Restoring the Social Order

Heather MacDonald reviews the failure of liberal social policies from the 1960s to the 1990s and how the conservative social reform movement on issues from welfare to crime saved lives and whole cities.

By the early 1990s, the fruits of this liberal monopoly over urban policy were in clear view. New York City homicides topped 2,000 in 1990. Drug dealers controlled the streets in the city’s poorest neighborhoods; children slept in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets from the dealers’ gun battles. Small businesses fled the city, unable to withstand the assaults on their employees and the constant break-ins. Manhattanites posted pathetic little NO RADIO signs in their cars, hoping for mercy from the circumambient thieves. The national welfare caseload was up fivefold, as was the nation’s illegitimacy rate. In New York City, one in seven residents was on welfare. I remember interviewing an able-bodied New York man who had been mooching off his girlfriend’s welfare check but was applying for his own food stamps. “I’m going for every dime I can get out of them,” he told me, righteously adding one caveat: “If they make you work, I’m not doing it.”

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