Responsibility to the Poor

in reference to I'm talking about government's role in a free society you mentioned some of the market failures and I think that you may have just passed over one that is a most importance and that isn't poverty and impressing my question I'd like to refer to what President Kennedy said that if a free society cannot help the many who are poor it cannot save the few who are rich and to say that well we are a government of the people and when there is a large sector of the people who are hurting perhaps it is the responsibility of the this government of the people to help out my question is my question is is regarding how free are the poor how free are the unemployed and how free are those people who are disadvantaged and so in reference to that what is government's role sure first of all I'm glad to see one vote for the poor first of all the government doesn't have any responsibility people have responsibility this building doesn't have responsibility you and I have responsibility people have responsibility second the question is how can we as people exercise our responsibility toward our fellow man most effectively that's the problem so far as poverty is concerned there is never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system in the free market the period in in a period in which you had the greatest improvement in the lot of the ordinary man was a period of the 19th and early 20th century those of us in our test room are the heirs of that we benefited from the way in which our parents and our grandparents were able to come here and by virtue of the freedom that was offered to them were able to make a better life for themselves in our them and us but next if you look at the real problems of poverty and denial of freedom to people in this country almost every single one of them is a result of government action and would be eliminated if you eliminated the bad government failures let me be precise and specific why do we have so high an unemployment rate among black teenagers to disgrace and a scandal why do we have so high an unemployment rate first of all because we give them lousy schooling through governmental schools which make them unqualified to hold decent jobs and second of all we require employers to discriminate against them by not hiring them unless they have unless their productivity is enough to justify a minimum wage the minimum wage rate is the most anti-negro law on the books and it's an anti Negro law because it precisely having first not getting not enabled the young blacks to have a decent schooling so that they can they can have productivity we next deny them the honor to job training that they might get if you can induce employers by a low by being able to hire them for relatively low wages to give them on-the-job training that would make them qualify for a higher payment and higher productivity in the third place we have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people we have induced people to come under control of welfare we I'm not blaming the people don't misunderstand me it's our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill shape the monster as the whole set of welfare programs we have under which we encourage people the families to break up we encourage people to move from one part of the country and come to another under which we have in effect made many people poor and yet when all this is said and have I ever been where I have sir of course of course more so than most of the people in this room how many of you have worked a 12-hour day and gotten paid 78 cents but let me go back to the because but you know that's all irrelevant is there one of you who is going to say that you don't want a doctor to treat you for cancer unless he himself is head cancer I could go down the line but when all is said and done while there are people in this country who are worse often other people by and large the weather the even the poorest people in this country are relatively well-off compared to the conditions in many other countries in the world what we take is our standard of poverty what we take is our standard of poverty is above the average income of all of the people in the Soviet Union let alone of the people in India or China and other countries now that doesn't mean we should be satisfied with it we are a wealthier country and we've been more productive and we should set higher standards by ourselves but by the same token we ought to have a sense of proportion and we ought to recognize both the source and the problem you

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Keywords: Welfare, Egalitarianism, Oppression, Altruism, Coercion, Capitalism, Capitalist, Socialism, Socialist, Marx, Marxist, Marxism, Fabian, Mercantilism, Democracy, Democratic, Liberal, Liberalism, Libertarian, Libertarianism, Keynes, Monetarism, Monetarist, Professor, Chicago, Economy, Economics, Economist, Free, to, Choose, Nobel, Prize, Laissez-faire, Invisible, Hand, Adam, Smith, Philosophy, Market, Government, Spending

Id: Rls8H6MktrA

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2009