http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8204
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Government anti-poverty programs are a classic case of the therapeutic state setting out to treat disorders created by the state itself. Urban poverty as we know it is, in fact, exclusively a creature of state intervention in consensual economic dealings. This claim may seem bold, even to most libertarians. But a lot turns on the phrase “as we know it.” Even if absolute laissez faire reigned beginning tomorrow, there would still be people in big cities who are living paycheck to paycheck, heavily in debt, homeless, jobless, or otherwise at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. These conditions may be persistent social problems, and it may be that free people in a free society will still have to come up with voluntary institutions and practices for addressing them. But in the state-regimented market that dominates today, the material predicament that poor people find themselves in—and the arrangements they must make within that predicament—are battered into their familiar shape, as if by an invisible fist, through the diffuse effects of pervasive, interlocking interventions.
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Like the supposed “war on drugs”, the supposed “war on poverty” is another one that’s been lost. It would seem that the only purpose of the “poverty war” was to enhance the number of gooferment bureaucrats on the payroll.
Thanks, LBJ!
Can we now admit defeat and try something that works?
Liberty.
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Posted by reinkefj 
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