The View From 1776

Current riots, looting, and burning in London again put the spotlight on the welfare state and its odious results.  Frank Madarasz emailed this article from the UK Daily Mail:

Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters

The connection between growth of the welfare state and social disorder is firmly established by historical experience.  Major eruptions of rioting, looting, burning, and killing by looters in the post-Worlld War II United States - Watts (Los Angeles) in 1965, Cleveland 1966, Newark, NJ, and Detroit in 1967, New York City in 1977, and Los Angles again in 1992 - all occurred after massive infusions of federal welfare entitlements funding.  Bewildered by this contradictory result, liberal-progressive commentators ascribed it to a “revolution of rising expectations.”

All of these incidents devastated large sections of the cities in which they occurred.  Small businesses were wiped out, housing was not replaced for years (in several cases, never), and working families departed for safer places, leaving concentrations of welfare “clients” who had never worked for a living and never would.

Great Society programs under the Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, from the mid-1960s until 1980, were the first to make welfare benefits entitlements without regard to earlier eligibility requirements. The Great Society not only failed to meet its objectives; it made conditions decisively worse, measured by the Federal government’s own statistics.  Ironically, the Great Society was designed to bring the blacks and other ethnic and social groups up to a parity with whites.  Instead, it under-cut almost all the progress they had made since the Civil War, leaving them worse off than before.

Education just fell off the cliff during the Great Society.  In 1960 the U.S. Office of Education commissioned tests in 987 high schools.  Average scores in the General Academic Aptitude tests for black students were 68% of those for whites.  A similar block of tests in 1965 reflected solid progress by black students, whose test scores rose to 79% of whites’ scores.  After 1965, and especially in the 1970s, Great Society funding for education rose rapidly.  In 1980, however, the nationwide average for black men in the 18-to-23 age group had declined to only 43% of whites’ scores, little more than half the level of competence achieved fifteen years earlier.  It almost seemed that the government was paying young blacks not to learn.

Crime statistics reveal the same dismal picture.  Violent crime rates were almost unchanged from 1950 to 1964, at a ratio of 160 crimes per 100,000 persons in the population.  Starting in 1965, the rate took off like a rocket.  By 1980, the ratio of violent crimes per 100,000 population had increased 263%, to 580 per 100,000. 

Reinforcing this pattern was the catastrophic rise in the number of teen-age, unmarried, single-parent families, in which little or no parental discipline is possible in most cases.  Between 1955 and 1980, the ratio of births to unmarried black teenage women, compared to all black teenage births, rose from 14% to 82%.  In other words, among black teen-age girls, who are the highest birth-rate sector of the population, eight out of every ten births was to an unmarried mother. 

Much of this can be accounted for by the incentive of higher welfare payment amounts to unmarried mothers, as well as the increases in benefits payments with each new illegitimate child.  The welfare system also encouraged irresponsibility among young men, who were able to rationalize that the mothers would be financially better off, because welfare payments would be less if a father were living with the family.

Liberal-progressives defend their socialistic dreams by saying that the problems arose only because governments failed to spend enough on welfare benefits.  This, of course, is their defense regarding Obama’s destructive government interventions in our present-day economy.  Unemployment is still nearly 17%, despite the largest stimulus spending in world history, coupled with the Fed’s more than tripling (plus more than $2 trillion) its balance sheet holdings of securities purchased with inflationary fiat dollars created out of thin air.

Liberal-progressives will never deny their religious faith in socialism, but the rest of the world has seen enough to conclude that government spending, whether for welfare entitlements or economic stimulus, has far more negative results than positive.