have even more cause to be rude when my nonsense threshold was exceeded.
But Sowell was implicitly claiming that every child of an unwed mother was living in a single-parent household, which isn't remotely true. The proportion of children born to unwed mothers has risen dramatically in recent years entirely because couples in stable relationships are no longer bothering to get married before they have kids. That kind of choice doesn't correlate with misery, despair or resort to drugs.
Ask any right-wing nitwit. They've got the statistics on pride amongst poor back people going back to 1788.
Really? What makes you think that? Apart from the desire to concoct an affecting - if implausible - story.
st blow.
That would truly have been an evil gesture on his part, if it had actually happened. Since the evidence supporting this fatuous allegation all comes from James Arthur's fertile imagination and a few affecting anecdote from his right-wing newspapers we can probably forgive Johnson's "Great Society".
Wikipedia paints a rather more positive picture of the initiative. It does mention Sowell's delusions about the state of the African- American family, but while the numerous positive achievements are documented with numbers of people raised above the poverty line and the like, Sowell's claim's about the African-American family don't seem to be susceptible to numerical analysis.
Except for Miami and El Paso, all the cities Williams cites are Rust Belt cities. People moved to them for a hundred years -- sometimes from all over the world -- to get jobs that paid enough to live on. Those jobs are gone, first to Mexico and then to China. The last nails in the coffin were pounded in during the GWB administration.
But the people stay. Life in Red China is not appealing enough for people to move there, no matter how many jobs they have.
Williams just doesn't get it. The ongoing problem is not the party of the mayor nor the amount of melanin present in his skin. Lack of entry- level jobs that pay a living wage is the problem. In the 60s there was a real effort to get inner city youth employed by local manufacturers. But factories moved out, first to the South (to evade unions), then to Mexico under NAFTA, which sadly was only a stopgap measure before all manufacturing went to China.
Alinsky was explaining why the Have-Nots turned Haves, such as the Indian nationalists (e.g. Nehru) and the American revolutionists (e.g. Samuel Adams), turned around and outlawed the same behavior as had brought them success. Other examples of moral rationalizers were Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Jefferson, who invoked the holy principles of freedom and equality to reach their goals. Machiavelli didn't give a shit because he thought it didn't matter.
The right wing acts on this principle: Look at those who cloak themselves with the goodness of saving babies to force women to carry their pregnancy to term. Are right-wingers making it any easier for women to bear and raise children? Hell no, the point of this thread is that the taxpayer is free of paying for other people's kids. Morality (save the fetii!) in the service of self-interest (I don't want to pay for your birth control).
In so far as Alinsky had an ideology, it was the same as Ayn Rand's: nothing gets done unless it is in the self-interest of the doer.
If you like the way things are, you will see no need to change. If people have given up hope that things will improve, then change will not be attempted. Community organizing helps the community identify goals, and helps the community achieve them by identifying leaders and mentoring them.
I don't know why the right finds the principle of "Helping people help themselves" to be subversive, but there you are.
Yeah, but that's not what Alinsky's community organizing is. He describes it as a means to manipulate people en masse, first recruiting on a popular, non-controversial or even virtuous pretext, then redirecting the resulting organization to achieve personal power, and ultimately, destroy society.
Liberal policies drove off those jobs. The cities and unions' demands ultimately made them untenable--GM's costs were simply stupid. I wrote about here, years ago.
Those costs came from enacting all sorts of entitlements by force, resulting in pay promises far beyond the value of the work. IOW, the same as Barack Obama's "change."
So, now those people have no jobs at all. Are they better off?
Securing all those unsustainable, unearned benefits is not laudable, not praiseworthy. It's destructive, and it destroyed those companies and the people who depended on them.
You're not getting that the lack of jobs was a direct result of "liberal"-ism.
The difference is they actually believed and worked for those things. They weren't pretexts.
Because the actual practice has become "helping yourself to what other people have earned." Not lifting people up, but demanding things for "free." Insisting other people pay your share. Declaiming others as not having earned what they worked hard to earn.
If you think that Alinsky was about acquiring personal power, you better reread (or read???) his books. Had you even heard of Alinsky before 2008? Have you heard of Fred Ross? Ross was merely the guy who trained Cesar Chavez to be an organizer.
Rather than destroying society, the purpose of organizing, put in today's terms, is so that the 99% have just as much power as the top
1%. To me that spells democracy, instead of the halfassed aristocracy we have now. If you want a country where the top 1% has as much power as the bottom 99%, move to a banana republic.
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