Lawrence Reed at Mackinac provides an excellent round up, in a speech for Grove City, about what government can and cannot do to help the poor. Among many highlights is his discussion about what the constitution’s framers thought about the issue, as well as his discussion of 19th century antipoverty efforts. Interesting excerpt:
Welfare statists make a crucial error when they imply that it was left to presidents of a more enlightened 20th century to finally care enough to help the poor. The fact is, our leaders of the 1800s did mount a war on poverty — the most comprehensive and effective ever mounted by any central government in world history. It just didn’t have a gimmicky name like “Great Society,” nor did it have a public relations office and elitist poverty conferences at expensive seaside resorts. If you could have pressed them then for a name for it, most if not all of those early chief executives might well have said their anti-poverty program was, in a word, liberty. And it meant things like self-reliance, work and entrepreneurship, civil society institutions, a strong and free economy, and government confined to its constitutional role as protector of that liberty by keeping the peace.
