President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty got some things right and has had some important successes. But it got at least one thing very wrong—a mistake still haunting us today.
You don't have to be a constitutional lawyer—I am not—to know that certain rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, are protected by federal authority through explicit language in the Constitution. Minimum income and health care, in contrast, are not constitutional rights, and they do not enjoy the same kind of protection. Some people believe they should be, but they aren't.
This is the original sin of President Johnson's Great Society: applying an approach appropriate for civil rights to a sphere where the invocation of "rights" does not fit and does not work. And it has led over the years to a misguided effort to use Congress and federal courts to impose uniform antipoverty policies in every state.
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