Monday, May 19, 2025

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

John Wilder, at his Wilder, Wealthy & Wise blog, has published a piece entitled "How The Great Society Doomed The United States." It is a story of how three sets of laws sold to the public as a means of helping others--the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the "Great Society Program" which initiated the modern welfare state--destroyed our country. 

    As John notes, "the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution.  And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die.  Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them." He concludes: "The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights:  It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim."

    Angelo M. Codevilla called the Civil Rights Act "the little law that ate the Constitution," noting its corrosive effect on public morality:

    What goes by the name “constitutional law” has been eclipsing the U.S. Constitution for a long time. But when the 1964 Civil Rights Act substituted a wholly open-ended mandate to oppose “discrimination” for any and all fundamental rights, it became the little law that ate the Constitution. Now, because the Act pretended that the commerce clause trumps the freedom of persons to associate or not with whomever they wish, and is being taken to mean that it trumps the free exercise of religion as well, bakers and photographers are forced to take part in homosexual weddings. A commission in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reported that even a church may be forced to operate its bathrooms according to gender self-identification because it “could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.” California came very close to mandating that Catholic schools admit homosexual and transgender students or close down. The Justice Department is studying how to prosecute on-line transactions such as vacation home rental site Airbnb, Inc., that fall afoul of its evolving anti-discrimination standards.

    This arbitrary power, whose rabid guard-dog growls and barks: “Racist! Sexist! Homophobic!” has transformed our lives by removing restraints on government. The American Bar Association’s new professional guidelines expose lawyers to penalties for insufficient political correctness. Performing abortions or at least training to perform them may be imposed as a requirement for licensing doctors, nurses, and hospitals that offer services to the general public.

And in a piece I wrote in 2017, I noted that "once the government goes down the road of forcing you to hold an opinion with which you may not agree, and force you to associate with or provide labor or products to those with whom you do not want to, it is only a matter of time until the set of forbidden thoughts and acts begins to encompass more and more of other private conduct and association. It is a domino effect. And coupled with the goals of Cultural Marxism, its ultimate aim will be to destroy all conduct or associations not affirmatively approved of by the State."

    John's article does not end with the Civil Right Act, but includes the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which, we were promised, would not change the racial makeup of the United States, but did precisely that; and Johnson's "Great Society" (or war on poverty) which has flushed tens of trillions of dollars down the toilet trying to prove Christ wrong when he said that there would always be poor among us (Matt. 26:11 and Mark 14:7). As John notes, "[t]he Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees." Of course, as DOGE has made clear, the purpose of this spending was not to lift the poor out of poverty, but to siphon public monies into the pockets of the elites, which is the true purpose of government.

    And during that same rough period of the late 1960s and forward, as one author has noted, much else went wrong

Measures of community strength, volunteerism, neighborliness, and civil society declined. Family breakdown increased, especially among the economically disadvantaged of all races. Divorce rates skyrocketed, and though they later leveled off for the wealthy, they remain high, especially for the poor. At the same time, rates of marriage have declined, and American birth rates have begun to resemble those of an aging and childless Europe. A holocaust of unborn children continues unabated. Findings by both conservative and liberal social scientists such as Charles Murray and Robert Putnam show an extraordinary erosion of social norms and expectations—familial, educational, legal, and professional—especially among those who make up the working class of America. Social mobility has become a taunt rather than a real possibility for many Americans, replaced by a self-perpetuating new aristocracy that congregates in the wealthiest urban areas of the country. Trust in all the main institutions of American society—both public and private—has declined, as has trust of citizens toward each other.

 And as research by Robert Putnam and others has shown, most of this decline of social trust and capital can be laid on ethnic diversity and immigration. 

    And while GDP, adjusted for inflation, has consistently grown since the 1970s (see here), the same cannot be said for wages. In a recent article entitled "Budget Guns and Price Changes," the author noted this sad statistic:

Fifty years ago, the average U.S. household income was $13,720. In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau indicated that it was $75,580 for a two-income household, an increase of 81.85 percent. According to the 1975 Guns & Ammo Annual, the average price of a double-action revolver was $109.77, and $207.52 for a semiautomatic pistol. In 2025, the retail price of a new revolver averages $918.54, and semiautomatic pistols average $839 including tactical firearms, competition pistols, carry pieces and rimfires. Since 1975, the price of revolvers has increased 88.05 percent, and 75.26 percent for pistols. These numbers are in line with the rate of inflation.

In other words, taking inflation into account, household income today is essentially the same as 50 years ago, even though American workers are many times more productive.

    John sees a happy ending, however: "The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better." But there will be a cost: an "it's darkest before the dawn" type of thing. As Codevilla notes in the article cited above:

In fact, the United States of America was great because of a whole bunch of things that now are gone. Yes, the ruling class led the way in personal corruption, cheating on tests, lowering of professional standards, abandoning churches and synagogues for the Playboy Philosophy and lifestyle, disregarding law, basing economic life on gaming the administrative state, basing politics on conflicting identities, and much more. But much of the rest of the country followed. What would it take to make America great again—or indeed to make any of the changes that Trump’s voters demand? Replacing the current ruling class would be only the beginning.

2 comments:

  1. One that took longer than usual to write, and ended up being longer than expected. More, however, to come.

    ReplyDelete

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