When You Harm Those You Mean To Help, You Should Immediately Stop (book review)

Forbes ^ | July 18, 2014 | George Leef

[reaganaut1]

For a long time, free-market critics of programs supposedly meant to help struggling people have been pointing out that those programs are usually counterproductive. They actually harm the “beneficiaries.”

Sadly, their arguments have almost always either been ignored by key politicians and opinion shapers or dismissed out of hand because those who make them are white or are said to harbor some hidden animosity towards the poor and minorities.

So, what will be the reaction to Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley’s new book, Please Stop Helping Us –How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed?

Riley, who is black himself, shows that affirmative action programs, progressive education theories, minimum wage laws and other labor market interferences, and other laws have retarded the economic advance of black Americans. In short, liberal policies that were adopted to help blacks have instead proven to be millstones around their necks.

[Armando Guerra]

When you harm those you intend to help...

Right there is the problem. Who says the programs are intended to help? When viewed from the perspective that the programs are intended to create a dependent class that will vote for you 90+% of the time, then the programs are spectacularly successful. Why would those who put the programs in place and benefit from them to such extreme have ANY incentive to change them?

[CaptainAmiigaf]

GOVERNOR Ronald Reagan of California said, as a guest on an old, old Johnny Carson show that the Social Services Welfare department lived in total terror at the thought of welfare receipients ever working their way off of welfare.
If the wonderful circumstance ever arose, it would then be the welfare workers collecting welfare.
Reagan receive a thunderous round of applause.

[MrB]

Ah, for a very few, yes, the intent was to actually enslave these people in bondage to the gov’t.

But for most sheeperals, it really wasn’t about harming, nor about helping, the people they stated that they intended to help.

It was about making THEMSELVES feel good for WANTING to “help”.

[IronJack]

Those programs are not designed to help. That is simply the rhetoric on the sales brochure. They’re really designed to subjugate.

[GraceG]

Libs (the well intentioned dupes mind you) remind me of Kindergartners wanting to help only to slow down and mire those adults they are wanting to help but because they did it with “good intentions” they get a pass on their destructive behavior.

[GraceG]

[ Right there is the problem. Who says the programs are intended to help? When viewed from the perspective that the programs are intended to create a dependent class that will vote for you 90+% of the time, then the programs are spectacularly successful. Why would those who put the programs in place and benefit from them to such extreme have ANY incentive to change them? ]

I would rather pay TWICE as much in taxes if all our social programs were judiciously policed (ie fraud was constantly being rooted out) and only the people who needed the supposed program were the only ones who ever got aid and those who didn’t actually need it were getting tossed out of the welfare office on their behinds and all the extra cost was for the hiring of fraud and investiogations officers.

But then again that wouldn’t serve the demonrats need for simple lever pulling voters....

[DannyTN]

Well unfortunately there is no control group.
We can’t see how the author’s policies, or lack thereof, would have actually turned out.

[TexasFreeper2009]

Democrats dont want to help blacks! they want them to THINK they are helping them so they will continue to vote Democratic and in the process help advance their true pursuit, socialism.

[Louis Foxwell]

Bureaucracy is constitutionally incapable of solving societal or personal human problems. The a priori principle of a bureaucracy is to sustain itself and grow. It is incapable of working itself out of an area of responsibility. This is precisely why we see social services increase as time goes on. The practice of compassion by government is to increase need in order to justify increases in funding. Bureaucracy always increases dependency. It never reduces it.
The bottom line is government has no business in the social service industry. It ought never be the job of government to help anyone. The government exists to provide military force against the country’s enemies and to protect the nation’s borders. Federal government has no other Constitutional activities. Our government as currently constructed is in flagrant violation of the Constitution.