The "root" cause of all problems in the world today is sin. Period.
Poverty is many times (but not always) a consequence of other sins: sexual immorality, debauchery, drunkenness, idolatry, fornication, sloth, etc.
The solution to sin is Christ.
He still believes in Trotsky, evidently.
That $10,000 annual salary wasn’t exactly chump change in the early 1960’s either. While I don’t know what that would be in today’s dollars, it would certainly be a tidy sum.
He is rather condescending towards those he was supposed to be bringing out of their benighted existences, isn’t he.
Wow. Why in the world did WSJ publish this?
All he does is tell some unrelated anecdotes about his experiences working in Little Rock.
Given the headline, I was expecting something about, you know, what he learned. Possibly about what the causes or cure for poverty might be.
Bump for later. As part of college I did social work in Izard County Arkansas in ‘69 and ‘70, when the government was stepping up the effort to drive the landed-poor off of their land and into public housing.
Do you know who Joseph Epstein is? No. Have you read anything else by Joseph Epstein? No.
What this guy probably didn’t realize was that Trotsky probably never even paid for a meal to begin with, a la Hillary and Bill.
The gist of the article seems to be: Like Obama, I was unqualified, I didn’t know what I was doing, I worked there for a couple of months, I gave up, I never checked back, anti-poverty programs in the US are hopeless.
1965. So much for the current myth of an intact black family before the War on Poverty.
"The poor used legal aid, not to sue the city and the school board, as political-minded antipoverty workers had hoped, but mainly to sue one another:"...
...We really don't want to help the poor but enable them to harass state and local government with lawsuits...
The "root" cause of all problems in the world today is sin. Period.
Poverty is many times (but not always) a consequence of other sins: sexual immorality, debauchery, drunkenness, idolatry, fornication, sloth, etc.
The solution to sin is Christ.
Strikes me as dishonest.
Nobody at the time was much of an expert on poverty.
This same folly of the elite hobbles our nation to this day. Somehow liberal, politically inclined people are convinced that somebody who writes and article or two, or gives a speech, is an expert. But they ignore all the people who actually are experts.
That's why when confronted with a leaking oil well the President suggested some academics to lead an effort to solve the problem. A better choice would have been some guys from Texas who had actually worked on sealing oil wells. But few politicians even know anybody that does that kind of work.
And that's why most anti-poverty and jobs programs fail too. Bureaucrats, lawyers, and teachers rarely have the mindset necessary to create jobs and reduce poverty. That's something that business owners and entrepreneurs do.