The late Professor Walter Williams was right about poverty; It's so logical but many want to look for other excuses, from slavery to Jim Crow to Christopher Columbus

We just learned that Professor Walter E. Williams passed away. He was 84 and born in 1936.

In my case, I got to know Professor Williams when a fellow conservative gave me Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? to read. It made so much sense that I gave my copy to another friend, bought a second one and gave it to another friend to read and finally bought my own copy and locked it in my desk so I would never give it away again. What a great book!

In the 1990s, the professor became Rush Limbaugh's favorite Friday substitute.

Dr. Williams was a national treasure. He was on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

My favorite message from Professor Williams was about staying out of poverty and it had nothing to do with voting Democrat. Instead, it was all about personal responsibility.

This is what he wrote:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science.
First, graduate from high school.
Second, get married before you have children, and stay married.
Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage.
And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

It's so logical but many want to look for other excuses, from slavery to Jim Crow to too many Christopher Columbus statues.

He was such a super guy. Loved reading his bio..

I’m very fond of Larry Elder also and while he really was the “sage” of South Central L. A., (gone now but not forgotten) for the “downtrodden”, he won’t be as well remembered, I’m afraid. Some of his advice to his radio listeners in
L. A., for years was directed to the young minority groups - something he said he learned from his dad about working:

“Arrive early and stay late.”

I used to believe this, but after working with some inner city "youth" and living close to blighted areas for a long a time, I no longer do.

First of all, how many minimum wage positions do you think are out there? And if you do land one of those jobs, what do you do if you're laid off? How can you pay rent? Have a car that breaks down?

If you have a stable family group that can fill in the gaps when setbacks occur, sure, then you can keep going and see light at the end of the tunnel. But if you do not?

The simple fact is that a variety of bad public policy decisions have made this solution almost impossible for many of the poor.

First off, welfare policy and easy divorce have created innumerable female-headed households living on the dole, which provide no stable family for young men to rely on for support.

Second, the flood of Mexicans has eroded wages and locked many American poor out of the job market. They succeed mainly because they have a support network of either family or other working immigrants who can line up a job for them.

Third, our "free trade" policies have destroyed millions of high-paying, "low-skilled" manufacturing jobs that would provide wages high enough to support a stable family.

Can some people born into unstable homes living on the dole work themselves up from that? Sure. Just not too many.

We can't base public policy on expecting passion-filled young men to live heroically like monks until they rise out of poverty through luck and hard work, not starting a family until they are in their late twenties. It's never going to happen.

What we need to do is stop paying women to have kids out of wedlock, get control of immigration, and stop the "free trade" madness.

What's opened my eyes a lot is how you can see the same pathologies that have decimated the lives of inner city blacks now spreading to the demoralized and unemployed white population in the Rust Belt and rural areas, and even among the second or third generation children of immigrants.

The same baloney: children having children due to welfare, drug use and sales, violence and other crime.

Race is currently being used to cover for what is really a class issue, an ideology promoting mass immigration and welfare that allows the elite to stay at the top and increase their profits while they claim they are, "supporting the poor and people of color."

Just like Nike's support of BLM: use slave labor in China to produce overpriced baubles for ignorant ghetto youth to fight over without moving a single manufacturing facility to a black neighborhood.

Yes, the hypocrisy is tremendous.

I’m not familiar with the demographics, but I reckon you’re correct about it being a class issue instead of a race issue.

Our trouble is the Leftist don’t want to listen to any of this. They are brainwashed to believe certain people are oppressed by other forces beyond family, discipline, and the other virtues that made America grade.

Candace Owens puts if right when she says, “You need to have a Victor mentality, not a Victim mindset.”

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