In Retrospect: Amity Shlaes’s brilliant history of 1960s welfare programs and the flawed vision that underpinned them

City Journal ^ | January 17, 2020 | Edward Short

[karpov]

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington. In the new schemes for wealth redistribution, student debt relief, socialized medicine, and universal guaranteed income that make up the Democrats’ political platform in 2020, Shlaes rightly sees a recycling of Great Society hobby horses—and she worries that a good portion of the electorate may be taken in by them. “Once again many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy,” she observes, and she has written her admirable, sobering study to make sure that readers realize that the “results of our socialism were not generous.”

Reviewing how ungenerous makes for salutary reading. After all, socialism of any stripe, whether in Russia, South America, Europe, or America, has always been an inherently deceitful enterprise. Shales captures the essence of this imposture when she describes one of its manifestations as “Prettifying a political grab by dressing it up as an economic rescue.” In totting up these receipts for deceit, Shlaes has done a genuine public service.

[Flick Lives]

Read her book “The Forgotten Man”, which was an excellent exposé on the Great Depression.

[forgotten man]

I read that book.

[DIRTYSECRET]

I just finished The Great Society. Returning it to the library. It’s not easy reading but the subject is more contemporary than the Forgotten Man. The end pretty much points the finger at Nixon for outdoing Johnson. Wage and price controls and it’s a wonder how he wanted John Connely to succeed him. The guy knew nothing about monetary policy and he gets named Treasury secretary. George Schultz was minor but I’m glad he’s gone. Moynahan was bleeding heart on the domestic stuff but told it like it is and was labeled a racist.

[Fiji Hill]

I have read The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper, 2007) and Coolidge (New York: Harper, 2014). Both are excellent books.

I have heard that President Nixon does not come off well in her new book on the Great Society.

[MacNaughton]

1960 U.S. Census = white o-o-w (out-of-wedlock) births = 3%
blacks = 25%

1965 - Under Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist, releases …

Moynihan argued that the rise in black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs, but by a destructive vein in ghetto culture, which could be traced to slavery times and continued discrimination in the American South under Jim Crow. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had introduced that idea in the 1930s, but Moynihan was considered one of the first academics to defy conventional social-science wisdom about the structure of poverty. His report focused on the deep roots of black poverty in the United States and controversially concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality. Moynihan concluded, "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States."

1965 - POTUS #36 LBJ's "Great Society" social welfare programs were passed.

2010 U.S. Census (50 years after LBJ's "Great Society") = white o-o-w births = 13%, blacks = 72%

[DIRTYSECRET]

Hard to believe what went into the thinking when all the housing projects were built and then demolished in the name of urban renewal.

[9YearLurker]

Amity’s terrific.

Here’s a good interview with her about the book.

[smvoice]

Bkmk

[9YearLurker]

Oops, sorry, here it is:

https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/looking-back-at-the-great-society-with-amity-shlaes/

[ronnie raygun]

A scam to enslave the black man and his family into poverty for a vote

[Fiddlstix]

Bookmark

[DIRTYSECRET]

Then there was Johnson’s attempt to find a really different way to find gold due to other countries trading cash. Don’t remember the idea but it was far fetched.

[CoastWatcher]

Let us not forget that the ‘Great Society’ was funded by raiding the Social Security trust.