Posted on 06/01/2011 5:02:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
The other day, I went to Times Square to ask people what government should do to help poor people. Most everyone agreed on the answer: "more social programs and a higher minimum wage."
It's intuitive to think that way. I used to think that, too. When President Johnson declared a "war on poverty," he said "compassionate government" was the road to prosperity for poor people. That made sense to me. At Princeton, I was taught that government's central planners had the solution to poverty.
But then I watched them work. Government spent trillions of dollars on poverty programs, and the poverty level stayed stuck at about 12 percent of the population. It's stayed there for about 40 years.
Now I understand that that government poverty programs encourage people to stay dependent. There's money in it. They policymakers would have known this 25 years ago had they read "The State Against Blacks." The author, an economist, said poverty programs destroy the natural mechanisms that have always enabled poor people to lift themselves out of poverty.
That author is Walter Williams of George Mason University. Williams, who is black, says "there's a huge segment of the black population for whom upward mobility is elusive, and it's because of the welfare state -- because of government."
Williams elaborates in a new book, "Race and Economics." A chief culprit, he insists, is the minimum wage.
"Let's not look at the intentions behind minimum wage," he said. "We have to ask, what are the effects? Put yourself in the place of an employer who must pay $7.25 no matter whom you hire. Will that employer hire a person who can only add $3 or $4 of value per hour?"
He will not. And so fewer young people get hired and "get their feet on the bottom rung of the economic ladder." This hurts all young people, but black teens most, he says, because "many of them get a fraudulent education in the public school system. So a law that discriminates against low-skill people has a doubly negative effect on black teenagers. The unemployment rate among black teens today is unprecedented in U.S. history. In the '40s, black teenage unemployment was less than white teenage unemployment."
And yet a Pew survey says 83 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage.
"People have the misguided notion that the minimum wage is an antipoverty tool."
Economists understand the truth. A survey of the American Economic Association found that 90 percent of economists say the minimum wage increases unemployment.
Williams says the minimum wage law has also been a tool of racism. In his book "South Africa's War Against Capitalism," he studied that country's labor markets during apartheid:
"White racist unions in South Africa that would never have a black as a member were the major supporters of minimum wage laws. Their stated purpose was to protect white workers from having to compete with low-skill, low-wage black workers. In the United States we found some of the same reasoning for support of a super minimum-wage law," the Davis-Bacon Act, which forces taxpayers to pay union-like wages for government-funded construction projects.
Williams says other programs designed to help the poor -- like welfare payments -- have wrecked the lives of millions of black people. He likens the welfare state to a "drug pusher" that keeps people dependent and in poverty.
"The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done ... break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on ... 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families."
Why does the welfare state create illegitimacy?
"(Without welfare,) people would decide, 'I'm going to go out and get a job, I'm going to live more responsibly.'" And that would include getting married before having children, something the welfare system discourages.
I believe the creators of the welfare state had good intentions, but good intentions aren't good enough. Even if deficit spending were not bankrupting America -- which it is -- America should end these programs.
LBJ changed that.
LBJ was the last dem my old man voted for for president.
I've never voted for one of the nasty things.
My point is they don’t care who pays as long as ity isn’t them.
Millions of the disabled ARE NOT DISABLED...
I know many of them.. disabled permits for parking IS A SCAM(mostly)...
Puh-leeze—Government’s central planners couldn’t run a lemonade stand for profit.
God bless Walter Williams. He’s such a breath of fresh air in the stale race-baiting world we live in.
Another example is in the University system. Blacks get into top colleges with grades and SAT scores well below whites and asians. As a result, however, they can't cut it against the rest of the student body when there, and many drop out. If there were no preferences, they would go to colleges where the other students were comparable in ability to themselves, and do fine.
People are just damn ignorant of how the world works. That’s okay, reality will kick their collective a&&&& at some point.
LOL - I don’t remember if that was Him or Her but LBJ took a lot of heat over that picture.
You are correct about supply and demand but you are mistaken about the government’s role in some of those things. The dairymen pouring the milk on the ground was a public relations gimmick to get an increase in government subsidies. The politicians willingly complied. After that the government would then buy the excess milk, reduce it to cheese and butter fat, or dry it, and spend billions of dollars a year storying it in warehouses. They do the same with wheat, corn, and other agricultural products.
When we send tons of food to starving people or to disaster areas in other lands you don’t think they magically grow it overnight, do you, or that they buy it on the open market? What would that do to the market? They simply take it out of warehouses where they have been storing it, or more correctly, paying someone else to store it. Eventually, much of it is destroyed.
Since some have talked about LBJ, he was involved in another famous murder, that of a Dept. of Agriculture inspector who was out looking for grain silos supposedly owned by LBJ’s friend and fellow Texan, Billie Sol Estes. The problem was the silos did not exist. Estes was getting millions of dollars a year from the government to store grain but he wasn’t storing any.
If that was discovered it would lead directly back to LBJ so he had the inspector killed while he was out in the brush looking for the non-existent silos. When his body was discovered it was found that the inspector had been shot six times in the back with a bolt action rifle. The rifle was still on the scene. The coroner, a part of the Democrat political circle, ruled the death a suicide. See, there was a precedent for Slick Willie’s tactics.
Even now there is price fixing for milk. I have asked store managers at supermarkets in several states why, considering what it takes to produce each, the price of milk is higher than that of gasoline, usually. They generally say something along the lines of the state won’t let them sell below a certain price. That is supposedly to help the little grocers and keep the big boys from undercutting them. Sounds compassionate, doesn’t it?
Like all other government welfare programs the compassionate thing to do is let the market work. In this case the poor people are protected with government food stamps and we know about the many abuses there, and the milk producers’ profits are protected. So, we the taxpayer, get to pay more in increased taxes and as consumers in the increase in the price of milk.
Lovely little scheme. Just not for us.
When the so-called ‘libertarian’ Stossel has the balls to stand up for the life and liberty of the unborn, I’ll listen. Until then, he’s a confused idiot.
“LBJ changed that.”
I got into a discussion about LBJ with an old guy some years back, and from his language you would think Johnson’s first two initials were MF. :)
Thank you for the correction regarding the dairymen. I was remembering TV reports from my childhood and failed to do my homework before posting.
I remember that there was a scandal involving Billy Sol Estes, but would have been hard pressed to explain it. Regarding the “suicide”, there was also the story of the NM coroner who declared a death to be suicide under similar bolt-action multi-round circumstances.
The whole issue of farm subsidies has always bothered me. It has appeared to be a thinly disguised welfare system, but I am willing to listen to anyone that can provide a cogent argument to the contrary. [”They need the money” is not a valid argument. I need money, too.] It is interesting that Eisenhower’s Sec’y of Agriculture argued against them.
“you would think Johnson’s first two initials were MF. :)”
There not?
FR is amazing, I learn something new every day!
We probably agree that no matter the subject, farming, “green” energy, gas milage, oil and gas, etc., should be left to the market to sort out. The market is self-correcting, the government is not.
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