Mark Steyn Quotes

The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order.

The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread. Nor do we want the burdens of nanny state paternalism that now weigh down many economies in Europe.

Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand. And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it and of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact, that practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible object of 'helping the poor' has the long-run effect of doing the opposite.

Liberals want to manage the damage with government programs to take care of those who have fallen between the cracks. Populists want to fix the cracks so that people don't fall in the first place.

The state, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty.

The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

Liberalism in various guises - feminism, the sexual revolution, gay activism - has been at war with marriage and family for several decades now. And when do-gooders look around at the wreckage of human lives caused by disintegrating families, they call for government to act as father, mother, brother, and sister.

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

The industrial revolution took the father out of the home and put the kids in school. And then everyone had their own little scene.

There are people in communities who are actually out there fighting poverty eye-to-eye, soul-to-soul, in neighborhoods that actually do well, that succeed. But for government, I think in many cases, they could do more.

What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

The message [of Donald Trump ] is that if anybody lives in those circumstances in this country, that's something that the government should be working to try to change.

For as long as I am alive, I will not rest in my desire to lead my people out of an abyss of corruption and poverty.

I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me. Lots of our friends are still in that world and I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the 70s and became disillusioned in the 80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

The Penny Post will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.

Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first requires a conversion of mind and heart.