The War on Poverty Five Decades on

In 1964 when Democrat President Lyndon B Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address to Congress he declared a totally unconstitutional war on poverty in the United States. Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1987 vowed that by 1990 no child will be living in poverty.

Fast-forward to the 21st Century and let’s assess how the continuing war on poverty is tracking.

The United States, in 2012, spent $688 billion to fund 26 separate anti-poverty programs. State and local governments added another $284 billion,  bringing total anti-poverty spending to nearly $1 trillion. That amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three. Since the mid-1960s, $23trillion has been spent.

In Australia, we have the big Aboriginal social welfare industry. It is great for working in, but useless at fixing anything. Government largess towards Aboriginal Australians has done little to fix poverty and has simply perpetuated it. For every disadvantaged Aboriginal or poor person, there is an abundance of persons on the government payroll who live off them. 

Current welfare spending in the United States per year equals four times the amount of cash required to eliminate poverty. However, the poverty rate is much higher now than when the war on poverty began in the 1960s. The United States waged a relentless war on poverty with trillions and poverty won.

Economist Thomas Sowell has written that the number of black American lives damaged or destroyed by social welfare policies would exceed the dreams of any Klansman. The social welfare industry is a colossal empire. It is a deep bureaucracy. It sends out hollow promises. There are many city enclaves where voters simply vote on what new promises have been made and the cycle perpetuates itself.

The social welfare advocates say nothing about the pathologies that fuel it. They say nothing about fatherless homes for example. There is a multitude of programs that simply are about making poverty more comfortable. Welfare programs also heavily subsidize out of wedlock birth and incentivize divorce. Social welfare and the dependence that it generates amongst the recipient has become a gentler form of slavery.

The legacy of the welfare state has been the breakup of low-income families, the explosion of out of wedlock births, systemic poverty, higher crime and rates of incarceration, a substantial decrease in the number of low-income households headed by someone who works.

The huge rate of welfare programs penalizes marriage and the fear of losing benefits discourages marriage. The family unit throughout the developed West has imploded.

The Deep State in the United States is a big unelected bureaucracy and showcases all the dangers of big government.  In Australia when people depend on big government for welfare, our democracy simply transitions into a powerful administrative state, and the bigger it grows, the power of the vote is far less effective, and the more the individual is disenfranchised. The monster of government ventures always engulfs an entire society. The erosion of self-sufficiency is giving way to tyranny.

The principle of self-reliance holds that each person has the ability to succeed in life without interference from the government.  If you uttered those words at a university today or in a public forum you will be attacked. The progressive-left wants everyone on the government teat. Personal responsibility is often inimical to them and they want everyone to become dependent on and beholden to big government.

Eventually, the Western nations will have to make a choice. To either embrace utopian statism with ideological principles such as egalitarianism, redistribution of wealth and the monster of social justice, or a system based on democratically elected representatives and personal responsibility. We cannot have both.

We can have a system where government serves a common purpose in protecting freedoms, rule of law, private property, and so on, or we have social justice idealogues where everything falls under the control of the state: your thoughts, education, health, property, and children. The belief that people are entitled to what others have produced is at the heart of the social degradation we see in Australia today. Everyone now has a right but no one has a responsibility.  

The chaos in the developed Western world has followed a similar pattern. The foundations and principles which built the West are being destroyed. The family has been destroyed. Toxic masculinity and feminism are being promoted.

The education system has gotten worse. At Universities Marxist professors are teaching leftism to the youth. We see critical race theory taught to children as part of a divide and conquer tactic.

Self-reliance has been undermined and more are dependent on government. People are now more subservient than ever and embracing welfare, more are unwilling to take care of themselves.

The recent manifestations of Black Lives Matter and Antifa are what happens when society has a whole generation of spoilt brats. They offer nothing and contribute nothing other than destruction. They live off victims they actually produce. Black Lives Matter is actually against things that would improve the plight of black lives such as building stable families, work, education, and self-reliance.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter will only bring about more poverty and crime. History tells us that the poorer can be called upon for revolution and to be the shock troops. Black suffering is a prop. White guilt is becoming a largely unchallenged dogma.

The hate campaign against whites will only increase and non-whites are told that your circumstances are the result of oppression or white privilege. They are taught that Western history is a long tale of oppression. Eventually, it could lead to a white backlash. We must resist these division tactics and identity that big government and the welfare state are where our current crises fester from.