Welfare culture, continued...
Another article here.
Helpless dependence is the engine that drives leftist politics, so naturally, the idea that poverty is inescapable is attractive. It's also wrong.
If you look at leftist philosophy and policy, the missing word is "volition." Everything is the result of outside forces, not choice. People are not actors, but victims.
...Like Shipler, in other words, Lipper has reversed cause and effect. She sees social dysfunction in Pittsfield and blames it on poverty.
But it typically is personal failure and social dysfunction that create poverty.
To stay out of poverty in America, it's necessary to do three simple things, social scientists have found: finish high school, don't have kids until you marry, and wait until you are at least 20 to marry. Do those three things, and the odds against your becoming impoverished are less than one in ten. Nearly 80 percent of everyone who fails to do those three things winds up poor.
That's a crucial truth that left-wing social thinkers have tried to deny from the earliest days of the welfare-rights movement.