Helping the Poor
This was extracted from Liberty Today, a national Libertarian Party publication.
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Helping the Poor
Libertarians want every able bodied person to be able to find work,
to be
self supporting. We also want the compassion all Americans share for
the
sick and disabled to mean something, to be effective.
The first step toward helping the poor and unemployed is to repeal
all the
laws and regulations which get in the way of people who want to
work.
Minimum wage laws cause massive unemployment among the
poorly
educated, unskilled young, particularly minorities. Economists point
out that
nearly one-third of black teenagers are unemployed primarily due to
the
minimum wage law. Federal labor laws prevent people from
producing
certain products in their homes. Zoning laws prevent people from
working at
home. In Houston, which does not have zoning, the greatest
opposition to
zoning comes from poor people who run small businesses from their
homes.
Licensing and other regulations prevent people from offering their
services
as taxi drivers, hair dressers, nurses and in hundreds of other lines
of work.
Day Care
Consider the mother who offers to care for the children of other
working
mothers in her home. She will run afoul of zoning, building, business,
health,
welfare, and who knows what other regulations. An effective,
voluntary
community solution will be shut down.
We must realize that the practical effect of all these laws regulating
business is to stifle small business and employment opportunity. If
we want
to help the poor go to work, we must be willing to repeal all such
laws.
Privatizing Welfare
Private charity works. Government welfare doesn't. In his 1984
book,
Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 to 1980, Charles Murray
reviewed all the major federal welfare programs and demonstrated
that the
groups they were supposed to help were worse off than before the
government got involved. The people who benefit most from those
programs
are the well educated middle class folks who run them. Most of the
welfare
tax dollars go to welfare workers. So they naturally have an
incentive to
keep expanding the government welfare plantation. People on
welfare are
given a similar incentive to stay on rather than go to work and lose
the
benefits.
Government welfare is demeaning and intrusive. Recipients lose
their right
of privacy and tend to become apathetic and dependent.
There are thousands of private charitable institutions and groups
like the
churches and temples, United Way, Red Cross and others which do a
much
better job helping those who need it. Their overhead costs averages a
low
10% of what they distribute to the poor. They tend to be much closer
to the
people and better understand the actual problems and how to solve
them.
Private charities are more concerned with helping people become
self
sufficient.
Saving Taxes
Government welfare costs hundreds of billions of tax dollars every
year.
Private charities raise over $100 billion per year in money and
services from
contributors who give voluntarily. If government were to get out of
the
charity business, taxes could be cut dramatically. That would help
the
economy and create jobs. Working people would have bigger
paychecks
every week. With the reforms suggested here, we would all be in a
better
position to exercise our compassion helping those we choose to help,
working
with other people in our own communities on real problems close to
home. It
wouldn't be a perfect solution to everyone's problems, but it would
clearly
improve on the mess the government has made.