The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

By Jesse Phillips

Analyst John Stossel recently interviewed economist Walter Williams (George Mason University, Department of Economics). Describing the colossal failure of the American welfare state, Williams provided this synopsis:

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Nobody should question the good intentions of a government that seeks to provide for the poor. It is perfectly natural to see someone living at a lower standard and to want to do something about it. Many people, however, are trapped in a delusional anticipation that Uncle Sam, the Great Benefactor, will sweep in as Robin Hood to rob the rich and feed the poor. Who needs Merry Men when you have the IRS to do the plundering?

I know what you’re thinking. “Who are you, Mr. Phillips, the Sherriff of Nottingham? Robin Hood was the good guy!”

My only point is that what works in Sherwood Forest, according to Williams, creates “hell” in real life.

I’m no libertarian, but I love John Stossel. This interview is nothing short of a must watch for anyone who wonders what the real problem with America is, socially and economically.

I’m so confident in this that I’m going to do something unconventional. I’m issuing a command to all my readers to stop reading my article, and watch the videos linked below.

The State Against Blacks
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Done watching? Okay, here’s some analysis:

Over the course of the interview, Williams’ point absolutely cuts at the heart of everything that is misguided about our government today: The so-called “War on Poverty” has deepened poverty and enslaved black people.

“There’s a huge segment of the black population for whom upward mobility is elusive,” Williams said, “and it’s because of the welfare state—because of government.”

Before anyone accuses me as being a racist (because that’s liberals favorite thing to call conservatives to cover up the destruction their own policies have done to minorities), just keep in mind that Walter Williams is a black man. I’m just telling you what he says, since he knows much more about this than I ever will, both experientially and academically.

He has lived the big-government horrors that he describes. Much of his critique centers around two misguided government agendas, two lanes on this road to hell our government’s good intentions have paved:

A. Minimum wage: minimum wage is a good intention because it’s meant to keep employers from underpaying workers. It’s hell because it keeps people unemployed, out of the job market, unable to develop a marketable skill and dependent on government handouts.

Let me make it very simple. Some types of labor is worth $5 an hour to an employer. Yet Uncle Sam says, “You’ve got to pay everyone more than $7 an hour”

Under these circumstances, one of two things happens: an employee capable of $5 an hour work ends up making $0 an hour, or a company overspends $2 every hour, reducing their profitability and therefore their ability to provide better services and more jobs.

Brilliant, Uncle Sammy, just brilliant.

What you might find alarming, as I did, is that the minimum wage has been a tactic used by racists, and not just here in America.

“White racist unions in South Africa that would never have a black as a member were the major supporters of minimum wage laws,” Williams notes. ”Their stated purpose was to protect white workers from having to compete with low-skill, low-wage black workers. In the United States we found some of the same reasoning for support of a super minimum-wage law,” the Davis-Bacon Act.

It should be no surprise that the Davis-Bacon Act was sponsored by James J. Davis, a racist steel union guy who happened to believe in eugenics and, in his perverted worldview, sponsored the law to cleanse the workforce of cheap-labor minorities.

B. Affirmative action: affirmative action is a good intention because it’s meant to keep people from being overlooked for promotion and opportunity simply because of the color of their skin. It’s hell, on the other hand, because it’s a disincentive to productivity, condescending and patronizing of the protected class and punishes the equally capable members of the non-protected class.

Affirmative action basically tells black people, “You’re not good enough to make it in this world on your own. You need the government’s help.” How racist is that? If a conservative said that, he’d be crucified. A liberal implies the same thing with a wink, a nod and a promise of government help, and he’s applauded.

It’s one thing to ensure that people have an equal opportunity to succeed. It’s quite another thing to ensure equal success. Our society’s increasing inability to distinguish opportunity as different than success—potential as different than its realization through diligent work—is one of the great problems that threaten the very fabric of our society.

One of most startling connections Williams makes is between the Welfare state and the black family. I have never been a fan of government intrusion into our lives, but neither had I seen it in such dark terms before.

“The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done,” Williams says. “Break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on … 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.”

Without Welfare, he contends, “People would decide, ‘I’m going to go out and get a job, I’m going to live more responsibly.’” Of course, this would lead to the sort of responsible living that has allowed strong families to be built for generations. Today, however, the government has replaced the father as the source of provision, and it is ruining families and the black community.

Race, politics, and a not so color blind media

How does this play itself out in today’s political climate? If you listen to the media, you’d think that liberals are the friends of minorities. After all, they use them to maintain their power by promising them handouts they’re supposedly too inept to get on their own. Liberals would do well to note the observation of Frederick Douglass that identity politics is actually a Marxist philosophy that enslaves the groups that have been divided.

“Both are plundered and by the same plunderers,” Douglass said. “The slave is robbed by his master, of all his earnings above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.”

Like the racist of old that enslaved blacks and then became economically enslaved by unfair competition with free wages, todays liberals have enslaved virtually every minority/interest group (blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc) by promising government aid and special protection under the law at the price of maintaining liberal power. Predictably, liberals are now being enslaved by their own inability to deliver their rash promises as the country gradually realizes the obvious failure of their overreaching entitlement programs.

Of course the media cannot accept this. After all, they are too busy portraying conservatives as hate mongers. Even though we promote a color-blind capitalist system where anyone can succeed regardless of your race or gender, according to the media, since we also believe in a smaller federal government and state’s rights, like the southern states did in the Civil War, we must be racist.

That’s the most illogical jump you could make. Just because two people hold one thing in common doesn’t mean they hold everything in common. I like Thomas Jefferson. Come to think of it, Timothy McVeigh was a Jefferson fan as well. Does that make me a terrorist? Of course it does not. All that fertilizer I bought last week was for my yard, I promise.

No matter how bad government spending gets, nor how bankrupt the failed welfare programs become, liberals will never admit that the government can’t live up to its promises as benefactor. Even though such an admission would free minorities to accomplish everything their God-given abilities allow them to do, it would also deplete the liberal’s power base, which means it will never happen.

It should be no surprise that the Republican Party, which was created with an anti-slavery platform, and successfully abolished it under Abraham Lincoln, would now be the party that is working to protect the black community from its modern enslavement to the welfare state.

Liberals have good intentions, and they create hell. Although our intentions are not always perfect, conservatism works better, and makes people more free.

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