Economic Freedom is Poverty’s Only Remedy
2011-10-15 · Guest: Hadley Heath (Independent Women’s Forum) · 50:13
Poverty in America and the War on Poverty
Bob Zadek and guest Hadley Heath examine the political and economic definitions of poverty in the United States, arguing that the “War on Poverty” has fostered a cycle of government dependency. They contrast American “relative poverty” with the extreme material deprivation seen in places like India, suggesting that redistributionist policies often serve as political tools rather than genuine solutions.
Topics: Poverty, War on Poverty, Income Redistribution, Dependency, Economic Freedom, Independent Women’s Forum, Walter Williams Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Hadley Heath (Guest)
Defining Poverty and the War on Poverty [00:01]
Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. We are here every Sunday at noon on 910 AM, Fox News Radio. Thanks so much for listening. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. 800-345-5639 is the way to reach us anywhere in the world. We welcome your calls.
Well, could you tell by the introductory song what our topic is today? Of course you can. It is poverty in America. Poverty is a subject which is so misunderstood, emotionally charged, and loaded, and it provides the political cover for so much that is really, really bad about our government today. It is the perfect political cover. We see it all over the papers, all over the media: poverty, poverty, poverty; poor, poor, poor.
Nobody who uses the concept or the words “poor” or “poverty” takes the trouble to even define what it means to be poor. What does poor mean? How do you qualify as being poor so that you benefit from government largesse? Poverty, to the extent that it is definable, is an amazing economic concept because if you study the history of poverty in America, you learn that the primary cause of poverty in America is—snare drum, please—it is the War on Poverty.
We had no poverty in America to speak of until we had a War on Poverty. Then the War on Poverty not only didn’t cure poverty, it created it. So now we have poverty, which is government-created, with the solution being more government programs. And the government programs bring in another related concept, which will really get my dander up, which is income redistribution.
The Obama administration, of course, is hell-bent on redistributing income, taking income from the quote “1%” to give it to all of the others. But it is poverty, or the alleged poverty, which provides the political cover to allow politicians to promote income redistribution. Now, Walter Williams is a very well-known columnist and economics professor. Walter Williams explains very simply the concept of income redistribution. Tim, what does Walter Williams have to say about income redistribution?
Walter Williams (Clip): Whenever you hear somebody talking about redistribution of income—you know, in terms of to help the poor, to help the elderly, to help failing businesses—when you think of redistribution of income, that’s what a thief does. He walks up to you with a gun in his hand and he says, “Give me your money.” He’s going to redistribute your income. There is income redistribution, except we have the government being the redistributor of income.
Material Deprivation vs. Relative Poverty [04:45]
Bob Zadek: To help me sort out this issue of poverty in America—the cause, the cure, and does it even exist?—I’m delighted to welcome Hadley Heath. Hadley Heath is a senior policy analyst with the Independent Women’s Forum. Hadley has become an expert in healthcare, entitlements—how depressing is that?—economics, and fiscal policy. She blogs and writes extensively and attends many, many conferences. A word about the Independent Women’s Forum: it is an organization which supports free markets, limited government, and individual responsibility. Hadley, welcome so much to the show.
Hadley Heath: Hi, thanks for having me.
Bob Zadek: Hadley, poverty in America. Political cover for income redistribution. What is poverty and who is poor?
Hadley Heath: Right. These are great questions. Poverty is such a huge topic. It’s a political one and it’s a cultural one. Americans have a certain perception of what it means to be poor. And I would argue that poverty in the United States, in general—or at least the formula that we take to determine exactly what that means to be at the federal poverty line—is different from material deprivation, or it’s different from the other kinds of poverty that we see elsewhere in the world.
I had the opportunity to travel in 2007; I spent a couple months in Calcutta, India, and I saw poverty there like I’ve never seen in my life.
Bob Zadek: Calcutta knows how to do poverty, don’t they?
Hadley Heath: I mean, I think it’s probably one of the worst places in the world in terms of homelessness and people who are just in dire need. I’ve never seen so many ribs sticking out of people before. So, I think we have to first of all recognize that the scale on which we measure poverty is sort of relative.
In the United States, certainly we have haves and have-nots. We have billionaires and millionaires. We have people who are very wealthy and we have people who don’t have access to all kinds of the new best gadgets and may not even have access to some of the basics at times. But generally speaking, it’s very rare in the United States that someone faces hunger or material deprivation in some way that is harmful to them.
So when we talk about this topic, absolutely, we should strive for much more than adequacy. We should strive for much more than having the basics. We are a very wealthy country; we’ve been very blessed. I think it’s good for us to encourage our fellow Americans to create wealth and that we should all strive for the best and most prosperous lives that we can have. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that government should step in and, like you said, redistribute wealth.
Any other kind of thief that might point a gun at someone and take their money—society doesn’t smile on that and society would say that’s wrong. But when the government does something—I mean, the government’s one of the most powerful actors because we’ve all participated. We have a democratic system; we’ve all voted and our representatives are making decisions about how to use tax money. This collective decision-making process makes it very hard to deal with a problem like poverty where Americans have different values and have different beliefs on what constitutes a social safety net and where do we draw the line on creating so-called equality among the different amounts of wealth that Americans have.
Dependency and the Equality of Result [09:15]
Bob Zadek: Well, of course it’s not and should not be the goal of any government to cause income equality. The controversy is over—and the economists describe it as—equality in result or equality in opportunity. Americans should all have equal opportunity. There should be no legal bars denying you access to education, access to college, or access to government contracts. But you cannot promote equality of result. The results will be dependent upon the skill and luck of the collective players in America, and it is not the government’s job to do anything to undo that. People should be simply given the opportunity to prosper to the extent of their ability, not to the extent of somebody else’s ability.
What we are doing in this country—and Hadley, I know you speak a lot about this—is that in the poverty programs, we tend to create this dependency. It’s as if you’re raising a child, and the child is never permitted to leave the household and is dependent upon parents until the child dies. It’s the dependency that harms equality of opportunity. Now, I know you’ve spoken a lot about equality of opportunity and dependency, Hadley. I’d like you, if you would, to tell us what you have learned and what your experience has been as to how this country has built this sick dependency, which in effect acts as a bar so people cannot achieve their true potential.
Poverty in America: is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is it existent or non-existent? To help me with this conversation, I’m joined by Hadley Heath of the Independent Women’s Forum. Hadley has spent a lot of her life thinking about, learning about, and worrying about this issue. Hadley, we talked about how the government, having created this artificial perhaps need for government handouts, then creates a dependency. And of course, if people are dependent upon government, they become surefire voters for the government doing the handing out.
The War on Poverty and the Dependency Trap [11:27]
Bob Zadek: So government has, I think, Hadley, created the dependency, and having created the dependency, they then dispense the cure in little bits, keeping the population—or the needier population—quite dependent upon government. Dependency, Hadley? Hadley? Did we lose Hadley? We’ll get her back.
The government, starting from the 1965 War on Poverty, created a system of programs that built profound dependency so that individuals were not given any of the tools they needed to work themselves out of poverty, but rather remained dependent on a government handout. And they could not work themselves out. Well, they became surefire voters for the government handing out the power that… I’m told Hadley is back on the line. Hadley, you with us?
Hadley Heath: Hi, yes, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened. But as I was saying, people respond to incentives, and this is true of the very wealthy in our society. This is also true of the poorest in our society. When there is choice before someone, then they have the ability, the capability to respond to incentives. They know if they make Choice A, they know that one consequence will happen, and if they make Choice B, a different consequence will happen.
And you mentioned earlier, is poverty growing or shrinking? Well, many fiscal conservatives and fiscal liberals alike would agree that part of our Constitution says to protect the General Welfare, and there should be some sort of safety net for people in society who have absolutely no means of providing for themselves. But in the last couple of years, poverty rates—that is, the number of people who qualify as poor according to the federal poverty line—has been growing. And now nearly 15% of the American population qualifies as impoverished. That’s about 46.2 million Americans.
So obviously, this is of concern. And there are a few things I think in recent years that have been driving poverty rates up. One of those things is that we have been in an economic recession, or at least a slowdown post-recession, and fears about a double-dip have created a very uncertain economy, one that’s slow to add jobs, and they’ve experienced high unemployment.
But also, just over the past few decades, we see divorce rates have been on the rise, and also the number of out-of-wedlock children, which create very big burdens for people who didn’t plan for these situations in their life, and when they get there aren’t capable of coping with the consequences. So you know, all these things matter, but I also agree that when the War on Poverty started in the late 1960s, early 1970s, the social safety net that government is there to provide for the most helpless and the most needy in society grew to much more than a social safety net and became something—people use the term “hammock” a lot because it’s too… to use with “safety net.”
But I do think, whatever you want to call it, it has made it so that people’s incentive structure is different. They no longer have a choice between going to work and making money and staying at home and facing hardship. Sometimes now the choice is between going to work and making money or accepting social assistance from the federal government. And so this creates a kind of dependency that’s not healthy, and it’s actually, in my mind, a very low view of poor Americans to continue to grant more and more spending to this area and expect that they are not capable of caring for themselves.
I’d ask liberals who want to spend more money on big government means-tested welfare programming: what is it that makes wealthy Americans so much better than their poor compatriots that they are capable of doing something that other people are not? In certain situations, there’s a clear answer. Some people are disabled, some people are elderly widows or orphans who really are experiencing dire need, but in other cases they’re able-bodied Americans who aren’t pulling their own weight and are responding to a set of incentives that the federal government has created.
And I would add that the welfare state, which is in large part a government bureaucracy, takes a lot of money to run. It takes a lot of money that when we pour millions and billions of dollars even into these federal welfare programs, every bureaucrat that we hire to administer the program costs even more money. So we’re doubling our costs by putting all this money through a pipeline of more and more programs for the government.
Bob Zadek: Those bureaucrats—Walter Williams calls those bureaucrats “poverty pimps”—those are the people who live off the poverty program, and statistically, economically, they are the primary beneficiaries of the poverty program.
Charity vs. State Coercion [18:45]
Bob Zadek: I think, Hadley, the distinction—looking at poverty and the needy and trying to understand how a libertarian would view the problem differently than a Democrat or even, I dare say, a Republican—one has to make the distinction between two important concepts: society and government.
And here’s the difference. I will stipulate, as a libertarian, that every human being has a profound and deep moral responsibility to care for others who are less fortunate. That is a moral duty that, to me, you are somewhat less of a human if you are not driven by that motivation. And I like to think that I am—I hope that I am—that I hold myself to that standard. However, I want to do that on my terms at the level that I want.
And the difference is the duty owed to the less fortunate is a duty owed by one human to another. When government does it, when government forces me at the point of a gun to transfer some of my money to somebody that the government has determined to be more in need of my money than me, I find that to be totally offensive. I agree in the result; however, the method is profoundly different. One is charity and generosity, and evokes every good feeling I could find in my body when I write a check or make a donation. When I pay taxes to support programs, I feel powerless. I feel the total opposite.
So the difference is not “should there be wealth transfers,” but they should be voluntary, based upon the respective generosity of every individual acting alone. Isn’t that the primary difference, Hadley?
Hadley Heath: Oh, absolutely, I agree with you. I believe a young man in the 1970s asked Milton Friedman the question, you know, “What responsibility does government have to the poor?” And Friedman’s response was, “Government doesn’t have responsibility; we have responsibility. This building doesn’t have responsibility; people have responsibilities.”
And yes, we do have, I believe, responsibility to our neighbor to help those in need. I would argue that the confusion between actual charity and the welfare state has led to more bad political decisions in terms of dealing with poverty and confusing more of the electorate, I believe, in ter—in terms of what policies they endorse in public opinion polls. And I think it’s a distinction that’s very important to make.
I think most Americans would agree that yes, we have a responsibility to help our neighbor in need. No one wants to see someone starve. No one wants to watch someone experience hardship. But it is a very different thing to force others to give money. Warren Buffett wants to pay higher taxes, but that’s not all he wants. If he wants the law to change, he wants everyone who’s in—who’s similarly situated to pay higher taxes. If you’re arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy, that is more wealth redistribution, then you’re not just asking if you yourself can make a more generous contribution to the government. You’re actually saying, “I think those guys should pay more,” and you want the government to be enforcing that kind of policy.
Warren Buffett, of course… there’s so much hypocrisy in what has been called the Buffett Rule or the Buffett tax or the Buffett tax rate. And I often find myself having conversations with friends of mine on the left. Yes, I have friends on the left who I love dearly, especially when we talk politics. And when I have conversations, my friends on the left, in making the best case possible for helping the less fortunate, they say we should pay more taxes. And of course, the comment we all have heard is, “Well, folks on the left, if you want to pay more taxes, pay more taxes.”
Bob Zadek: And the real question is to the folks on the left: why do you on the left get to set my tax rate? Why can’t I set your tax rate? What gives people on the left the special power to set tax rates? Everybody, to the extent that money is needed to finance pure governmental functions, there’s no dispute. Defense, protection of—of—pro—of property rights, there’s no dispute. But for the other stuff, the income redistribution, it just—it’s in a libertarian sense inappropriate for one group of people, even though they may be in the majority.
Bob Zadek: The founders, as we know, hated majority rule. They hated it and feared it. So just because the majority says, “Zadek and Heath, transfer some of your money,” the fact that the majority wants it does not make it right. The founders knew that. I’m speaking with Hadley Heath. We are talking about poverty in America. Is there poverty or not? You will learn when we come back. There is not poverty in America. And we’ll learn from Milton Friedman’s wisdom in 90 short seconds.
Redefining Poverty as a Political Tool [22:27]
Bob Zadek: I’m joined by Hadley Heath. Hadley is a senior policy analyst with the Independent Women’s Forum. The topic is poverty in America. Now, the importance, or one of the important concepts to bear in mind, is poverty is really important to liberal Democratic administrations because it provides the political cover for so many programs that the Democrats dearly love. If you think about it, if there were no poverty, the justification for many, many programs would simply disappear. And you would have bureaucrats who would come to work one day and say, “Oh my God, oh my God, there’s no more poverty. I’m out of work. Close up the store.” It would be a nightmare for many in Washington, D.C.
So, and the problem is, therefore, the goal of government is to make sure we always have enough poverty to justify the programs. Well, Obama—no jerk when it comes to this stuff—realized this. And the problem was, under many existing measures of poverty, poverty was not increasing fast enough. So last year, Obama put together a task force to redefine poverty, not in terms of absolute dollars—that is, how many steak dinners you can buy in the course of a month or whatever. That’s an absolute measure of poverty. But rather, the Obama administration, being very clever politically, is working on a definition of poverty which will define it in relative terms, which means you are poor if you don’t get to buy as many steak dinners as somebody else in a higher economic bracket.
Now, the genius of that is there will always be poor people. Obama talks about millionaires and billionaires. If the entire country were millionaires and billionaires, well, the millionaires would be poor under the Obama definition because they don’t have the same purchasing power as the billionaires.
Hadley Heath: So this is so important to see how confusing this can be for Americans who don’t specialize in public policy. I work in public policy, so I spend a lot of time tracking this stuff, following it, looking at not only the philosophical arguments against big government welfare spending, but also the practical—what happens. The proof is in the pudding that these government programs tend to be more harmful than they are helpful.
And I think particularly we should be concerned with a group of voters, a voting bloc—I think that’s young voters—who were hugely in support of President Obama because it seemed that they had a false choice. And the false choice is you either favor big government welfare state assistance to poor people, or you don’t care about poor people. You must be unloving, you must not have a heart, you must not have a solution for the problem of poverty. And I think that false choice drives a lot of young voters to the left politically, especially when it comes to fiscal issues and this problem of poverty.
But as they get older, I think voters tend to not only experience wealth redistribution firsthand as they get their first paychecks and see what a bite taxes take out of that earned money, but they also learn philosophically that big government is not—it’s not just an actor that has no effect on poverty, and it’s certainly not the solution, but it’s a great part of the problem. It’s actually making the patient sicker. You know, if poverty is a sickness, I think what the left attempts to do by handing out paychecks and food stamps often is a treatment for the sickness. And this treatment is actually indeed making the problem worse.
Whereas many of the libertarian solutions to ending poverty, ending mass poverty, are indeed a cure for that kind of sickness and would move people—would change poor people into self-sufficient people, maybe not make them billionaires tomorrow, but it would certainly make them able to stand on their own two feet. And that not only gives people the pride of working for their own money, but it gives them the freedom to spend their money how they choose. They’re no longer dependent; they no longer have to spend their food stamps or whatever credits or subsidies they might get on the stipulations of what government says how to spend their money, but they’re free. They live in a more free society.
So I would make that point, and I’d often make the point that when we talk about poverty, we must talk about what is wealth. Wealth is not just the number of dollars that you have, especially now that we’re not on the gold standard. Dollars are just a measurement, and really what we should care about for the poor in our country and in so many others where people are truly suffering. And when they don’t make ends meet, it means, you know, sometimes even death for people in some of the most harmful situations in the world where they truly are oppressed and they truly are in need.
The thing about wealth is that it changes your standard of living, it raises your quality of life, it makes you healthier. It makes you able to afford, you know, better food and a more healthy lifestyle and allows you to be closer to the people you love. You can buy a cell phone and talk to people and this is, you know, all these technological developments, all the things that we’ve done to save labor and save time, they’ve made our lives more enjoyable and they’ve made our lives more rich. And I mean richness in a sense that can’t be measured by money.
So I think when we talk about poverty we should talk about wealth and we want people at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale to be wealthier. We do; we want that for our neighbors. We want them to participate in earning their own wages and earning their own salary to the extent that they can. But we shouldn’t be so focused on everyone having the same amount of wealth as people at the top of our socioeconomic scale become millionaires and become billionaires and might have wealth that we think is way too much or out of control—and we’re all welcome to have those opinions—people at the bottom often benefit because even if you can’t have the iPhone for tomorrow, eventually it’s going to be available to more people who aren’t the top one or ten percent in our country. But innovation and some of the free market policies that our country has pursued in the past are the reason why we’re so wealthy today.
The Government’s “Cure” for Poverty [28:15]
Bob Zadek: And to show you—just to show you in stark contrast how vested Democrats and liberals are in having poverty, and to show you how much of government is driven and has as a raison d’être the existence of poverty in America, I’m going to play a clip from Representative Jim McDermott. Representative McDermott is a very liberal representative. And he gave a speech about a month ago about poverty in America and what the government can do and should do to fix it.
And the challenge I throw out to my audience is I’m going to play this clip from McDermott. I defy anybody to count and tell me how many discrete government programs Representative McDermott mentions in the course of maybe a minute and a quarter as to his cure for poverty. And then I’m going to play a delightful short clip from Milton Friedman to show you the other view of government’s solution for poverty. Tim, the McDermott clip.
Rep. Jim McDermott: I need to appreciate the anti-poverty benefits of the Affordable Care Act, of Democrats’ recent expansion of Pell Grants, and our financial reform legislation, all three of which the Republicans have begun to undermine as fast as they can. We need to recognize the impact of the Recovery Act. It’s estimated it kept more than four and a half million people out of poverty in 2009 through the refundable tax provisions, the UI extensions, and the increased food stamps. We need to defend and strengthen Social Security, especially given the disappearance of pensions. We need also to further reform child support through passing payments directly to families.
Government Programs vs. Milton Friedman [33:16]
Jim McDermott (Clip): We need further reform of the child welfare system, building on the 2008 legislation I helped pass and the waiver legislation I’ve just introduced. We need to have a Title IV-E waiver so states can do some of the things in terms of kinship care and other things that we passed in the Fostering Connections Act.
Bob Zadek: Oh my God, my head is spinning. There must have been 35 government programs—that is Representative McDermott’s solution to poverty in America. For a different view, the libertarian view of poverty in America, I with great happiness turn to Milton Friedman. Tim, the Milton Friedman clip, please.
Milton Friedman (Clip): Most residual hard cases of poverty today are the result, again, of a failure of government. Why do we have a black teenage unemployment rate in the 30 to 40 percent range? Because of two failures of government. One, a failure to provide decent schooling, which is a governmental responsibility—has been, whether it should be or not, it has been. And second, because of a minimum wage rate, which prevents those kids who haven’t had decent schooling from getting jobs at low pay at which they can earn the skills on the jobs that would enable them to rise to higher pay. If you look into the sources of poverty, you will find a very large part of them are derived from bad—what I regard as wrong-headed—government policies.
Bob Zadek: Okay, folks, that summarizes it. Who are you going to believe? Representative McDermott with 35 government programs that need to be funded and enacted and preserved to get rid of poverty, or Milton Friedman who says, give people a good education and reduce the minimum wage, which prevents people from getting jobs. Which strikes you as being a more sensible approach? Is government the problem or the solution? You have just heard both sides; you decide which makes more sense.
Women and the Independent Women’s Forum [35:45]
Bob Zadek: Now, Hadley, when you speak to—I guess your audience is often women—that’s the focus of the Independent Women’s Forum. What do they understand to be the problem with or the cause of poverty? And how receptive are they to your message? Is Hadley there?
Hadley Heath: Women are another big group of people that big government often points to and says, “We need to protect this group of people.” We need to protect women, we need to protect the poor, we need to protect racial minorities, we need to protect all these groups of people. And when they pass legislation in the name of protecting these groups of people, they actually end up doing more harm than helping, because on a piece of legislation’s face is an intended purpose, but the actual outcome of a law can be very different from its intended purpose. And these unintended consequences that end up hurting these groups are actually doing more to hold them back in society rather than free them and allow them to achieve more.
Bob Zadek: Now, how receptive are they to your message and what is their state of mind when you address various women’s groups? And what is their state of mind after you’ve taken the last question?
Hadley Heath: Sure. Well, I think that most women in the United States can recognize that big government is something that’s—you know, I think most people agree that government has important roles and does good things, and they appreciate having nice roads and they wish public schools were better, and they have all these desires for what they believe is right for government to do. But I think everyone that I’ve spoken with generally, even if they are, you know, some of my friends who are also more liberal, will say that the federal government today is doing too much.
Obviously, we look at the national debt and we see that we’ve been overreaching, especially in terms of spending, to do things that were never one of the founders’ intents for government to do. And it’s getting us in more and more trouble because not only can government not perform all of these roles efficiently, but it’s creating such a large burden for American citizens in terms of the uncertainty of the soundness of our money or the future of our tax code or how we’re going to pay off this national debt.
But it’s absolutely creating a shrinking factor in terms of personal liberties. Every time the government mandates how our money’s being spent or how—especially when they tell us that we have to buy a private product like health insurance—I mean, we’re seeing private property and individual liberties being assaulted, and I think Americans generally across the political spectrum recognize that and that worries them. So I expect that we’ll see some change in the political landscape here in Washington soon.
But like I said, most women, unless they are fully devoted to the feminist myth that all women are victims and need big government to come rescue them, most women I think recognize that that’s not the case anymore—that women are capable of providing for themselves, and they like the idea of individual responsibility and limited government. So I’m looking forward to the next elections and seeing what happens.
Bob Zadek: When we come back, we’ll talk about income inequality. Is that incompatible with a free society? This is Bob Zadek.
Economic Justice and Occupy Wall Street [41:10]
Bob Zadek: Poverty in America. Does it exist? And the corollary—and this phrase is all over the news, compliments of the Occupy Wall Street crowd—and the phrase we hear every evening on the news is “economic justice.” Economic justice. What in God’s name does that even mean? To discuss topics such as economic justice and poverty in America, I’m delighted to welcome back Hadley Heath from the Independent Women’s Forum.
Now, Hadley, you probably have been taking a glance at the evening news and you have observed the Occupy Wall Street crowd complaining, among other things, about the absence of or the lack of sufficient economic justice. Now, I actually spent yesterday poking around as I prepared for the show trying to figure out what in God’s name economic justice was all about. Now, maybe Hadley, you have hung around or walked past the “Occupy whatever” during the course of your travels in the last couple of weeks. Can you help out at all as to what economic justice means? Is it nothing other than take from the rich and give to the poor? Is that what economic justice means? I can’t sort this one out.
Hadley Heath: I think that’s essentially what it means. I’ve heard it called social justice as well. But there’s this movement, and we see a lot of it in the Occupy Wall Street protests, for fairness. And it’s fairness in the eyes of the protesters that doesn’t exist in society today, doesn’t exist in our law today, and that public policy must be changed in order to affect this kind of fairness.
And I think most reasonable people would recognize that when you start a foot race, if you start on the same starting line, that that’s fair. And then you might have a finish line and you might have faster runners that finish before the slower runners. And that’s fair because they all started at the same place. And this is, you know, I’m describing the difference between equal opportunities and equal results.
Equal results—when we strive to have everybody have the same amount of wealth or everybody gets the same results no matter how much work they put in or no matter what choices they make—that is really unfair. And that is the opposite of justice. That is taking from people who have sacrificed and who have made difficult choices, who have saved and who, you know, have experienced the work or the choices that they’ve made to get to that point.
You know, a lot of the people who are in the middle class today or upper middle class today may not have ever experienced true poverty. I imagine a lot of the Occupy Wall Street protesters have never experienced dire poverty. But I know that much of what I have today—I look around my apartment and I look at the car that I get to drive and the many amenities that come with my life—and while I think I’ve always worked hard, I also recognize that my parents helped me a lot and they worked very hard to sacrifice and be the kind of parents that were supportive.
And before them, my grandparents’ generation—you know, my grandfather tells me all the time how he was the youngest of eight children who always wore hand-me-down clothes, worked on a farm, had a hard time. You know, the kind of poverty that he lived in is comparable or worse than what we call the federal poverty line today. And what’s interesting, I’ve definitely seen—I’m sorry.
Economic Freedom and the Concept of Fairness [43:49]
Bob Zadek: Wealth in wealth has been increasing in this country, and it’s been increasing for people, um, in, in various socioeconomic levels. Now, how comfortable you are or aren’t with this concept of inequality—you know, some people will finish the race faster, some people will earn more money, some people have more wealth. Uh, people may be not comfortable with that. Uh, I’m comfortable with it because I think that, uh, when people have more personal choices and, and the ability to respond to incentives, we all have more economic freedom; we all have more wealth.
But some people would disagree and say it’s more important that we’re all equal than we’re all prosperous. It seems to me that if we are so obsessed with fairness—the word you used and a word that I hate—with fairness and equality, it seems to me, applying these concepts to something like the National Basketball Association, shouldn’t we require that any basketball player who’s taller than six foot seven must play the sport in wingtip shoes and a jacket and tie so that he is, uh, leveling the playing field vis-a-vis the shorter and slower players?
I mean, what is this equality all about? All we need to have is you’re born, and if you’re lucky enough to be tall, you get the rewards. You get to play in the NBA if you’re tall and agile and skillful, and if you are dedicated to hard work. But in the concept on poverty, in the discussion of poverty, there isn’t much conversation, and this is what’s missing. And this is what gets me as a libertarian. I don’t pretend to speak for others, but what gets me in such a dither is that there is no discussion when you talk about somebody who is poor—whatever that means—as to whether they are poor because of their own failings, shortcomings, weaknesses, or bad behavior, or whether they are poor because of something beyond their control.
In America, we don’t make that distinction. Now, and that’s because government programs simply cannot do that. In the private sector, we can. And if charity, if income distribution were done on a purely voluntary basis, and if I were allowed to pick and choose who is the recipient of my money that I choose to transfer, I would be darn sure that the recipients are those people that I considered to be worthy.
Now, does that make me less charitable, less caring as a libertarian than folks who are on the left? Hardly. What’s wrong with that? That is every bit as charitable and as caring as a government-enforced program that requires me to give my money pro-rata to those people who I vehemently wish did not get my money because I have decided they don’t deserve it.
Hadley Heath: The concept of deserving it, the concept of worthiness. I think, I think, I, I think the message used to be: if you see somebody who’s better off than you and you envy their position in life, you wish you were wealthier, you wish you had what they had, uh, then maybe you ought to evaluate the choices that person made or, um, or, or work harder yourself and try to reach that point.
But I think when people see the government as a mechanism to take that person’s will and give it to the other people who, who haven’t made those same kind of choices or, or the decision to, to save or, or be wise about how they spend their own money, then when the government becomes a mechanism to, to become a bully to, to people and take their money away, that’s really dangerous.
Bob Zadek: And I, I, I want to make a couple more points, and I know we’re gonna wrap up. We have a minute and a half. Go ahead, Hadley.
Hadley Heath: Okay. Well, there are many people—uh, libertarians, conservatives, and liberals, I think—who are, who have good intentions in terms of helping the poor. And, uh, I aspire to be one of them. I think you probably are too. We, we give money away, we do acts of service in our private lives, and, and we really do wish the best for our fellow Americans.
We want America to be a place where everyone can be prosperous. We believe in the American dream and social mobility—people moving up and improving their own life situations, and accepting help from a neighbor occasionally when, when that becomes necessary, and, and having the blessing of being able to give to others. I think that that’s an incredible blessing that we can experience.
But all this that is motivated by love for our fellow man—these are, this, this is great, and I, I am so happy that we have this, uh, among Americans of various political backgrounds. But we have to wisely consider the unintended consequences of some government programs and look at the results. Look at what’s really happening.
And when we look at the results, I think we’ll see that the libertarian approach, or the smaller, more limited approach from government and the bigger approach from the private sector and society rather than government, is going to have a better outcome. We have to strive for the best possible outcome. So that’s one of the reasons I support scaling back the welfare state, is because I do care about improving the situations, uh, of, of poor Americans.
Finally, I’ll point people to the Independent Women’s Forum. That’s who I work for. We’re a group in Washington, D.C., and we can be found online at www.iwf.org. And to my libertarian friends: do not cede the high ground of caring about our fellow man to the left. Preserve it and keep it. It is ours. We have both the motivation and the right solution. Thanks so much for listening.
Bob Zadek: Bob Zadek, I’ll be back next Sunday at noon. Thanks so much for listening. Noise is good too.