It was a huge success.
“I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”
-—Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One
About $10 trillion of that went to Fedzilla itself. Charities that enforce donations with submachine guns have the highest overhead rates for some reason.
LBJ - a terrible president and a horrible man. The self-styled “tough guy” (hey, I can pick a beagle up by his ears, “those are ALL my helicopters, son”) who quietly scurried home in 1968 with his tail tucked between his legs when things turned sour.
LBJ said that he was going to create a permanent Democratic slice of the population.
He did.
Once again, a Southern Democrat, creating a larger plantation.
Waging war on poverty can never work. It will always be counterproductive. All that it can do is destroy wealth and increase the experience of poverty. Why? Because you cannot destroy or diminish the negative. You cannot destroy what isn’t. Poverty is the isn’t of something or other. It is not having. Not having enough, not having as much as, not having something or other. It is the negation or negative of wealth and value.
Attacking what doesn’t exist can only destroy value that does exist. Think man who imagines little green men and pursues them with a gun. His bullets will not be stopped by the nonexistent creatures but by real things and perhaps people. Going after the nonexistent, the negative, negation is at best wasteful and often destructive. It is dangerous. And we generally recognize people who are out to destroy the nonexistent that their mind perceives to be a danger.
It is widely recognized that focusing on the negative will result in failure, stagnation and decline. But somehow it is the default operating system on the macro or political level. Our only hope to avoid more struggle, hardship and eventual collapse is to reject this loser’s outlook and embrace the winner’s positive and appreciative consciousness of what is. If we manage to do that we can expect limitless prosperity, progress and growth.
We could have colonized the entire solar system for that amount.
The thing everyone should have understood in 1964, and certainly should understand now, is that ”liberals” use the word “society” when they mean nothing other than government.With his “Great Society” rhetoric Johnson was promising to make a great government. Since government at its best is a necessary evil, that should have been seen for the absurdity it always was. Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776)
Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest . . .
LBJ was a crooked scoundrel whose policies have bankrupted the United States in less than 50 years and turned 10s of millions of people (including the vast majority of blacks in this country) into government serfs.