Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in January 1964, and poverty promptly won. The Office of Economic Opportunity launched that same year, spending $800 million in its first year alone. By 1980, the federal government had spent over $3 trillion (in today's dollars) across the constellation of Great Society programs: Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, community action agencies, the whole apparatus. The poverty rate in 1964 sat at 19 percent. By 1973, it had fallen to 11 percent. Impressive, until you notice it was already falling at precisely that rate throughout the 1950s, before Johnson spent a single dollar. The market was already doing the job. What Johnson created was a dependency infrastructure. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program paid higher benefits when no father lived in the household, which subsidized his departure. Between 1965 and 1980, out-of-wedlock births among black Americans climbed from 25 percent to 56 percent. Charles Murray documented the numbers exhaustively in "Losing Ground" (1984), and the left never refuted the math; instead, they attacked Murray personally. Bureaucracies administer poverty rather than eliminate it. Every dollar Washington sends to a poor family in Chicago passes through a federal agency, a state agency, a county office, and a caseworker's desk first. The machinery consumes a stunning share before anything reaches you. Capital formation, voluntary exchange, and sound money pulled more people out of destitution in the 19th century than every federal program combined has since Johnson's cameras rolled in the Rose Garden.