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PARTISAN REVIEW
the brain of a twelve-year-old chess genius is sitting in his office in Miami
or Toronto working on a formula to produce footnotes for footnotes for
footnotes for footnotes. The good news is that several highbrow maga–
zines, and even one or two learned journals, have either banned footnotes
altogether or are demanding that they be kept to a minimum.
Jenny Teichman
Ending Welfare
WELFARE JUSTICE. RESTORING SOCIAL EQUALITY. By
Neil Gilbert.
Yale University Press. $25.00.
In the midst of the current, often bitter, mudslinging debate about
welfare programs and policies, it is wonderfully useful to have Neil Gil–
bert's recent work
Welfare Justice
as a reference. Gilbert takes us behind
the scenes of the debate and offers us history, data and careful analysis,
wise counsel about policies that have outlived their usefulness and have
been diverted from their original purposes, and new ideas and proposals
that should be considered or adopted. For example, when Aid to De–
pendent Children was established in 1935, it was conceived and designed
as a program for widows and their children, a "small group who, it was
believed, would shortly disappear from the public assistance rolls through
absorption into the social security system." By 1992, more than fifty years
later, that program provided financial assistance to 4.3 million single–
parent families at the cost of$20.3 million.
Gilbert takes on the "victim" movement and their advocates and es–
pouses individual responsibility and the duty to be self-sufficient. He
proposes a complete overhaul of the current system which is steeped in
the concept of entitlements, and designs the framework for a system that
focuses on the duties of citizenship and individual responsibility.
His chapter describing the bogus findings of advocacy researchers on
such issues as the number of children kidnapped annually (advocate re–
searchers claim 50,000, the more accurate figure is probably 550), the
homeless (advocacy researchers report them to be in the millions, careful
studies claim 250,000 to 300,000) and rape victims (the one in four num–
ber publicized by advocacy researchers such as Mary Koss as opposed to
the 0.7 per 1,000 persons over twelve years of age reported by the Bureau
