Reddit reviews Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition

By virtue of the fact that I'm on Reddit, you're obviously correct.

I recommend Losing Ground, Affirmative Action Around the World, and The Myth of the Robber Barons for an empirical, historical examination of what has caused poverty to decline in America, and what has caused it to increase.

I don't think it's as simple as that, but reforming welfare laws to what they were pre-LBJ would be a good start. Charles Murrary's Losing Ground is a good introduction into what disincentives became entrenched during the "Great Society."

> History does not show that free enterprise outstrips the government. History shows that people with power take advantage of those without.

In fact without free enterprise there could be no socialistic government. The government creates nothing at all, it can only take the productive capacity of individuals to fund its projects. Capitalism has provided more wealth and a higher standard of living for more people in the world than any other economic system.

The people in power that you speak of who take advantage of those without are those in government. It is less obvious, but no less true in america, but it is more obvious when you look at dictatorships around the world. The US is continually moving in that direction, it is your government you need to be most wary of.

> The property is not taken by force.

It is absolutely taken by force. You can't assume that I agree to what you call a social contract. Individuals make individual decisions, you can't say we all agree to give up our property simply because you feel most people do or should. The only reason that most people give tax money to the government is exactly because you will land up in prison if you don't.

> We're a society, and pretending like we're not and that we shouldn't pitch in to help other members of our society is backwards.

Thinking that the only or best way to help our friends and neighbours is through giving money to the government is backwards. http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-1950-1980-Anniversary/dp/0465042333

I am stunned that you claim the only way that America got to where it is was through social assistance. My good god, that is as backwards as you can get. The only reason there is any capacity to provide welfare is because of productive individuals who earn wealth in your country. Welfare is not a tool for economic growth.

> Without public education, not everyone would be able to get a minimum level of education.

Private coalitions, charity schools, faith based schools and voluntary tutoring and home schooling are all alternatives to a public education. You can't pretend a public school education is free. It is not free, it is more expensive than it is worth and it is a forced version of charity... not freely given and unaccountable in its outcomes. If you think it is a good system that is worth keeping then you're not looking at it with a mind that asks about what could be better.

Two points. One, a moral premise; the other, an empirical observation.

• Firstly, in general, it isn't justifiable to force someone to help another except under certain dire circumstances. But even then, it probably isn't justified when it isn't clear if the action will help or harm. For example, if there was a child drowning in a pond and only you could save him/her, then I might be justified in forcing you to save the child (like by threatening to impose some punishment on you if you chose not to do it, including imprisonment, which happens to be the penalty for not paying taxes for the welfare state.) However, suppose it wasn't clear that you could save the child. Additionally, suppose it was plausible that you might actually end up knocking another child in the pond, resulting in its death, during your forced attempt to save the first. Would I still be justified in forcing you to help? I submit I would not be justified in doing such a thing. TL;DR: As a general moral principle, you aren't justified in forcing someone to perform an action if it is unclear whether that action would help or harm.
  
• Secondly, many people see welfare as a system which helps the poor. However, this is highly debatable. I won't go into all the reasons for and against (though I'll mention that poverty rates have stagnated after implementing our "War on Poverty", and they were drastically declining prior,) because they are all very complicated, and there are thoughtful voices on both sides of the debate. The point I want to make is that it isn't at all clear that the welfare state helps the poor. See Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 for an academic criticism of the welfare state. TL;DR: It isn't clear that welfare actually helps the poor, and it may in fact harm them.
  
  It follows from these two points that the welfare state is immoral. If you want to deny this conclusion, you have to deny one of the premises (the first being a moral principle, the second being an empirical matter.) But both of the premises seem fairly plausible to me.

I apologize for taking so long to respond, I have 3 very young children which makes a long and thoughtful response sometimes impossible for many reasons, I'm sure you can understand.

I think we can both agree, this discussion may have reached it's limits through an internet discussion, as the topic has widened and lost focus. As to the failure that is the Great Society's War on Poverty, broadly we can view it in the same failure as the governments War on Terror, Drugs, illiteracy, hunger, or any other Strawmen it can conjure, in that it ends up causing more of the very thing it purports to end. Specifically relating to poverty however is quite complex, where over time we re-define terms and statistics, economic conditions fluctuate, and not to mention outside unintended consequences such as increased babies born out of wed lock, single parent families, etc,.... In short, it would take a book to prove to you my case, and I am not willing to do it. Luckily, others have. But in short I'll paraphrase Tom Woods who puts it plainly "The poverty rate in the United States fell from 95 percent in 1900 to around 12-14 percent in the late 1960s – a period in which government antipoverty measures were fairly trivial. By the late 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs began receiving substantial funding, the poverty rate stagnated. By 1994 it was about the same as it had been in the late 1960s, even though the federal government was by that time spending four times as much per capita as it had under LBJ." In 2009 the AP reported poverty as having the single largest year increase in the rate since the govt began keeping records in '59. Now, like I said, economic conditions conflate the issue, but the fact remains, and it doesn't show the efforts of the govt war on poverty to be a resounding success now does it?

I'll politely bow out at this point, if only because at some point these discussions become pointless as we Redditors love to argue and yet rarely budge on our positions. I'll will say that it is my opinion that it's precisely your worldview being the majority that we have such a disparity between the top 2% and the rest of us. The government has been trying to socially engineer this country and regulate and control the market for many many decades now, and all we've gotten is bigger government and bigger corporations. I'm for freedom and trying something different for a change, and it shouldn't be that scary.

Edit: Meant to say that I wish we could discuss this further over a beer or six, cheers!

You certainly didn't look very hard for studies demonstrating the perverse incentives of welfare. The themes of incentivizes and disincentives are very common in the social science surrounding this area. For instance, if we want to talk specifically about the AFDC program—which no longer exists, but this question asks about how welfare has affected black communities since the 1960s, so it is most definitely relevant—here are a few studies for your reading pleasure:

1. Mark R. Rosenzweig. "Welfare, Marital Prospects, and Nonmarital Childbearing". Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 107, No. S6 (December 1999), pp. S3-S32
   >The roles of the entitlements of the AFDC program and marital prospects in the fertility and marriage choices of young women are assessed in the context of a model incorporating heritable endowment heterogeneity, assortative mating, concern for child quality, and potential parental and public support alternatives. Estimates based on data describing the fertility and marital experience up to age 23 of the eight birth cohorts of women in the NLSY provide evidence that higher AFDC benefit levels and lower marital prospects induce young women to choose to have a child outside of marriage.
   
   
2. Jeff Grogger and Stephen G. Bronars. "The Effect of Welfare Payments on the Marriage and Fertility Behavior of Unwed Mothers: Results from a Twins Experiment". Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 109, No. 3 (June 2001), pp. 529-545
   >We study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers. We use twin births to generate random within-state variation in benefits, effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior. Higher base welfare benefits (1) lead unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage and (2) lead unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth. The magnitudes of the effects are fairly modest. Moreover, we find no evidence that the marginal benefit paid at the birth of an additional child—the focus of the family cap debate—affects fertility.
   
3. Philip K. Robins and Paul Fronstin. "Welfare benefits and birth decisions of never-married women". Population Research and Policy Review. February 1996, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp 21-43
   >For some time now, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been increasing rapidly in the United States. This has prompted several states to propose (and in some cases, enact) legislation to deny access to higher AFDC benefits for families in which the mother gives birth while receiving AFDC. The authors investigate whether AFDC benefit levels are systematically related to the family-size decisions of never-married women. Using a bivariate probit model with state and time fixed effects, applied to Current Population Survey data for the years 1980–1988, it is found that the basic benefit level for a family of two (one adult and one child) and the incremental benefit for a second child positively affects the family size decisions of black and Hispanic women, but not of white women. The effects are concentrated among high school dropouts (no effects are found for high school graduates). The authors conclude that rather than to uniformly deny benefits to all AFDC women that bear children, a better targeted policy might be to alter the AFDC benefit structure in such a way as to encourage single mothers to complete high school. However, being a high school dropout might be a proxy for some other underlying characteristic of the woman, and encouraging women to complete high school who otherwise would not might have no effect whatsoever on nonmarital births.
   
   Look, I'm not saying this issue isn't controversial. You'll find studies pointing both ways, and much of the data is unclear or doesn't produce statistically significant results in either direction. What I'm really trying to say is that you cannot completely deny that welfare produces perverse incentives. The AFDC was criticized for years because many thought it encouraged unwed motherhood. Have you read Charles Murray's Losing Ground? It's a brilliant read, and many more of these studies are studied to prove the thesis that welfare causes dependency.
   
   These are not wild theories, and they cannot be dismissed as racist or overly simplified or overly generalizing. The AFDC received widespread criticism. Check out its wikipedia page.. In fact, it was this kind of criticism and the data supporting the possibility of this dysgenic effect that eventually lead to the welfare reform of the 1990s, as AFDC became TANF.

>Before reddit shits all over me for saying that, there are numerous peer-reviewed studies that prove welfare reforms have increased the decline in marriage; a simple google search will show you that.


Now show liberals research—by social scientist Charles Murray who first reached that conclusion 13 years earlier in his 1980 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980—that the Great Society welfare programs increased illegitimacy (now 70%) in black communities, increasing crime, dependency, and broken homes.

They probably won't like him, since he's a libertarian, works for the American Enterprise Institute and has published other research which makes liberals uncomfortable, notably on the heritability of intelligence.

Europe is able to have such a massive welfare state because we pay for their defense budgets. And destructive "fuck you, I'll do what I want" individualism is a result of the state. [Society is emergent, people cooperate to reach common goals without government and through the market] (http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Community-Background-Essential-Conservative/dp/1935191500/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377371743&sr=1-1&keywords=the+quest+for+community). [After the welfare state was expanded in the 60's, people could engage in destructive behavior that most people disproved of (out of wedlock pregnancy, divorce, promiscousnous, addiction) because that behavior was subsidized by the government] (http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-1950-1980-Anniversary/dp/0465042333/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377371787&sr=1-1&keywords=losing+ground). Libertarians are the greatest friends of poor minorities. Even after desegregation, [the war on drugs] (http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431), [occupational licensing laws] (http://www.amazon.com/State-Against-Blacks-Walter-Williams/dp/0070703787/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377371682&sr=1-1&keywords=state+against+blacks), and the lack of school choice are institutional barriers that have kept minorities poor. [Public institutions have always been erected to take care of the poor, whether there is government involvement or not] (http://www.amazon.com/Mutual-Aid-Welfare-State-Fraternal/dp/0807848417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377371988&sr=1-1&keywords=david+beito).