Myth Busting

Those of us who were children during the 60's took a while to get some perspective on the events of that era. Back in the late 70's, early 80's when I wrestled a bit with these issues one of the conclusions I came to was that liberals were wrong on one of their root causes---poverty did not cause crime, crime caused poverty. And I thought the rise of big government and the welfare state broke apart the family and spawned illegitimacy and crime. Here's Thomas Sowell, RCP busting the cherished liberal myth that their "Great Society" saved this country:

While liberals may think of the 1960s as the beginning of many "progressive" trends in American society, cold hard facts tell a very different story. The 1960s marked the end of many beneficial trends that had been going on for years -- and a complete reversal of those trends as programs, policies, and ideologies of the liberals took hold.

Teenage pregnancy had been going down for years. So had venereal disease. Rates of infection for syphilis in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1950. There were similar trends in crime. The total number of murders in the United States in 1960 was lower than in 1950, 1940, or 1930 -- even though the population was growing and two new states had been added. The murder rate, in proportion to population, in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1934.

Every one of these beneficial trends sharply reversed after liberal notions gained ascendancy during in the 1960s.....

As for black economic advances, the most dramatic reduction in poverty among blacks occurred between 1940 and 1960, when the black poverty rate was cut almost in half, without any major government programs of the Great Society kind that began in the 1960s.

Most of us have figured out what works, but as always, liberals think they know everything but are the last to know anything useful.

Being out of touch is the definition of a liberal.