The Lost War against Dependency

[Geee]

National Review:

Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state.

 

The actual signing of the War on Poverty legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs “worked.”

 

Of course everything “works” by sufficiently low standards, and everything “fails” by sufficiently high standards. The real question is: What did the War on Poverty set out to do and how well did it do it, if at all?

 

Without some idea of what a person or a program is trying to do, there is no way to know whether what actually happened was a success or a failure. When the hard facts show that a policy has failed, nothing is easier for its defenders than to make up a new set of criteria by which it can be said to have succeeded.

 

That has in fact been what happened with the War on Poverty.