Walter Williams on the ‘War on Poverty’

The war on poverty is a war on the poor.

This works out great because - to paraphrase a commenter on Megan's blog - being poor means that someone else makes your decisions for you. Politicians may not have been bright enough to figure that out in the beginning, but it hasn't escaped their notice now. If they can only impoverish the entire nation, their power would be immense.

That's a gem.

I really enjoyed this video... and watching Dr. Williams shoot hoops was awesome.

So why is it that so many people don't believe this (the content of the video), don't want to believe this, flat-out deny this, and continue to vote Democratic? Is the power machine so big by now that we can use the school system to brainwash all the kids into thinking like automatons and grow up to do the bidding of the Democrat party? How is it that some of us didn't fall under that spell? Why does this continue? I know my questions sound naive, but with all that I see going on right now I feel defeated and helpless and I'm running out of steam.

I LOVE Dr. Williams. I met him at YAF in the late 90's. Brilliant and dedicated man.

I don't think Dr. Williams was being fair. His ideas about "good intentions" clearly are coming from Milton Friedman, who's ideas have been undercut by recent reality. This was one of the major talking points during the Regan revolution of the 80's on limited government.

The fact is that urban poverty has more to do with deindustrialization and capital flight to developing countries. To blame the "War on Poverty" for the problems in these communities in unfair. You may argue that they were largely ineffective, but indeed the source of these problems was not these policies. "Voluntary cooperative action" through markets is what has caused the current economic crisis and worsened the conditions of the black urban underclass.

I don't think Dr. Williams was being fair. His ideas about "good intentions" clearly are coming from Milton Friedman, who's ideas have been undercut by recent reality.

I find that one thing that doesn't work very well in this comment section is simply asserting something. It makes your argument rather unconvincing - seeing as it's not an argument. How have these ideas been undercut by recently reality? Which specific ideas and specifically how were these ideas undercut?

"Voluntary cooperative action" through markets is what has caused the current economic crisis and worsened the conditions of the black urban underclass.

When you can explain to me how keeping an interest rate at historic lows and government mandates for tax-subsidized GSEs to lend to people who will never ever pay back the loan can be mistaken for "voluntary cooperative action", I'll entertain your assertion.

Meanwhile, the only parts of Harlem that have gotten better are the parts where residents took it upon themselves to clean out the crack houses and refurbish the neighbourhood. THAT is voluntary cooperative action at work, my friend.

We could add one more section to those videos now - the war on drugs - which would be related to the minimum wage issue, since illicit activity is the only source of market clearing wages & independence.

Good calls both Methinks and yet another Dave,

add the myriad of other techniques deployed to prevent people becoming too independent of the benevolent state.

The Kiwi opposition leader has been promoting the idea that a guy with more than $1 million worth of property should be allowed the dole - details on www.kiwiblog.co.nz</p>

That insipid dick might end up running my country

Austin's rebuttal to Walter Willisms bears out again, as Mises observed, that "Every historical experience is open to various interpretations and is in fact interpreted in different ways...History can neither prove nor disprove any general statement."

Only economics can do so.

don't think Dr. Williams was being fair.

Fair?

Dr. Williams has been studying the issue for for over 25 years.

He just may have a bit of insight.

"Voluntary cooperative action" through markets is what has caused the current economic crisis and worsened the conditions of the black urban underclass.

Can you make a cogent argument to back up your assertion?

I'm betting you can't, and quoting others who make similar assertions does not a cogent argument make.

Austin's rebuttal to Walter Willisms bears out again

What rebuttal? He merely made some assertions, not any argument at all.

Willis? DynOMite!!!!

"The war on poverty is a war on the poor." - Methinks.

By your thinking there was no poverty until the Guvmint intervened and then poverty was rife. Poor people are poor in a free market because they haven't figured out any way to satisfy any market demand.

Poor people are poor in a free market because

But we don't have a free market.

By your thinking there was no poverty until the Guvmint intervened and then poverty was rife. Poor people are poor in a free market because they haven't figured out any way to satisfy any market demand.

That's not it.

Once upon a time, most everyone, by today's standards, was poor. In the U.S., people who, anywhere else, would have been poor, began to realize the rewards of their labors, and so, made themselves wealthier. Some more so than others, but all became better off as technology made human effort more productive and relatively free markets allowed people to multiply the value of their efforts via the coordination made possible by market pricing.

What government interventions have done is to freeze a lot of people in place, particularly the poor, by taking wealth out of the system to grow the federal and state bureaucracies, build and extend an empire, destroy the incentives to save, reward criminal behavior, impede the entry of youth into the market, and so on.

Political systems always cater to the wealthy, that's why the wealthy created them.

Thanks for the link.

1982? Not only did he know this in 1982, but he could communicate it so well then too? That's discouraging. You would hope that that kind of work would have been more accepted over that time frame.

Bob Kozman - I'm right with you. You ask great questions.

"How is it that some of us didn't fall under the spell? How does this continue?"

I wonder those same things. It's not surprising that in a society where conventional wisdom said making people into homeowners made them responsible (rather than the responsible happened to become homeowners), that we struggle so much with critical thinking.

But why more people buy the false cause, and doubt the true cause is beyond me. Could be generational.

That is such an incredible video. If Williams is right, the implications are huge. The crime our government has committed, condemning an entire generation to poverty, is of astronomic proportions.

Alright, Sam, instead of "rebuttal," his "assertion."

Either way, arguments over history are endless, and these issues can only be settle by economics.

Bold Raider from the North,

You wrote,

"More specifically, deducing logically necessary conclusions from axiomatic concepts" is the only way to settle these disputes.

I'm getting worried. I actually agree with you about something.

You wrote furthermore,

"Mises wasn't a rationalist, but he didn't throw rational foundations out the window either, when they can be found."

What do you mean by "Mises wasn't a rationalist?"

Just what would you call a man who wrote this?

"Action and reason are congeneric and homogenous...two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason...Logical thinking and real life are not two separate orbits. Logic is for man the only means to master the problems of reality. What is contradictory in theory is no less contradictory in reality."

By your thinking there was no poverty until the Guvmint intervened and then poverty was rife. - Gil

No, that kind of scrambled BS can only flow forth from you. Sam explains it. I'm going back to not wasting time on your posts.

Either way, arguments over history are endless,

Yes, especially when people are ignorant of history except for the mangled garbage thrown at them in public school. The only thing that history teaches us is that history teaches us nothing.

"Even the most faithful examination of a chapter of economic history, though it be the history of the most recent period of the past, is no substitute for economic thinking. Econonmics, like logic and mathematics, is a display of abstract reasoning. Economics can never be experimental and empirical. The economist does not need an expensive apparatus for the conduct of his studies. What he needs is the power to think clearly and to discern in the wilderness of events what is essential from what is merely accidental.

There is no conflict between economic history and economics. Every branch of knowledge has its own merits and its own rights. Economists have never tried to belittle or deny the significance of economic history. Neither do real historians object to the study of economics. The antagonism was intentionally called into being by the socialists and interventionists who could not refute the objections raised against their doctrines by the economists. The Historical School and the Institutionalists tried to displace economics and to substitute 'empirical' studies for it precisely because they wanted to silence the economists. Economic history, as they plannned it, was a means of destroying the prestige of economics and of propagandizing for interventionism."

Mises

Ask any of your friendly good intentioned financial regulators in your neighborhood why he subsidizes a job in a triple-A rated company while taxing the ones in a BB- rated one.

In 1959 when I joined the Navy, every black recruit could read, write, and performing math at acceptable levels to need no special supervision.

By 1969 I was being asked to volunteer to teach reading and writing to blacks, in the service, who were functionally illiterate. Men who could not be trusted to read and understand warning signs in their workspaces. Men, who were accepted as recruits to satisfy the black leaders who were insisting on "equality" even in ways that were ultimately dangerous and unhealthy to those the black leaders were attempting to "aid".

The fools among us can look to causes other than government for that situation, just as they can poo-poo Walter William's presentation; and they can prove themselves fools in doing so, and remain fools.

Yes Gil,

We know that you can nitpic, and we know that poverty has always been a condition of life for someone.

But, we also know that you know the difference between a small minority being so poor that they need help, and th4e majority being made poor and being encouraged to become dependent.

We also know that you're aware that socialism always increases poverty for all. There is no other way for it to happen. Rationally and logically socialism has to increase the poverty in the people because the takers can't be, and won't be, lifted up, therefore the makers must be torn down to the taker's level in the interests of egalitarianism.

Mother Nature's way is to let the poor select themselves.

Government's way is to destroy the incentives to be anything other than poor, thus creating them.

The advantages of Mother Nature's way are to obvious to even bother listing.

"But, we also know that you know the difference between a small minority being so poor that they need help, and the majority being made poor and being encouraged to become dependent." - vidyohs.

Thanks for at least pointing out the poverty that will still exist in a free market.

Always Gil, always. T'ain't nary a thing we can do about it either.

Well there is one thing......as seen we can make it worse.

Some people are not willing, and some are not able, to accept the responsibility for themselves to make productive effort.

I am willing to provides assistance to the unable, but I am not willing to subsidize the unwilling.

Some people are not willing, and some are not able, to accept the responsibility for themselves to make productive effort.

I am willing to provides assistance to the unable, but I am not willing to subsidize the unwilling.

And who can refute that?

It is also an easy wedge issue. When we let something get under our skin, everything starts looking like that problem.

Everyone on Wall Street looks like a Madoff, every priest a sexual predator, every cop a jack-booted thug, every immigrant a job-stealing freeloader - it doesn't even need to make sense.

Freeloaders tend to wash out of the system. The have no independence. They either live off family members, or they resort to crime. Feeding from the state is too much of a hassle. They are required to look for work.

Not everyone who lives off a family member is a freeloader either. Some have children to mind, and some are writing books, or whatever.

I met a whole bunch of freeloaders. Remind me sometime to tell you a very interesting story about when I used to manufacture amphetimines. Needless to say, I was arrested, and it was the best thing that happened to me at the time.

I spent 72 of my 60-day sentence in jail with 500 people who most definitely should have been there. 450 of them had one thing in common: they were freeloaders outside of jail. That was their job - full time freeloading and stealing.

Either way, we pay.

You got 60 days for manufacturing amphetimines?!

Damn, I got 1-5 years for possession with intent to deliver marijuana. (The presumption of the law in WV was that if you have it, you intend to deliver it.)

True Confessions time? Rhetorically consorting with persons guilty of behavior anti-social it is we are?

Given a little time, people will identify themselves. Those who are makers soon show it by being productive, and those who are takers also soon show it by whining about wanting some of what others have made.

K & Sam - no wonder the libertarian side is so for legalization of drugs, ya'll are cooking em!

K & Sam - no wonder the libertarian side is so for legalization of drugs, ya'll are cooking em!

Not any more!

I was seduced by a very pretty girl who used the stuff. She had a friend who made it, but he had no sense of chemistry w/regards to safety and purity.

Science has always been my thing, and I couldn't stand watching him. It was like watching someone make a cake and thowing in the eggshells, the box the cake mix came in, and cooking it with gasoline indoors.

The reason I only got 60 days was all in the police report. I had "expressed concern for the officers safety" by carefully explaining what they did and did not want to touch because they had never seen a setup like I made. I made them acknowledge there were no scales and baggies, and cash laying around, and the anount being 'cooked' would yield about 7 grams.

It was not a for-profit adventure as I was gainfully employed with a nice job at the time. It also helped that the extent of my record of prior offenses was two traffic tickets.

Before the trial even came up, I had already become a volunteer at a food bank, and that helped too. ;-)

Sometimes you have to work the system. I got the sense the judge felt bad about locking me up, but I was actually looking forward to drying out. It was getting very hectic.

That was 35 years ago.

If you think about it, it's pretty audacious, the war on poverty.

Of course this isn't the only "war" we are in the midst of. There's the War on Climate change, the War on Drugs, the War on Obesity (no czar there yet though). I imagine that soon we'll have the War on Death (and rest assured that it will be about as effective as all the other Wars).

The War on Poverty however has the distinction of never really being over.

Ever.

The war on the poverty of the turn of the century was won already, as was the WOP on the poverty of the twenties and even the forties. The poverty of the sixties is largely non existent today as well.

But because "poverty" is a relative term and a constantly moving target, the war to vanquish it will never ever end.

Good point, Dave.

I love it, Dave.

We're ruled by a posse of Czars and we're constantly at war. Somebody should tell OBamBam that this is the kind of activity that has historically been known to encourage revolutions that didn't work out so well for the Czars.

And then, or course, there is the war on terrorism - a real war. A perpetual war, that we accept as something winnable.

Maybe we can have a war on war.

Maybe we can have a war on war.

Mmmm...sorry that one's already been done (and by "been" I mean it's ongoing).

The whole idea behind the bloated bureaucracy of the UN is ending wars. This one seems to be as successful as the war on poverty, terrorism and obesity.

When people ask me if I support traditional welfare. I usually ask them from 1965-1980 did poverty for those in the inner cities increase or decrease? And any honest person will say poverty and the quality of life decreased in every measurable way.

If this is true why do you fault Reagan for cutting welfare for those in the inner cities? Aren't the inner cities better off now because of the workfare and welfare reform policies that Reagan championed?

The sad thing is that LBJ declared a war on poverty and a war in Vietnam both failed not because of a lack of money but because of failed strategies.

Failed strategies is only one of the reasons those two wars failed; but, the reality remains that neither should have been attempted.

And Conservatives find it hard to believe when Muslims say 'jihad' can mean anything from a literal battle to merely looking into one's self.

And Conservatives find it hard to believe when Muslims say 'jihad'... - Gil

This conservative remembers Daniel Pearl having his head hacked off while other Muslims videotaped it.

How do you tell which ones want to look into themselves and those who wish to look into someone else?

Oh please brotio! The terms 'war' and 'crusade' can be both used in the literal sense as well as in a flippant way as mean 'a personal challenge of some sort'. Muslims don't like the way Westerners casually use the word 'crusade' as it pertains to certain events in history for them. Are you going to get offended if you overheard a local Muslim referred to his personal jihad to lose weight?

Are you going to get offended if you overheard a local Muslim referred to his personal jihad to lose weight?

Only if they get offended by my crusade to lose weight.

This conservative remembers Daniel Pearl having his head hacked off while other Muslims videotaped it.

And remember when they came over here and were throwing us in prisons and torturing us and stacking us in naked pyrimids?

"Only economics can do so."

More specifically, deducing logically necessary conclusions from axiomatic concepts.

Mises wasn't a rationalist, but he didn't throw rational foundations out the window either, when they can be found.

"I'm getting worried. I actually agree with you about something."

Embrace the revelation, don't fear it.

"What do you mean by "Mises wasn't a rationalist?""

A criticism of deduction from axiomatic concepts is that it is a futile attempt to decipher reality by means of pure reason--a method conventionally attributed to Descartes and rationalism. But Mises was not foolishly exclusive on this issue as were the rationalists, or some of the positivists on the other extreme. Instead Mises recognized that the laws of consciousness were no less objective reality than the laws of nature. And to understand reality, it does not serve you to blind yourself to some aspect of it.

I like your quote. It was what I was thinking of when I posted.

The "war on poverty" has turned out to be a great way to keep poor people poor, which in turn is great for the Democratic party. And since most poor children attend horrible government schools, they don't learn eonough to realize they're being screwed by the people who claim to be looking out for them.

The worst thing that could happen for the Democrats would be lots more Americans becoming wealthy (or just learning basic economics). Seems like a bad incentive situation to me...

Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they couldn't do a much better job if it was a conspiracy!