Throwing Money at Poor Communities Won’t Fix Them

To a degree, I wasn’t ready for how White captures the absolute failure of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the amount of damage it was doing to our cities. It is hard to believe, but by 1972, only seven years after the peak of the Great Society legislative tsunami, White saw clearly that liberal government policies were already destroying the poor and the urban neighborhoods which had before been vibrant.

Not since Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion had I read such an extraordinarily insightful understanding of why billions and billions in urban investment had failed and were doomed to fail no matter how much money we poured in to the wrong policies. And White was writing 20 years before Olasky, so his perception and insights are even more remarkable.

When you read this analysis, you will understand how big the problem urban America is facing really is. It is deeply entrenched in the wrong ideology and defended by bureaucracies of failure.”