I lived outside of Chicago for many years; every time we went to the Loop we drove past the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side. Chicago "housing projects" like the RT and Cabrini Green became Chicago shorthand for "hell on earth" or "concentration camps for poor black folks". They were more like prisons than they are like housing. 

The reason they were like that is because of what we've been talking about; a kind of consensus that people who aren't perfectly self-reliant are morally flawed and that charity just makes them worse.

"Individual action and responsibility" are just as significant to ideology now as ever, but . . . become less and less relevant in a society increasingly dominated by corporate interests, private wealth and mass culture.