Moynihan's Musings

George F. Will on a new publication of the letters of the late and deeply missed Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

Moynihan enriched America's political lexicon with "defining deviancy down" (defining as normal kinds of conduct previously stigmatized) and "iatrogenic government" (an iatrogenic ailment is induced inadvertently by a medical treatment). He likened government bureaucracies dispensing social services to the poor, rather than income maintenance, as "feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses." His point in saying that the subject of race could benefit from a period of "benign neglect" was to encourage "some equivalence between what government can do about certain problems and how much attention it draws to them."