In 1958, my parents divorced when I was a few months old. The last time I saw my stepfather was in 1965, when the police took him away in handcuffs after he punched my mother in the face in front of my older brother and me.
Life was pretty tough, but I always believed that if I earned a good education and worked hard, I could accomplish whatever goals I set for myself. Why did I believe this? Because my family told me it was true, and my own experience validated their encouragement.
When Mary and I were married in 1983, we started out with more than $12,000 in student loans and had our daughter right away. However, we had each other, great educations and a determination to succeed that never faltered. Within six years, we were debt free and able to put a down payment on our first home.
Since the beginning of our republic, the American dream has inspired most citizens, domestic and imported, to think their best days were still ahead of them, and their children would be better off than they were. Poverty in the United States has always been both a relative and overwhelmingly temporary condition.
In the years since most of my great-grandparents were born, Americans have enjoyed the benefits of electricity, telephones, automobiles, radios, air conditioning, airplanes, television, programmable computers, nuclear energy, the Internet and the smartphone, among many other inventions.
Of course, it gives little comfort to today’s poor to point out that they live better than their ancestors did, or how people in other countries live. Saying so may sound callous if it is not put in the proper context. Many public policy organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity do an excellent job at providing this context, but it takes time to absorb this information, and we live in a sound bite-driven society. Americans tend to compare themselves to their contemporaries and dream how to improve their own lives.
Every year, a new crop of poor people, otherwise known as young people, strike out on their own and begin developing careers, starting their own families and accumulating wealth. The vast majority of them will not remain poor for very long. This was true when President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty 50 years ago. It is still true today.
Americans have prospered not because of the War on Poverty but in spite of it, especially considering its legacy of high divorce and illegitimacy rates. The chronically poor, including the mentally and physically challenged, drug and alcohol abusers, the incarcerated, people who make bad decisions, and the unlucky need our help. But history teaches the best intentions of utopian central planners cannot match the results of individual liberty and free-market capitalism.
J.D. Van Brink is chairman of the Georgia Tea Party.
