Doing Good vs. Feeling Good

Dead tortoise (not) walking.

That tortoise is dead, dude, and it probably died slowly, painfully and in terror. Drowning is no joke. The (apparently) young man who thought he was rescuing a confused, wayward turtle, obviously felt really good about himself until someone informed him that the testudo he tossed in the water can't swim. Tortoises are exclusively terrestrial. They sink like rocks.

The photo above is a perfect metaphor of "liberal" "thought". As Denis Prager explains below, "liberals" don't care what actions or policies accomplish good things in the real world, they only care about what actions or policies make them feel good about themselves.



Mr. Prager provides two very good examples in his video, the minimum wage and pacifism. But there may be an even better example: the welfare state. The American welfare system purports to help the poor, but instead creates perverse incentives that lock people into poverty for generations, and the people most negatively affected are poor blacks, the very people "liberals" claim to help most.

The results of welfare policies discouraging marriage and family were dramatic, as out-of-wedlock birthrates skyrocketed among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans. In the mid-1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was scarcely 3% for whites, 7.7% for Americans overall, and 24.5% among blacks. By 1976, those figures had risen to nearly 10% for whites, 24.7% for Americans as a whole, and 50.3% for blacks specifically. And today, the numbers stand at 29% for whites, 41% for the nation overall, and 73% for blacks. In other words, the entire country is moving rapidly in the wrong direction, but blacks in particular have reached a point of veritable catastrophe.  

The devastating societal consequences of family breakdown cannot be overstated. Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of America's economic ladder. Regardless of race or ethnicity, the poverty rate for single parents with children is several times higher than the corresponding rate for married couples with children. According to Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, “the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent” and thus constitutes the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass. Articulating a similar theme many years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty.”  

Children in single-parent households are burdened not only with economic, but also profound social and psychological, disadvantages. For example, youngsters raised by single parents, as compared to those who grow up in intact married homes, are more likely to be physically abused; to display emotional disorders; to smoke, drink, and use drugs; to perform poorly in school; to be suspended or expelled from school; to drop out of high school; to behave aggressively and violently; to be arrested for a juvenile crime; to serve jail time before age 30; and to go on to experience poverty as adults. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

Obviously, "liberals" can't blame their pet policies for this catastrophe. After all, their hearts - and therefore their intentions - are pure, unlike those mean, heartless conservatives. "Liberals" therefore invent all kinds of excuses, like racism and "white privilege", as though 21st century America could possibly be more racist than Jim Crow America.

Kathryn Edin writes:

After several years of interviewing, observing, and living among these fathers, I’ve learned that not caring about their children is not the problem. Our 2013 book, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, reveals that these men desperately want to be good fathers, and they are often quite intensively involved in the early years of their children’s lives. Yet they usually fail to stay closely connected as their kids grow older.
...
If they want to stop the father-go-round, moms will have to do what they can to keep the biological dad involved with his child and not push him aside. It’s up to them, because currently, mothers have most of the power de facto, if not de jure. Almost always, an unmarried mother has presumed custody, even if the dad willingly signs documents to establish legal paternity.
...
So here is my message to the single moms I’ve come to know and admire over the years, the ones who do so much of the nurturing and caring—those who often struggle mightily just to keep a roof over their kids’ heads: You can’t easily substitute someone else for your kid’s dad.

Unfortunately, Ms. Edin doesn't make the connection that custody law is not the only factor that gives  mothers the power, and that fathers aren't just being replaced by other men, but by government itself. As Daniel Mitchell points out, depending on her state of residence, a single mother might need to make $69,000/year before getting off welfare makes economic sense.

That also means that the father needs to make $69,000/year before marrying him and getting off welfare makes economic sense. The probability that a young man who grew up poor in the inner city can clear that bar is minuscule. That means that governments give mothers incentives to kick fathers out of the home rather than marrying them, even if both together can make that much. From the Front Page Magazine article quoted above:

The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: “When a couple's income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty—marriage and work—are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system.” 

William Galston, who served in the '90s as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated that the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15% to 20% of the family disintegration in the United States. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere around 50%. By Murray's reckoning, the growth and increased liberalization of the “welfare complex” have eroded the traditional ethos of working-class communities that once held people who worked at low-wage jobs, and men who married the mothers of their children, in much higher esteem than unwed parents who became wards of the state.

People tend to respond predictably to incentives. Obviously, these perverse incentives affect everyone who partakes of the welfare state, not just blacks, but blacks are most likely to partake, and are therefore most negatively affected.



Note that blacks make up 15.1% of the under-18 population, but 30.5% of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) recipients, which makes them the demographic most likely to use welfare. Hispanics are next, followed by whites, followed by Asians. Note that, as noted above, blacks are most likely to grow up in fatherless homes, followed by Hispanics, then whites, then Asians. That's a strong correlation, and although it's true that correlation does not necessarily prove causation, when strong correlation exists alongside strong financial incentives, causation becomes rather obvious.

As Walter E. Williams stated:

The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do, and that is to destroy the black family.

I've presented this evidence to my "liberal" friends and they simply don't care. It doesn't matter to them that in reality the welfare state they support has destroyed the most vulnerable American families, causing untold, unnecessary misery. It doesn't matter to them that the murder rate in Chicago and Baltimore, the incarceration rate of young black men, the poverty rate, unemployment rate and rate of drug use among blacks can all be traced back to fatherless homes, which can be traced back to the welfare state. It's not about race. The same is true for poor Hispanics in the migrant farmer communities where I grew up and poor whites in Appalachia.

None of that matters. Like the ignoramus who tossed the non-swimming, terrestrial tortoise in the water without so much as a Google search on his smart phone, facts don't matter to "liberals". All that matters to them is the feeling of righteousness they derive from supporting policies that Democrat politicians insist are compassionate. But there's nothing compassionate about perpetuating generational cycles of dependency, poverty and criminality.

It's not just economically stupid. It's immoral. It's unconscionable. It's an atrocity. It's downright evil.


Further reading:

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