Forty Years Later The Moynihan Report - Road to the Middle Class

OH YEAH. FORTY years ago this summer. The Moynihan Report on the Negro Family. Kay S. Hymowitz does a little retrospective entitled The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies. Back then you see, in 1965, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm that the black family was in crisis. Illegitimacy rates had soared to 25 percent. Something had to be done.

But Moynihan was shouted down in a storm of abuse, and a literature began to emerge that celebrated the single-parent family.

It was the beginning of 40 years of liberal lies on the family.

Then the second wave feminists appeared and they augmented the liberal attack on the nuclear family.

By 1995, 30 years later, the number of black children born out of wedlock had soared to 70 percent. In 1996 a Republican Congress, the first Republican Congress in 42 years, passed a welfare reform bill that made a down payment on ending the culture of welfare dependency that subsidized the demolition of the black family. Thank God for evil Republicans.

But liberals still haven�t learned. The New York Times prattles on about inequality, as if. As Hymowitz writes:

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series �Class Matters� and you still won�t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

Wanna avoid poverty? Finish high school. Don�t have children before you get married, and don�t get divorced. Hey, it�s not rocket science.

One day, like many other components in the old Democratic coalition, African Americans will come to an understanding of what liberals have done to them. They will realize that the people they trusted and voted for have been lying to them. Being good, polite Americans—rather than lefties of a revolutionary persuasion—they will not in their rage �cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.� Instead they will just quietly get up and leave. And maybe join that Republican sewing circle they�d heard about at church.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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