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With the United States government poised to make generous contributions to rebuilding Afghanistan, leftwing commentators inevitably demand similar assistance for blighted urban areas closer to home. Especially in this holiday season with its emphasis on relatives and reunions, this argument resonates with a superficially appealing logic: Why not help members of our own national family before we extend charitable efforts to strangers who live halfway round the world?
In one typical column, Julianne Malveaux of USA Today insisted on Dec. 21 that “Inner cities need ‘foreign aid,’ too.” Recognizing that many of us question the general wisdom of using taxpayer money to nourish distant nations, Ms. Malveaux takes care to invoke the one specific instance of international assistance that nearly all Americans recall with pride.
“The concept of a Marshall Plan, a rebuilding effort, is an intriguing one – and not just for Afghanistan,” she writes. “For the Marshall Plan, we spent about $13 billion – the equivalent of more than $75 billion today. If we were to commit such a sum now to rebuilding our own inner cities, we’d go a long way toward eradicating ‘poverty, desperation, hunger and chaos’ here.”
Never mind the fact that we’ve already spent many times more than that $75 billion on domestic antipoverty efforts; by some estimates, the social spending to assist America’s poor since the days of LBJ’s Great Society has totaled more than 5 trillion dollars.
Moreover, Malveaux’s call for a “Domestic Marshall Plan” hardly counts as a startling policy innovation; as she herself acknowledges, this concept has stirred lefty hearts for nearly 40 years and represented a personal crusade for former Urban League president John Jacob. The enduring appeal of this fatuous notion that a massive new spending initiative can conclusively rescue the urban poor from their plight, reflects both liberal misunderstanding of the nature of poverty, and willful misrepresentation of the original Marshall Plan that purportedly inspires them.
In June of 1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall spoke at a Harvard commencement about a revolutionary program for European assistance, he never suggested that governmental expenditure constituted a cure-all for economic hardship. The “Marshall Plan,” enthusiastically promoted by President Truman as well as Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, stressed the need for European nations to come together in devising their own continent-wide program for economic reconstruction, while the U.S. provided “pump-priming” financial contributions.
“This is the business of the Europeans,” Marshall declared in his Harvard speech. “The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support. … The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number of, if not all, European nations.”
Eventually, 16 nations – representing virtually all of the continent outside Stalin’s control – signed on to the Marshall Plan. The result of this coordinated approach amounted to what historian Paul Johnson called “perhaps the most successful scheme of its kind in history.” By 1951, the participating nations had raised their industrial output by more than 40 percent above their pre-war levels.
The forgotten ingredient of this triumph involved a unique set of historical circumstances. In 1947, Europe remained physically devastated by the greatest war in human history. Some 40 million Europeans had lost their lives, with farms and factories ruined almost everywhere. At the same time, the nations of Europe remained rich in human capital, with some of the best educated, most industrious, most productive populations on earth. In rebuilding Germany, for instance, no one talked about the need to teach the Germans the importance of self-discipline or the work ethic.
The peoples of Europe may have demonstrated a destructive tendency to butcher one another in ghastly orgies of well-organized slaughter, but no one could accuse these societies of dysfunctional values when it came to economic productivity. The skills and virtues required for prosperity flourished after the war as they had before the conflict, so that purely financial assistance to a materially stricken continent could produce an overwhelming explosion of growth.
By contrast, America’s inner cities suffer far more complex and intractable problems than the challenges overcome by postwar Europe. What bombs exploded, what tanks rumbled, through the most troubled neighborhoods in the United States? Unlike the devastated regions of Germany, France or Italy in 1947, depressed districts of Detroit and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., hardly boast an abundance of industrious, experienced laborers simply waiting for the chance to get back to work. The ubiquitous problems of the American inner city – involving family structure, drug addiction, inferior education and rampant crime – remained for the most part distant fears for the Marshall planners of the late 1940s. These disasters, alas, have proven themselves far less amenable to governmental repair than the financial and infrastructure dilemmas that Western Europe overcame with the help of U.S. aid. It is vastly easier to rebuild a shattered factory than to reconstruct the broken institution of the family, or to overcome an epidemic of fatherless households.
In her stubbornly wrong-headed but manifestly well-intentioned column, Julianne Malveaux asks: “What will it take for us to implement the Marshall philosophy of eliminating misery closer to home – especially in our inner cities?”
What it will take, Ms. Malveaux, is the uncomfortable but unavoidable recognition that the dysfunctional values generating that misery lie indeed much closer to home – and will not yield to the efforts of even the most ambitious Washington bureaucrats or social planners.
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