The projects
As America's veterans returned from World War II, government officials launched massive spending on new "housing projects."
It worked, at first. But then something went wrong. The very requirements that bureaucrats set for "the poor" ended up subsidizing and thus encouraging multiple generations of fatherless families.
Today, "the projects" are being dynamited and bulldozed, nationwide. The city of Atlanta was proud to announce, this week, it will become America's first major city with no housing projects, at all.
Even Las Vegas is going to demolish 251 units near Bonanza Road and Eastern Avenue. Instead, residents will be given housing vouchers, allowing them to be dispersed into the community. The goal is to "rid neighborhoods of blight, much of which is caused by public housing," explains Las Vegas Housing Authority Executive Director Carl Rowe.
Yet "housing projects" were the prime jewel of tax-and-spend American liberalism for 60 years. As government now pretends it can run the auto industry, the banking industry, the stock markets and health care, let us stand in awe at the columns of dust arising from the wreckage of a policy that once presumed government could do a better job than the free market at "providing safe and sanitary housing for the poor."
As a wise political philosopher once warned -- it was Ringo Starr, actually -- "Everything government touches turns to crap."
