Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

Encounter Books, 2016. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned wel fare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws m ay lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disp roportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the resul t is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it go es with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken beli ef that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public sc hools that most low-income students attend. In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor-and poor minorities i n particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward. Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren't working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.