Robert Woodson has this article in the WSJ on fighting poverty, the compassionate conservatism of Jack Kemp, and Paul Ryan's low-profile efforts. Crime is inevitably part of the mix, although not in the simplistic "poverty is the root cause of crime" mantra so beloved by our friends on the left.
Kemp's public record reveals that in the late 1970s the then-congressman persuaded his colleagues who were part of an initiative called the Opportunity Society to conduct a unique field hearing in the troubled Kenilworth-Parkside public-housing development in Washington, D.C. Kenilworth was at the forefront of a movement of associations of public-housing residents that strove to take on management duties for their developments, which had become crime-ridden, drug-plagued and dilapidated during years of neglect and opportunism under bureaucratic public-housing authorities.Poverty and crime have an interaction more complex than either causing the other, and a deficit of personal responsibility is a root cause of both.
Once the Kenilworth residents were empowered to take charge of their neighborhood, they drove out the drug dealers, reduced teen pregnancy and welfare dependency, and launched self-help initiatives.
That does not mean, though, that government has no role to play. Woodson's main point is that some commentators on the right have become as much of a problem as the poverty pimps of the left, and he is particularly unhappy with Ann Coulter.
Ann Coulter has emerged as a right-wing Al Sharpton. Like Mr. Sharpton, she is more interested in delivering flamboyant attacks than in offering fact-based analysis. Such was the case in her recent diatribe condemning the work of Paul Ryan and Jack Kemp to reduce poverty in America.
In her Oct. 21 syndicated column, Ms. Coulter ridicules Rep. Ryan's tour over two years to poverty-stricken neighborhoods throughout the nation in search of greater understanding of the solutions generated by indigenous grass-roots leaders. Without citing evidence, she dismisses the efforts of Rep. Ryan and Kemp, who died in 2009, and accuses them of using such events to promote themselves with little benefit to the poor.
Ms. Coulter declares in a Sharptonesque tone: "What matters is their own self-regard and favorable press notices, not accomplishing anything useful. For all of Kemp's claims to being black America's truest friend, he didn't actually help any minorities."
What Ms. Coulter doesn't know is that my Center for Neighborhood Enterprise worked closely with both Kemp and Mr. Ryan in their efforts to recognize and support the grass-roots organizations in low-income communities. Never once did I hear Kemp claim to be "black America's truest friend." He focused on what grass-roots leaders were accomplishing and what more could be done with support for their efforts.
I agree that government has a role -- a limited one -- in ameliorating poverty. That role is principally to suppress crime in poor communities to give them at least a fighting chance to regenerate. Thus, more policing and tougher sentencing are things the government should be doing.
But in the end, the government is not the most effective tool. Culture is more important than government. And a culture of responsibility and consequences, not entitlement and excuse-making, is the only culture that has a chance.
We seem to have lost track of this lesson, and we will pay a price for our forgetfulness.
I completely agree that culture is more important than government, but these are not independent spheres. Government policies affect culture, and for the past 50 years many of those effects have been in the wrong direction.
The north star of government policy should be the karma principle. People who do the right thing should be better off than people who do the wrong thing. Yet many of our government programs have "benefit cliffs" where you lose a benefit if you earn above a certain amount, so that you are worse off for working harder.
Penalizing honest work and subsidizing sloth (or unreported illegal activity) corrodes the work ethic. The horrifying rise in out-of-wedlock births has multiple causes, but government displacing fathers as the family breadwinner was a big part of it.