Why do so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm their intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are, in fact, holding black Americans back.

Examples abound, argues Riley, Editorial Board Member of the Wall Street Journal and “one of the nation’s rising political writers” (Charles Krauthammer). Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for those already employed, but the laws nonetheless impose a heavy cost, pricing a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies limiting school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.

Please Stop Helping Us lays bare such counterproductive results—and more. “I cannot think of any book that has said so much in so few pages since Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom back in 1962” (Thomas Sowell).

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