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Up From Poverty |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Jack Kemp |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1987 |
| Size: 3,488 Words, 21,841 Characters |
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ON THE ROAD TO ECONOMIC FREEDOM
An Agenda for Black Progress
Edited by Robert L. Woodson
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1987
13 pp., $16.95
Perhaps no other problem in this century has been so discussed and debated, but also so continuously vexing, as poverty in America. Those on the political Left have looked to government for the solution to poverty, while the Right has tended to blame government in every case. In my view, we need to go beyond these views. The poor may be always with us, but their number can be put on a steadily declining path, as it was for most of our history, if our market economy and democratic system are expanded to encourage greater entrepreneurship, wider opportunities for private sector jobs, strong families, and standards of right and wrong. Often, the incentives grafted onto our system reward the opposite.
The current welfare reform proposals in Congress are a good example of these political dynamics. Liberal welfare reform bills just tinker with child care, welfare benefit levels, and job training requirements. But sweeping reform of the entire system is needed to eliminate powerful disincentives against families, new jobs, work effort, and childbearing within marriage. Somehow, the debate gets sidetracked from fundamental principles.
A broader, fresh look at our economic and social system is needed, and On the Road to Economic Freedom, a collection of essays by a new generation of black thinkers and activists, provides one road map out of the intellectual void. Their rallying theme is that progress against poverty can be achieved by mobilizing the strengths of the black community itself.
A New Generation
These authors believe cries of racism and repetition of black statistics about black poverty are counterproductive to black progress. They believe that blaming racism and inadequate spending as the causes of poverty places the solutions to black problems out of the hands of blacks themselves. Nothing could be more calculated to frustrate the will and ambition of black Americans than telling them that they can do little about their own condition, that the real problems li...
Read Full Article
...our nation's poor. But if there is one thing that we have learned, it is that there is nothing inevitable about poverty in a free and democratic system. We can solve poverty in our lifetime because we know that freedom is the answer. We know that economic freedom works because it has worked every place it has been tried. This book tells us how to make it work for all the American people.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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