http://nationalreview.com/article/367903/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/page/0/3
JANUARY 9, 2014 4:00 AM
The White Ghetto
In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.
By Kevin D. Williamson
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In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socioeconomic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.
“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the Owsley County newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.”
Her advice to young people is to study for degrees that will help them get jobs in the schools or at the local nursing home — or get out. “I would move in a heartbeat,” she says, but she stays for family reasons.
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Reading this article makes me crazy.
Gooferment “welfare” is design to keep people “poor” and hopeless.
How many generations of human beings will we allowed to thrown away?
I don’t want to pay for that! Do you?
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Posted by reinkefj 
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