Greenbeard
Gold Member
Well you can say its a ridiculous article, but I'll put Thomas Sowell's education, track record, experience, and credentials as a social historian up against yours or anybody else's here on USMB and will expect that it will be no contest as to who is most credible in their perspective and analysis.
I'd encourage you to put aside "education, track record, experience, and credentials" for a moment and actually evaluate the article's arguments and the evidence presented to back them up. A minute or so of scrutiny will reveal specious arguments, a conflation of "the War on Poverty" with "any policy even tangentially related to the Great Society," factual inaccuracies, misrepresentations of the goals of certain policy initiatives, and in general a complete lack of evidence to support his points (and, at times, even an explicit point is lacking since he seems to think insinuation is a valid rhetorical device here).
I didn't bother to point it out earlier but parts of it are actually incoherent. For example:
The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
Followed by:
The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs.
If the esteemed social historian believes that AFDC was created during the Great Society and not the New Deal (which apparently he does, since the anti-poverty measure that he accuses of destroying the black family apparently didn't exist--in his mind--during the 1940s when he says poverty rates fell for black families) then he probably would also need to be reminded the War on Poverty didn't contain any welfare programs--instead of simple transfer payments, it consisted of programs aimed to help the poor better themselves (Time listed them in a 1968 article: Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Work-Study Program, Adult Basic Education, Rural Loan Program, Migrant Worker Assistance, Employment and Investment Incentives, Work Experience Program, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the Community Action Program, which set up Head Start, Upward Bound, Legal Services and Health Service Centers.)
Either way the War on Poverty is not entitled to credit for success that it obviously did not merit.
At no point did anything in that article show this. Certainly that seems to be the philosophy underlying the article but he didn't bother to support it, nor did he support his much firmer thesis: "The disastrous consequences that followed have made the word 'liberal' so much of a political liability that today even candidates with long left-wing track records have evaded or denied that designation."