Preserve and protect

"PEOPLE are acting out of frustration and hopelessness," was how Representative Maxine Waters reacted to the riots which leveled her Los Angeles district. "People who are thinking that way don't think rationally. They act." And people who think the way Representative Waters thinks don't speak rationally, they just speak. She was hardly alone, however. Even as stores were smoking, and passersby being gunned down, liberals saw the violence as a sociological, if not political, act, so that a man filling the trunk of his car with cases of booze was making a statement about America's urban crisis.

The liberal remedy, as always, was to remove the root causes of frustration. The discredited Kerner Commission, which declared that America was two nations, "separate and unequal," was cited as if of Biblical authority. Even though America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting poverty, liberals insisted we have not spent enough. We have been particularly remiss during the last "12 years of neglect'' (Richard Gephardt, though the phrase quickly became a media mantra and has now been picked up by Bill Clinton.)

In fact, money is clearly not the problem. The Federal Government will spend $731 billion on social programs this year, 5.3 times more (in constant dollars) than in 1965. When you factor in state and local efforts, the nation now funnels well over $1 trillion into social welfare, or about 19 per cent of GNP, as against 11.5 per cent back in 1965. (L.A. County, by the way, received more federal money in 1991 than any other county in the nation.) Nor did this growth halt during the Reagan years. In the eight-year period starting in 1981, during which total population rose 8 per cent and the poverty population rose by less than 1 per cent, means-tested federal spending on children and families rose 18 per cent. But low-income blacks may be finding what conservatives have long maintained: namely, that social programs have hurt blacks rather than helped them. In 1960 more than three-quarters of black families were intact; by 1985 only half were. Today more than half of black births are illegitimate; as recently as 1970 fewer than one-fifth were. Before the Great Society, black and white males aged 16 to 24 participated in the labor force at similar rates. By the mid 1970s non-participation was at a 40 per cent rate for black youths, versus 25 per cent for white youths. The record number of jobs created during the Eighties did little to raise the percentage of young blacks actively seeking employment.

But for those black families that remained intact, and those youths who stayed in the labor force, the Eighties were a time of unbroken advance. By 1990 half of all black families headed by a married couple had incomes above $33,393. During the eight years of the Reagan Administration the number of black families earning more than $50,000 (in constant 1988 dollars) jumped from 392,000 to 936,000. Nearly one-third of the jobs created during the Eighties went to blacks and Hispanics, who together account for only 18 per cent of the labor force. But a gap that widened significantly during the Eighties was the one between rich blacks and poor blacks. And government intervention, in the form of liberal social programs that break up families, is to blame for this disparity.

Some conservatives, it must be said, used the argument from frustration to push their own remedies. HUD Secretary Jack Kemp argued that the liberal welfare model was "deeply, systemically flawed .... It prevents [people] from saving, stops them from owning their homes and acquiring assets, discourages work, and, worst of all, subsidizes family breakup. The combination of tax disincentives and a flawed welfare system has shattered the link between human effort and reward." All true, and the policies Kemp pushes--urban homesteading, school choice, inner-city capital-gains tax breaks--are sensible alternatives. But they are not a riot-prevention package, for lack of which South-Central burned.

Liberals and supply-siders alike make an important moral miscalculation. Perverse incentives will always discourage work and encourage family breakup. But only people with the character, energy, and persistence to work and keep a family together will benefit from the right incentives. Almost three decades of liberalism have vacuumed these qualities out of ghetto residents, transforming poor people into a shiftless and criminal underclass. What society must now do is reverse that process.

We need welfare, training, and employment policies that instill habits of hard work and perseverance, nurture the family, reinforce authority in home, school, church, and--yes--law enforcement, and which include disincentives for anti-social and self-destructive behavior. If restoring economic prosperity was the politics of the Eighties, then the politics of the Nineties must involve restoring the concepts of good character and public decency.

This will not even begin to be possible unless law and order is restored to all parts of society. People neither can nor will work hard, acquire skills, invest in businesses, and raise decent families in conditions of anarchic criminality. Every society has a criminal class ready to swing into action, in addition to marginal people--the guy filling his car trunk--who are willing to profit if there are no consequences. In Los Angeles, they were given free play, and the smoke rose and the morgues filled.