As George Mason University Professor Walter E. Williams puts it: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do. And that is to destroy the black family.”
In his speech on Monday in New York, President Obama referenced “the ideals we’re built on” as a reason for providing more government investment to address poverty in our inner cities. But he’s certainly not talking about our founding principles. These might be better described as Ben Franklin once did:
I am for doing good for the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and thus became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less that was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
The wisdom with which our Founder concludes is that, of the poor, “more will be done for their happiness by insuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.”
Clearly, this was not the “ideals we’re built on” that Obama referenced, and Franklin’s wisdom could go a long way to explain the unhappiness observed among poor teens in Baltimore. More likely, Obama was referencing the glory days of the modern progressive as the “ideals we’re built on,” such as the redistributionist policies of FDR’s New Deal, and the firm foundations of the welfare state laid by LBJ’s Great Society.
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