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THE WAR ON POVERTY TURNS FORTY
by Rod D. Martin, 22 January 2004
"The War on Poverty is over -- and the poor lost."
So said Jack Kemp well over a decade ago. Kemp was half-right. Today,
the poor are with us still -- but so is LBJ's War, now entering its 40th
year.
Hailed as a cure-all, this liberal-led War has bled America dry --
materially and morally.
Through Medicare and Medicaid, it replaced free markets and personal choice
with the shackles of a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy, creating a costly,
unaccountable, hydra-headed monstrosity that slouches towards bankruptcy and
entraps those it was meant to help.
Through tampering with Social Security, Great Society architects created
sham budget surpluses, postponing the day of reckoning for a system that
operates like a Ponzi scheme.
Through exponential expansion of the welfare system, it ignored the
prescience of liberal icon FDR, who once deemed permanent welfare "a
narcotic [and] destroyer of the human spirit." This abominable system not
only weakened personal initiative and responsibility; it tore through civil
society like a tornado. As Bill Bennett put it, "Families, churches, and
community groups [were] forced to surrender....to bureaucratic experts.
Fathers were replaced by welfare checks and private charities...by
government spending. Religious groups were dismissed as amateurs, and whole
communities demolished in slum clearance."
Note the irony: in the name of fighting poverty, welfare wrecked the values
and institutions that made victory possible. Welfare was anti-work,
anti-life, anti-choice, and anti-family, and few seemed to care.
The perversity extended far beyond the most obvious victims: Uncle Sam
taxed productive people to pay others not to work, save, invest, or get
married, and to have babies they weren't prepared to raise. Washington
punished millions of people for getting a life, while rewarding millions
more for getting life wrong. To add insult to injury, Americans were forced
to pay more and more into Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, for the
"privilege" of getting less and less in the future.
The War triggered the steepest cultural and moral decline in our history. As
unwed pregnancies skyrocketed, so did out-of-wedlock births and abortions.
Partially in response to this, the Supreme Court issued its infamous Roe v.
Wade ruling thirty-one years ago today, and since then, one out of every
three of our children -- a number equivalent to twice the population of
countries like Iraq or Australia -- has been killed. Crime and drug use
reached epidemic proportions; divorce increased and marriage fell out of
favor; and inflation exploded, mocking the thrifty and vindicating the
profligate.
Why did this War fail so miserably? Quite simply, it failed to understand
people.
It forgot that people are unique, with highly individual circumstances no
cookie-cutter program can address. It forgot that human dignity --
exemplified by the Christian doctrine that every person is created in the
image of God -- can be discarded only at great cost, that a man robbed of it
becomes the animal the secularists say he is. It forgot that humanity is
generally self-interested and responds to material incentives: if a woman
gets cash for each child born out of wedlock, she will bear more of them,
just as a breadwinner facing a higher tax rate for working overtime will cut
back his hours.
Perhaps most significantly of all, the warriors of false compassion forgot
that eliminating all risk from peoplešs lives requires eliminating
responsibility as well. Not only that, but it destroys any hope of
responsibly using risk to get ahead, to create some measure of wealth, or to
set a proper example for ones children.
Compassion demands we learn the lesson; and indeed, in 1996 when a
Republican Congress finally reformed welfare, every form of social pathology
began to fall, and 3.5 million fewer people live in poverty today.
Yet we must do much, much more.
We must give Americans back their Social Security savings. We must not
tolerate the impoverishment of the elderly when compound interest could make
them rich. Even the most conservative numbers show that, if every American
could invest his Social Security as he does his IRA, most would retire on
almost twice their salary, after inflation. As Britain, Australia and even
Chile have shown, we can make this a reality for every family.
We must also reform health care. Immediately, we should give every American
the same right leftist Democrats have reserved for big corporations since
the New Deal: the right to spend or save every health care dollar tax free.
Wešll accomplish this through Medical Savings Accounts, similar to your IRA.
In so doing, we will radically cut insurance costs both for workers and
employers, introduce real price competition into medicine, provide complete
insurance portability, and create a vast new pool of investment capital and
inheritable wealth for millions of poor and middle class families.
These reforms will change every aspect of American life for the better. We
can take great pride in our Presidentšs courage in standing for them in his
State of the Union. And in enacting them, we can show real compassion
toward our fellowman, and end the long leftist night.
Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 22 January 2004.
-- Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC
(http://www.theVanguard.org),
is an attorney and writer from
Little Rock, Arkansas. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter
Thiel, he is the Center for Cultural Leadership's Senior Fellow
in Public Policy and Political Affairs and a Vice President of
the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA).
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