He'll get me for that. There's one thing I want to say. You know, talking about the great society today, pretty easy in this group. I assume everybody's against it.
But there's one last thing I want to say, a little leftover business from yesterday. And I recommended a book by Thomas Sowell. It really is loud. I feel like I'm sort of whispering.
Actually, that's okay. I recommended this book by Thomas Sowell, and I called it Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality, and I said you should get it, it refutes every myth, it's outstanding, extremely well done, and it's a very short book, concise, and packs a punch, and I didn't mention because it just didn't occur to me, I wasn't thinking, but it's interesting to note that for those of you who don't know, Sowell is a black man, and I mention that simply because that means that the civil rights establishment
has made his life just a ceaseless joy, constantly.
He gets invited to all the fancy cocktail parties and all the conferences,
and they treat his work very seriously.
They've never caricatured his work or misrepresented him or tried to make him look ridiculous.
And he notes in his final chapter, he makes reference to the fact that he's a black guy,
but just in passing, because he was mentioning that at Cornell University,
The Theory of Money and Credit
Dr. Gordon, is David Bado's book called From Mutual Aid to Welfare State? Is that the title?
Sounds familiar? Okay, it's something like this, okay?
Now this has nothing to do with the Great Society, but it's still somewhat relevant.
Alright, let's see. It's worth looking at.
Okay, you should look at this.
Now this does not deal with the period that I'm dealing with,
but it looks at the question, it looks at what did ordinary people do
before there really was an advanced welfare state?
What had people done?
I think this is the one case in which I'm recommending a book that I haven't read,
I have read several of Beto's unpublished papers on the subject because he gave them to me, and I like what he's done.
But he shows how ordinary people used fraternal associations and like organizations to provide mutual aid in the absence of a welfare state
and how they were able to get cut rate medical insurance and so on and on through this voluntary means.
and that this particular function began to atrophy in the 1930s or so
because the government sort of supplanted it.
But it's an interesting way of considering this question of what would...
So it was a way to answer people who would say,
well, wouldn't everybody drop dead instantly if we eliminated the welfare state?
I don't really have any record of people in the 1920s just corpses lining the streets.
I mean, I don't think anybody has ever testified to that.
Okay. But that's something from a little earlier. The Great Society is the name given, that we give, and that was given at the time, to the anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson's administration.
Now, Lyndon Johnson, of course, took over from Kennedy when he was assassinated in 63 and then continued through January 69 when Nixon took over.
I won't tell the off-color joke I just heard from David Gordon about Lyndon Johnson.
I'll resist that temptation. You can ask him about that later.
I'm sure he's got 27 of them for you if you're interested.
But what I do have are a couple of quotations from Lyndon Johnson
about what his great society would be like.
His great society would be, quote,
A society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness,
works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty.
He also described the fight against poverty as an investment in the great tradition of the 1930s,
an investment in the future as in the past.
And he goes on to say that this investment will return its cost many-fold to our entire economy.
Well, it didn't really. It didn't really do that.
At this point, it's between five and a half and six trillion dollars that have been spent on these various programs.
And we're still waiting for the great beauty without barrenness and so on and on.
But nevertheless, and we're waiting for the areas that have most benefited from them,
you know, not to look like bombed out remnants of World War II, but nevertheless,
it's interesting, of course, to note the fact that we do not have a poverty problem in the United States.
That should not be a controversial statement.
It is surely a peculiar kind of poverty in which more poor children suffer from obesity than malnourishment.
This is not a normal situation, I think.
Likewise again, if you compare, obviously, the condition of Americans to those of areas of the world that we consider poor.
You know, I mean, we all know this. I mean, the poor are living like kings in the 18th century, for crying out loud.
I mean, just flush toilets is a great thing to have.
But beyond that, all the amenities that we take absolutely for granted, refrigerators, telephones.
I mean, now there are poor people with cell phones today walking around.
Many of them own their own cars, own their own homes.
You know, you see all the time, you see the Heritage Foundation and other groups like this
doing surveys of all the various things that the so-called poor own,
which would make them the envy of the world in any other society.
But according to the great society philosophy, that's not enough.
It's not enough to say, well, they're not living in absolute destitution,
They don't get to enjoy as much of the American abundance as do their fellows, and this needs to be rectified.
So it's a question of inequality to them, and I remember Murray Rothbard used to say things like,
so in other words, one guy has three yachts and I have only one, it's a terrible injustice going on, it has to be rectified.
Well, look at American society, extremely wealthy, and yet we have this anti-poverty crusade taking place.
Roughly from 1950 to 1968, the poverty rate in the U.S. declines from about 30% to about 13% over those years.
And there is, of course, a little bit of that that does take place during Johnson's years,
but that can hardly be attributed to his Great Society program since they hadn't really had any time to get started.
and they weren't really funded as highly as they would be until the early 70s in any case.
That is, you know, the free market has a way of eliminating and combating poverty.
And it does this. And that seems to have been what happened over these years.
So it was happening gradually at roughly the rate of a percentage point per year.
So this is already taking place. Poverty, there's already a so-called war on poverty going on.
going on. That's going on automatically. But that's not fast enough. And of course, what ends up happening is that after the Great Society programs begin, well, the poverty level more or less solidifies and increases slightly and then levels out.
And that's what we have to show for five or six trillion dollars. Well, I have here a few examples of things. By the way, is it about 5,000 degrees in this room or is it just because I'm up here and I haven't slept
I don't know if there's anybody who can do anything about that, but it's kind of warm.
That guy's sweating. That's a guy perspiring.
First thing I want to note is, just to give you a few examples of these things,
I want to give you a few examples of these things. We all know, we're all familiar with at least some of the anti-poverty programs of the Great Society.
But I want to give you a few examples and let's see how they've turned out.
We'll look at them and the wonderful intentions that were behind them and then we'll see what happened.
The first one is the Job Corps, which just won't go away.
The Job Corps. The idea was that every year you'd recruit a hundred thousand really, really disadvantaged people.
Absolutely pathetic human beings who just can't keep a job to save their lives
and we would relocate them far away from the slums, like in some wilderness or near military barracks
and we'll train them to do productive things in life and this will be wonderful,
will show how committed we are to building up job skills among people.
Okay, so that's the idea. Well, how does this work out?
Well, I have a historian's testimony about the Job Corps,
and let me give you a little taste of how the first year goes.
First year, 1965, of the Job Corps.
Let's see, the first year, several members of the Job Corps were arrested at the Atterbury Center in Indiana
for forcing a fellow trainee to commit sodomy.
In Austin, Texas, a trainee on leave from Camp Gary got stabbed in a fight.
At Camp Breckenridge in western Kentucky, a food riot had to be quelled by Federal Marshals.
Members of the Job Corps were charged with burglaries in Laredo,
promiscuity in St. Petersburg, and window smashing in Kalamazoo.
Okay, so that was the first, so once they start killing each other,
once they stop killing each other and raping people,
the program starts to settle down a little bit.
and what the congressmen began to find is that in 1966 it seems to cost about as much to provide for a member of the Job Corps for a year as it would to send the person to Harvard
and they wonder, you know, isn't that a little disappointing that that's all we have to show
well as I say during its second year it starts to settle down but notice this now the typical Job Corps program lasts six to nine months
This is not that difficult to ask of someone.
Six to nine months, we're going to give you a skill that can get you a job.
See, remember, you can't get a job. That's why you're here.
So we're going to give you a free program to give you skills.
Now, you'd think any normal person with a brain would say,
I am completely unworthy of this.
So yes, I'd be happy to finish this program.
Okay.
So here's the problem.
Two-thirds of the people enrolled in the Job Corps quit before completing the program.
More than half of them had quit before three months had elapsed.
Now, remember, this is a free job training program.
All you have to do is show up.
That's it.
And you get a free job training program.
And they can't complete this.
So it sort of seems like, again, I don't think you have to be Einstein to see that maybe this is why,
One reason these people are having difficulty finding jobs and keeping them.
They can't finish a free job training program.
But nevertheless, OK, so we have this.
Then we find that people who do graduate from the Job Corps,
it turns out that their unemployment rates and wage rates are no better
than for those of so-called no-shows, people who've been accepted to the Job Corps,
but who never showed up.
So, if you never showed up to the Job Corps, you'd be just as well as people who went through the whole program and risked getting stabbed and sodomized.
So, that's the Job Corps.
But even more than that, one can say that what kind of jobs are they being trained for?
I mean, they don't have the skills to do very advanced, particularly advanced work.
and Social Work.
So they're being trained for simple jobs like cook or baker, janitor, things that you could
pretty much get on the job training for, that people aren't necessarily going to hire job
corps graduates for.
But beyond that, other people were going to get these jobs anyway, regardless of whether
there was a job corps or not.
So the net effect of unemployment is zero.
Somebody was going to get these jobs anyway.
The only effect is that it slightly privileges one group of the disadvantaged at the expense of another.
So there's the job corps. There's the great society. Beauty instead of barrenness. That's what we have.
Well, the next example that I have is, and you know, incidentally, I had a student who said,
but you know, if the job corps really were ineffective and it had no good results,
you know, why would they continue the program?
And I thought, you know what, I don't even know where to begin in answering that question.
You know, you're right, I'm sure it would be abolished,
because things are very, very often abolished when they don't work.
Okay, the second thing is, I've got to keep my eye on this,
there is some legislation also that Johnson favors
for federal aid to elementary and secondary education.
And this isn't meant as an education measure per se, as much as it is an anti-poverty measure, once again.
Because these funds under this program will be targeted to the poorer school districts.
Okay, so that's the idea, and we'll help them, because the idea is that poverty is a trap, and education is the cure-all.
So if we can lift these people out with education, we can stop this cycle of poverty.
and federal money is the way to go.
And what did they find?
Well, they found when you actually study the question,
even when government agencies studied the question,
they found that either they found absolutely no difference,
none, in academic performance between students
in poor areas that had received this money
and students who had not, absolutely no difference
in achievement, in those few cases
is where they could pinpoint some initial improvement in the academic performance of low-income students.
This advantage, however slight, this advantage had disappeared after the following summer going into the next academic year.
So that was it. And billions and billions and billions of dollars over the years were poured into this.
And interestingly, a study was conducted as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
carried out by several researchers under Professor Coleman of Johns Hopkins in 1966.
And the study concluded this. Taking all these results together, one implication stands out
above all that schools bring little influence to bear on a child's achievement that is independent
of his background and general social context, and that this very lack of an independent effect
means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment
are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.
That is to say, education does not seem to have, and marginal changes in the level of spending on education
don't really seem to have much of an effect on children's performance and are destined not to have such an effect
because of the impact on their home environment, for one thing.
If you're living around degenerates all day and then you go to school and you get a fancier set of blocks than the other kid, it's really not going to be able to erase your difficulties.
So once again, nothing to show for it, but again, nobody resigns, nobody is disgraced by this, no one feels sorry about it.
Again, reminding us of Murray Rothbard's one of his laws that nobody ever resigns, nobody ever resigns.
No matter how wrong you are, nobody ever resigns.
So nobody resigned over that, my friends. In fact, though, the radical left at least did learn something from this.
A number of people on the radical left noticed that precisely that education had so little effect on children and on erasing inequality in society,
that Christopher Jencks, who was a leftist who wrote a book in 1972 called Inequality,
One of the things he argued in that book is that since education is not going to work in order to equalize society better, as we've seen,
radicals need to just focus simply on just crude redistribution of wealth now.
Just take from the rich and give to the poor, because this intermediate thing of fixing up education isn't working.
So let's just cut right to the chase and just start robbing people and giving them money.
So, okay, a couple people picked up something. That wouldn't be quite the lesson that I would draw from this, but that's the lesson they drew.
and the same thing can be said for Head Start by the way, Head Start is the sort of the counterpart to this for preschool children that again it's supposed to help them give them a boost give them an advantage and again the same results seem to to to obtain that after I think something like 44 billion dollars have been spent on Head Start and it's again it's one of these things where whatever marginal gains are observed are flushed out within about a year or so so you know thank you so much. Then there is something
something called Medicare and Medicaid, somewhat less obscure program than these others.
Now this is, along with social security, here's a classic way you take a segment of society
that is, by temperament, the most conservative, the elderly, and you enlist them in the ranks
of the welfare state, and you make them the greatest cheerleaders of all.
the wealthiest, the wisest, and generally they are, but this, they've been compromised, my friend, some of them,
and it actually brings to mind the Simpsons episode, I was talking about this, you should all be watching this program by the way,
not because I'm going to argue it's free market or anything, sometimes it is, but it's just funny, and Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia
Mises is going to be one of the great programs of all time, and he's a Mises adjunct scholar.
He's got his PhD from Harvard, so obviously that means you have to listen to everything he says.
But there's a Simpsons episode where the kids, Lisa and Bart, have been writing cartoon scripts
and submitting them to a network, but they've been submitting them under an adult's name
because they want to be taken seriously. So they've been submitting them under their grandfather's name.
and he's been getting royalty checks, and so finally they said to him,
there are two jokes,
finally they said to him, well, grandpa, didn't you wonder why you were getting
money for doing absolutely nothing? And he said, well, I just figured it was because the
Democrats were in power again.
Now, I had intended that for later because that sort of,
you know, would that that were so, it doesn't really matter which party is in power, of course,
That's a point that I'll return to.
But a better example is, the grandfather is complaining one day
that the young generation always wants to get something for nothing.
They always want to get something for nothing.
And as soon as he's finished making this complaint,
he marches into the Social Security office and says,
I'm old, gimme, gimme, gimme.
Oh, gee.
Well, here we have Medicare and Medicaid.
The idea being that for Medicare, obviously we're talking about medical care
for the Elderly and Medicaid for the Poor.
Okay, here's a great program.
Well, a couple of things to note about this.
Obviously, if you're going to provide these kinds of services,
as has been noted up here at least one other time,
you're going to stimulate demand like crazy.
People are going to continually use this over time.
More and more and more, they're going to demand everything.
Doctor, I'm 107 years old
I feel fatigued and tired a lot. I have some aches.
I'd like to run 17 tests to figure out what's wrong with me.
Look, the answer is you're 107, I think.
But there's no market test that's going to stop you from doing this, or not quite as much.
And when you spend all this money on something, obviously you're going to get prices going up and up and up,
Hospital prices had increased 7% the year before Medicare, and the year following it, they increased 14% and continued to increase at an accelerating and runaway rate.
What's notable, though interestingly about Medicare, and here I'm citing another historian, is as follows.
The average aged person was little better off.
True, he paid only 29% of his medical bills directly out of pocket in 1975, compared to 53% before Medicare,
but his total bill was also much higher.
In a way, the price inflation created by Medicare erodes some of its benefits.
The average beneficiary spent $237 out of pocket in the year before Medicare and $390 10 years later in constant dollars almost exactly the same.
Likewise, then also the question of Medicaid, medical treatment for poor people.
Well, it might be worth asking, what did poor people do before Medicaid?
Medicaid, just everybody died or something. What did they do? What happened? They jumped
off a cliff when they were sick. What happened? Well, generally what happened is doctors used
to, in the days before medicine was bureaucratized, as much as it is now, would provide reduced
cost or pro-bono services regularly for poor people, and the poor would try to pay what
they could whenever that became possible. I would recommend, by the way, another book.
I'm sorry, but you've got to be a lifelong reader. You should be reading.
Okay. This one I won't check up on you on, but you really should do this.
I'll erase my sweaty man. There we go.
Still warm in here. Man, for some reason, the other rooms, it's...
I feel like I'm living in a... Well, anyway, never mind.
I feel like a piece on a meat hook or something. Okay.
This is a really good book, and it's not written by a free marketeer, to my knowledge, but it's written by an honest scholar, and those pop up every now and then.
And this is a scholar who's willing to say, look, if something is a big, stinking disaster, I'm going to admit it, and I'm going to document it.
This book, The Unraveling of America, where I'm drawing the bit on Medicare and Medicaid, is useful, at least for the chapters on the Great Society.
So if you're interested in any of these themes or you want to know how you can smash this stuff, I would recommend this book, my friends.
Okay. Again, let me cite a bit of this.
In the last year before Medicaid, the hospital admission rate for families with incomes below $3,000 was $107 per 1,000 families.
For families with incomes $10,000 and above, it was only $89 per 1,000 families.
Before Medicaid, the average low-income person visited a doctor 4.3 times a year, not dramatically less than the 5.1 visits made by high-income persons.
Granted that the poor are more frequently ill, these figures do not sustain a thesis of gross inequality.
And then he goes on, most of the government's medical payments on behalf of the poor compensated doctors and hospitals for services once rendered free of charge or at reduced prices.
And he concludes that really this is a transfer program from essentially middle class taxpayers to middle class physicians.
And that's your great society program.
There's Medicare and Medicaid, mentioned that, mentioned all these other things.
Okay, now there are a million points one could make,
because there are so many great society programs.
When Lyndon Johnson, when he actually announced that Medicare,
he said, in part of his speech, he said,
He said, thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, to thy needy, in thy land,
citing a biblical passage that does not exist, to my knowledge.
Just invented that.
I don't know.
I don't know. If you're desperate, you just start making up things.
Okay. Well, this is not the brightest guy in the world anyway, Lyndon Johnson.
Well, okay, well then we see also that there is, and I don't want to belabor this because we've all heard a million times about the rise of the underclass, but this is a group of people, and it's hard to, you know, different researchers, you know, they differ on how many people there are in this group called the underclass, but we're talking about a group of people who are poor, but not simply poor, who have really pathological difficulties, that they don't understand the connection between work and money, or they don't understand...
This is Michael Levin wrote a great article in the free market some years ago when he said that a lot of the times when Korean businesses will be attacked in cities that's because the local residents have been whipped up into a frenzy that somehow the Koreans have stolen things from them because there's only a fixed amount of wealth out there so how could they have all this stuff? They must have taken it from us in some way. That's a typical underclass pathology, an utter lack of understanding of how wealth is created
How to live like a civilized human being.
These are people for whom whether or not to commit a crime very often is simply a matter of cost-benefit economic analysis.
So, what do you do with these people and where did they come from?
Well, you may be familiar with this, but I'm going to erase these.
This is such a familiar book that you're almost going to be disappointed that I mention it, but maybe some of you don't know about it, and it's a little neocony, but it's pretty good, actually. It still stands up, in my opinion.
Okay, let's see. Here we go.
Oh, it's Charles Murray, the big racist.
I was being sarcastic.
Okay. Yes, it's losing ground. You should get this. It's not bad.
Yeah, it's got all the information you need to smash everybody.
Yeah, that's the spirit.
Because basically, as you all know, or some of you know, his basic thesis is that
this rise of the underclass, this phenomenon by which the poor have become,
have become, or at least a particular identifiable group of the poor, have become, in a sense, hooked on, you know, getting free handouts and all the rest of it.
He says you can't hold the Great Society programs themselves altogether blameless in this case.
In fact, he actually correlates the two. He says that the incentives that are being used here
are going to tend to make people act like parasites and act in antisocial ways
when you reward them for this behavior.
And he has in this book actually a very interesting example
which he was roundly criticized for but which I think works.
I won't go into any detail because you should get it.
There's a 10th anniversary edition that came out recently where he has a new introduction
where he looks at the research in intervening years and he says, I don't change, I basically
don't change the thing I said.
But he gives an example of, he says that suppose we had a government anti-smoking program whereby
we paid you a bounty to quit smoking.
He said, I can demonstrate to you logically that the net result would be more people would
be smoking at the end of the program.
And you think, well how could that be?
But yet he explains it and you read it and you say, you know he's right.
it would work out that way and he said likewise that's the same thing for any
social welfare policy because you for one thing there is something that
economists refer to as the disutility of labor people would rather not work if
they could get away with it so there's always this difficulty of how do you
provide for people who are desperate without at the same time making the
package so attractive that you make being desperate seem attractive you know
I'd like to get free this and free that and especially when you consider that
In many cases, the programs of the Great Society, the housing programs, the medical programs, the educational programs, the AFDC, which is originally a Franklin Roosevelt program, but greatly expanded in the Great Society, where you have additional children, you get more cash and everything else, well the result is, first of all, remember all these benefits are tax free, so you bear that in mind, it might not seem like that much money, but it's tax free.
This package of benefits gave you an income that was well above what you'd get with a minimum wage job,
and in some cases well above what you'd get at one and a half times the minimum wage.
So a lot of people said, well, to heck with this, I guess I'll just get some free stuff,
because that's what I'm entitled to and everything else.
In fact, again, just the last Simpsons example I will give is Ned Flanders,
the man you'd most like to punch in the face.
Murray makes additional arguments that, at the same time that government is making it more and more attractive to be in and to remain in,
in a completely pathetic position and not to lift oneself out of it
and to give a bureaucratic solution to this whole thing.
There are other signals that are being sent. Discipline in the schools is being destroyed.
Crime, because of various developments, is not being punished
as readily and as effectively, so that becomes more of a legitimate
option, just simply from a rational economic calculation point of view.
And he goes into this in some great detail.
The usual argument against Murray is to say that, well, the reason you had this growth of the underclass was that there just weren't that many jobs for them.
Okay, well, in some cases, there could be a little something to that. I don't really know.
But, interestingly, Harvard economist Richard Freeman, in 1980, did a survey in which he asked out-of-work inner-city black youths about their job prospects.
and over 70% of them said they could easily find a job, but they didn't.
They completely dropped out of the labor force altogether.
In 1989, it had risen to around 75% and said they could easily find a job,
but minimum wage jobs now seem silly and ridiculous and like chump jobs.
What's the point? Even though those are generally the first step for other things.
The Catastrophic Rate at which young black men began to drop out of the labor force altogether took place at a time when the economy was booming.
So it's a little difficult to argue that that was the explanation.
There's also a controversy about Murray's claim that these programs encouraged more out of wedlock births.
His argument is it's a simple economic calculation.
He's not necessarily saying that a woman is sitting there saying,
I get an extra $100, so I think I'll do something with this guy.
They're not thinking that way, but they don't have to think in that way.
And people just very often respond to incentives, but the preponderance of studies seems to demonstrate a correlation, at least, between the rise in these programs, and AFDC in particular, these payments and out-of-wedlock births.
And there's certainly at least a logical correlation, and certainly these payments are not doing anything to discourage out-of-wedlock births.
And indeed, why should these women get married in these cases?
Because, as Charles Murray said, a welfare mother's child provides her with the economic insurance that a husband used to represent.
You get children, you get more money.
So you have all these difficulties going on.
Well, and the pathology is so deep among the underclass that even if you argue that,
Well, how can these unskilled people possibly get the skilled jobs that are becoming increasingly numerous in our sophisticated economy?
How can you expect them to be employed in these areas?
Well, I want to cite a little passage from another historian who says this.
The so-called higher skills that one steel mill not far from Chicago needed recently to fill jobs that were going begging for lack of qualified applicants
amounted to a little more than being able to divide 100 by 4
and going one step further to understand the concept of 75%.
It generally takes only basic math for a worker to handle the statistical process control
that is one of the key recent technological advances in manufacturing.
One didn't think of secretarial skills as being particularly elevated until recently
when corporations in big cities found that increasing numbers of applicants lacked them.
Now, anxious companies pay their employees bounties for bringing in qualified applicants for secretarial jobs.
Anyone who wants her children to escape poverty needs only to make sure they learn basic literacy, computer typing, and polite business-like demeanor.
How can a scarcity of unskilled jobs in steel mills explain why ghetto mothers don't do this?
Okay, but there again, well, we need more job training programs, I guess. I don't know what the explanation is.
But anyway, so we've got this and this and that.
Well, in addition to Murray, there's been an additional argument that's been made that,
that although these programs were probably a necessary component of the rise of this degeneracy,
at the same time they may not have been completely sufficient they may have
helped it but was going on simultaneously was a cultural battle in
which the left was making a deliberate attempt to remove the stigma that had
been traditionally attached to receiving government handouts you just wouldn't do
it you had pride about it but now in the 60s people were being actively told that
you had a right to this that that society owed this to you
Sgt. Shriver said something like that he intended to institute a new grievance procedure between the poor and the rest of society
because it probably is my fault that some bum doesn't have a job after all.
I feel like I can say anything at this conference.
But imagine, for instance, even as late as the early 1960s, imagine an America in which, for instance, in Philadelphia,
Half of the applicants for welfare were rejected.
In New York City, welfare workers are still being told that withholding assistance is just
as if not more important than granting it.
Things like this.
Or there are still attempts made to try to contact relatives and to tell families, maybe
you want to play a role in supporting this person.
All these types of things.
Applicants still had to verify their eligibility with marriage and birth certificates and so
on.
Unwed mothers very often had to promise not to have any male collars coming to my home
or meeting me elsewhere under improper conditions and likewise that they would not knowingly
contribute or be a contributing factor to shaming their children by their conduct.
But these attitudes change because remember the left, they despise bourgeois morality,
they despise the work ethic, they despise the connection between work and reward, they
They despise the capitalist system, and boy, this is just great.
For some reason, the left always seems to identify with the most degenerate aspects of society,
and there are many, many examples of this.
But for instance, at Columbia University, which I mentioned just at random,
at their School of Social Work, in the, around the mid-60s,
they published a famous monograph at the School of Social Work,
Citing Old and New Testament passages in favor of this.
I think these were real ones in this case.
And they were saying there should be no penalty or stigma
for any competent and able-bodied individuals who,
just for whatever reason, don't seem capable of holding a job.
And that, in fact, social justice,
said these social workers at Columbia University,
meant that we couldn't really scrutinize
the behavior of the poor, because really, quote,
The origin of economic or social need is far less important than the fact of its existence.
And this just goes on and on and on.
The National Welfare Rights Organization is founded and again and again emphasized an emphasis on rights.
A key instrument in advancing this new approach were a thousand governmental neighborhood service centers
funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity
and were basically aimed at agitating among the poor and getting them to recognize that
that welfare payments were a right that they had.
The New York Times spoke of a new philosophy of social welfare that seeks to establish
the status of welfare benefits as rights based on the notion that everyone is entitled to
a share of the commonwealth.
You know, incidentally libertarians are accused all the time of, you know, they don't care
about community.
They break down community.
All they care about is individuals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, but then look at this, look at what I talked about yesterday, look at this today.
The left thinks absolutely nothing of destroying community standards about handouts, about
hard work, busing people's kids around all the time, destroying the little local patriotisms
that used to exist in cities and towns.
They think nothing of this, but we're the ones who destroy communities by just leaving
everybody the hell alone.
Anyway, I felt like mentioning that.
I had already mentioned this guy.
The National Welfare Rights Organization is always an interesting thing to note.
It's interesting that observers at their meetings were always struck by welfare mothers coming to their meetings,
and they still had this old-fashioned idea that they really shouldn't be receiving state aid,
but they kept hearing the word rights, rights, rights over and over again, and it got through to them.
One of the members of the NWRO conceded regretfully that the initial attempt, anyway, to pull in the black churches was actually unsuccessful.
So thus this passage.
We met with Whitney Young, director of the Urban League, and he gave us a long speech about how it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get 50 poor families onto welfare.
By the way, there are two... sorry, I have to just give these to you. I can't resist.
And you might find them useful. I don't know if you're interested in these topics, but I'll give them to you anyway.
There are two books that are pretty good, pretty good.
This one's sort of pretty good because it's irritatingly neo-Khani here and there,
but it's got enough incriminating quotations that that alone makes it worth something.
I mean, it's fine, but, you know, there are parts of it where you're just groaning.
The subtitle of this book is something like the 60s legacy to the underclass.
Okay. It's pretty good, because he goes into some depth about this deliberate attempt to undermine
the standard view of government handouts as a prerequisite to this explosion in handouts.
Second book I would mention, there's just one chapter that's pertinent to this,
And that's this guy. Again, I'm not saying this is a perfect individual who's never made any mistakes in his life, faith-based charities, but he's still worth looking at in this case.
He's got one chapter in this book that's really good. Well, I don't know, I just mean that it's very good on this topic.
I would recommend these. And as I say, this one, if you're interested in the Great Society, there's just one chapter that you'll like.
Okay.
I don't want to talk about that. And also, the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity, also, many of the lawyers that worked for it helped the NWRO,
National Welfare Rights Organization in its class action suits and legal cases and so for instance,
and this is from Magnet, rules that welfare officials without extensive hearings could declare a person employable
and require him to take a job, struck down thanks to left-wing government lawyers.
Rules that women receiving AFDC could not have a man in the house, struck down.
Rules that recipients suspected of fraud had to answer questions or else face possible loss of subsidy, struck down, et cetera, et cetera, and it just goes on and on and on.
So in other words, radicals are going around in various communities organizing the poor to go into the courts and demand their rights.
And also what they would do is that these OEO attorneys would encourage the poor to just keep requesting more hearings all the time from local welfare officials
so as to increase their caseload impossibly and just force them to give in, which is what they would do.
Or have sit-ins in these people's offices and they don't know what to do.
I'm just a local state bureaucrat. I don't know what to do about this.
I'll just approve your damn application. I'll just do whatever you want me to do.
Again and again and again, sleep-ins, sit-ins and so on.
So about, now just one little statistic and then I will more or less wrap up after one more example.
During the 1950s, the AFDC rolls rose by 100,000 families, or 17%.
During the 1960s, the increase was 107%, or 800,000 families,
with about three quarters of that increase occurring from 1965 to 1968 alone,
which was not a time of terrible economic conditions by any means.
The overall AFDC population increased from 4.3 million in 1965
to $10.8 million in 1974.
Well, the last thing I would mention is the evil Michael Harrington
wrote a book in 1962, I think.
It was called The Other America.
And you probably have to read it in school.
And he's arguing, Michael Harrington, I mentioned him
because this is one more example of a leftist attempting
to give some other explanation for the existence of the poor.
And he's saying that it's just structural things in the economy,
that it can't be helped.
So for instance, Harrington, by the way, when he died,
I think he died in 1989, was president of the Democratic
Socialists of America, and he helped to oversee the Great
Society programs.
He was the one who stirred the consciences of America.
He says, the other Americans are the victims of the very
inventions and machines that have produced a higher living
standard for the rest of the society.
As the society becomes more technological, more skilled,
Those who learn to work the machines, who get the expanding education, move up.
Those who miss out at the very start find themselves at a new disadvantage,
condemned to an economic underworld.
Now obviously, if you're going to say that poverty is being caused by the economic system,
there's no longer any distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
You know, some guy who just doesn't feel like going to work,
well, you know, one of the reasons he may not feel like it is because he's overcome by despair
at his situation. It's not because he's lazy, in some cases, because none of them are lazy.
It's that they just overcome by despair. So he even says that even if a person is unfit for work
because he's drunk or a drug addict, you know, don't be so quick to condemn this person
because this is not because of vice. It's at despair, at his powerlessness to advance in this economy
The Causality is reversed or something.
Poverty is something that gets inside people, transforms them, stamps them with a distinctive personality, he goes on to say.
So therefore, we have to have big programs, because there's no way to expect these people to advance.
and but beyond this there's no there's no way and it's not even desirable to
attempt to distinguish among different classes of the poor all of them are
equally worthy of these payments and of course over time the the result has been
what we have now now if you're interested in anything having to do with
welfare and you want all the statistics on it you know but how much has been
spent and what has happened what are the outcomes the book it's not that well
It's all written, but it doesn't matter. It gives you the data.
There's this Michael Tanner book, The End of Welfare.
At least it's got all the data in there.
It's written from a free market point of view.
And the other, so that would be one thing.
The other thing you might have some interest in,
it's not his best book by any means, but it makes a reasonable,
it's sort of useful, another Charles Murray book,
and that is his book In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government.
And I mention this because in here, he's got an interesting graph.
He plots, he looks at the growth or decline in private charitable giving.
And then he plots it against time.
And he's showing that during periods where the government is increasing its social welfare expenditures,
private charity declines.
Whereas during periods in which at least the impression is that the government is cutting back,
5.5 trillion dollars spent, nothing to show for it other than devastation and destruction,
This is what the left refers to as a great society.
Thank you very much, my friends.
All right, let's see.
I've got about six minutes.
If anybody has a question or a comment
or would like to add something to what I said.
To get back to your civil rights and connect with this,
the black people are vastly overrepresented on this.
Is there any particular reason for that?
Do you know anything about the tax rate right before the advent of your society?
Where do we get the money to fund all these things?
When the title of the thing is The Republican Warfare, what did they do to solidify the later Nixon War?
programs, but every time, like when Newt Gingrich was around, he was constantly being accused
of wanting to abolish Medicare. He's going to abolish Medicare, he's going to cut it significantly,
and he constantly said the opposite. He constantly said, I'm not going to do that. So my argument
always was, well look, no matter what you say, the press is going to say you're abolishing
Medicare, so you may as well do it. You may as well cut it back, because they're always
I think he's going to accuse you of cutting it back because they're dishonest in the way they talk about cuts and things.
Well, the Republican position basically has been to consolidate things.
So, for instance, we'll go back even further. Eisenhower came in and he was not a terribly ideological person.
And he, for instance, he added more people to the Social Security roles, I think self-employed people and some farmers and some other things
and some other things, because Truman had expanded the Social Security rules.
He increased the minimum wage.
He made some beginnings of efforts for some other welfare state programs.
And then, of course, Nixon, you know, Nixon really is in large part responsible for the beginnings of goals and timetables in affirmative action.
We shouldn't fail to give him the credit for that.
But in large part, they continued to fund these things at ever higher levels.
And also Nixon, to his everlasting shame, nearly established a guaranteed income program in
the United States, the Family Assistance Plan, that would guarantee everybody a minimum income,
which probably would have had some effects on people's labor patterns if that had passed.
And in his defense, the best he can say is, well, you know, I mean, I'm more interested
in Foreign Policy, and I sort of think that the domestic front can run itself.
But then, you know, and especially as you just look down, I mean, the budget doubled
under Reagan, and I mean, Reagan actually added a cabinet position of Veterans Affairs,
and you know, and so it goes.
And I remember in 1994, Dick Armey saying, you know, we're going to think about privatizing
the post office, and that'll be just the beginning.
okay and it was just the end too because it never happened they thought about it
or a couple of them and then nothing so it it sort of makes me think that people
say well our position is completely unrealistic we'll never get to it but you
know like for instance that like like Hans's position or Murray Rothbard's
position of a stateless society well it's completely unreasonable it'll never
happen but well I mean do you think the abolition of these programs is ever
going to happen I mean so I mean in a way the only way any of this is ever
is ever going to be cut back.
It's not going to be because some politician wins office.
That should be obvious by now.
It's not going to happen.
There's going to have to be some crisis that shakes the system
to its foundations.
And I would rather, the thing that
attracts me about the stateless position
is that when that crisis comes, it
would be nice to have a well-articulated alternative
view to begin to pick up the pieces with.
because I don't see with a world filled with CNN and you know where we see every day they'll pick out the one really hard case and everybody assumes that's the common example of what happens with welfare and it's just and there's just no way to go around explaining it but jeez you know I sometimes think by the way sometimes libertarians say technology is such a great thing it's going to be a wonderful avenue for liberty maybe it is in some some extremely restricted cases
But for crying out loud without television, I actually think we'd have a much easier time of it.
A constant propaganda device in everybody's home, training them to think the same way, and this is a device for liberty?
I mean, it could be used for liberty if, you know, if any of our people could get into the thing.
You know, other than John Stossel. How about somebody else?
Okay, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Do you often hear these statistics that although inner-cities, Blacks, Mexicans are overrepresented population-wise,
still 60% or something of social welfare goes to poor, rural whites, and first of all, is that true?
And second of all, if so, do we have the same morally hazardous effect that you see in the inner-city?
Yeah, good question. Yeah, it is true that most of the recipients are white, but again, you know, there are percentages and proportions here that are relevant.
Well, I mean, I don't know. In some environments, I think everywhere it has a certain deleterious effect, because the mere fact that it's an outside state agency means that it can't really have any kind of real personal oversight of individual cases.
And secondly, precisely because the word entitlement is used in all cases, I think that undermines an older, better view of these things.
But on the other hand, I do think that in some environments it just adds fuel to an already blazing fire because it increases a sense of victimization.
You know, I remember one time, I'll be honest with you, I'm going to make a confession I shouldn't make,
but I applied for some fellowship many years ago, some sort of Christian thing, and I didn't get it.
And I concluded from this, the reason was because I'm a Catholic, and these Protestants, you know,
they think I worship statues and all this nonsense, and I thought,
boy, those bastards, I can't believe they robbed me of this fellowship.
And I suddenly realized, you know, boy, if I do this even once, it must be so easy to go through life,
to go through life, thinking that every slight, everything is due to race or something like that.
And anything that encourages that, anything that encourages the idea that the society is inherently unjust,
and you therefore are entitled to a kind of an ongoing reparation payment, is going to be culturally very destructive.
Okay, I've already gone over my time. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.