David Frum Calls out Charles Murray's Argument About The Lazy, Degenerate Poor

Frum is perhaps the most sane Conservative of our time. This is a masterfully written review of Murray's newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, which essentially posits that poor people are scum and lazy degenerates and that is why they are having a harder time economically than their elders did: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book-review.html .

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

Indeed. Evidently our moral turpitude has created our failing economic prospects.

Also too: Murray is responsible for this racist piece of shit: The Bell Curve. Fucker.