Ryan through his teeth

Remember vice-presidential candidate Ryan pretending to wash the dishes because he didn't really have time to help but could make plenty of time for a photo op? There's a man who understands the value and the culture of work, eh? Via Hinterland Gazette.

The whole editorial staff of the National Review gathers to argue that "Paul Ryan is Right":

New York City manages to graduate barely half of its black male students from high school — and among high-school dropouts, two-thirds reach the age of 26 without ever having held a full-time job lasting at least one year. And perhaps most significant, the vast majority of blacks are born out of wedlock. You could not come up with a more effective system [jump]
for producing poverty if you tried. If Paul Ryan is a racist for criticizing those conditions, what shall we call the people who run New York City’s public schools or those who govern Detroit — the people who help create those conditions?

I just want to point out the problem here that Ryan isn't criticizing the conditions—from redlining through crappy schools (increasingly coopted into the anti-union charter movement to generate tax-free income for hedge-fund investors) to idiotic laws that put 25% of the young fatherhood-aged men of the community into prison, which Ryan has always vociferously supported—he's criticizing the victims

“not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” 

—those men in the community (only some, but any is too many) rendered unable to take care of their children by a society so badly organized it can't provide them with honest jobs. Ryan is a racist for refusing to criticize the conditions or even look at them.

Also Ryan's shameless lying about or ignorant misappropriation of the research of Robert Putnam, who does not find that welfare spending somehow encourages people not to work; rather, as quoted in ThinkProgress,

“Among nineteen member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for which data on social trust and group membership are available from the 1990-1991 World Values Survey, these indicators of social capital are, if anything, positively correlated with the size of the state,” Putnam concluded. That means higher spending on welfare programs can actually help lower-income people become more engaged.

This is right in tune, of course, with the lying of the National Review:

Spending more money on Head Start and Medicaid sounds like a very good idea until one confronts the evidence that those programs provide few if any lasting and measurable benefits. 

(See here for Head Start, here for Medicaid)

A mature mind would understand that it is not only possible but likely that programs intended to benefit the poor will in fact harm them.

Actually, a mature mind would look at more than one study instead of clinging to the one that matches his preconceived opinion.

The unhappy fact is that would-be reformers such as Paul Ryan are sitting opposite not mature-minded opponents but rather a collection of sentimentalists and opportunists; the former cannot understand the law of unintended consequences, while the latter are committed to exploiting the intellectual defects of the former for their own political benefit.

Ooh, I think I smell Cookie in the stab at Johnsonian majesty in the rhythm there. But there is no "law of unintended consequences" except in the sense of Murphy's law,

as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.

Which is not really usable as a premise for empirical prediction. Though it is wise, which is why I believe that people should be given the resources to figure out things for themselves rather than punished for failing to conform to my narrow plans for when they should marry and have children and the like. Conservatives keep suggesting that the welfare state is slavery (that's a lower class of propagandist than Paul Ryan of course) but it looks to me like an extension of freedom to people without wealthy families. And as far as the intellectual defects go, as my dear dad used to say, people who live in glass houses shouldn't take baths.

Photo via Noemi Ravica Amador.