Republicans in Congress are trying to convince Americans that conservatism offers better answers than liberalism to the problems of poverty.
Larry Bartels
, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, is having none of it. In the Washington Post, he makes a provocative argument: The free market that Republicans laud "has done nothing at all" to help the poor over the past 40 years. Government programs have alleviated poverty, he argues, but our free-enterprise economy has "failed abjectly" at that task.
