Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries?

In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.

In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor—and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward.

Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren’t working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.



Back



aboutLiberty Portal

Liberty Portal is a gateway for free markets and free thinking. We aggregate open-sourced content to promote and popularize important lessons from economics, philosophy, history and more.

suggested

Frederic Bastiat

The Law

Read this for FREE at mises.org

The Law, originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. In The Law, he wrote that everyone has a right to protect "his person, his liberty, and his property". The State should be only a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. "Justice" (defense of one's life, liberty, property) has precise limits, but if government power extends further, into philanthropic endeavors, government becomes so limitless that it can grow endlessly. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." The public then becomes socially-engineered by the legislator and must bend to the legislators' will "like the clay to the potter": "I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes". Bastiat posits that the law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense (of his life, liberty, and property) in favor of another's right to "legalized plunder," which he defines as: "if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." Bastiat was thus against redistribution.



Frederic Delavier

Strength Training Anatomy

Over two million people have turned to Strength Training Anatomy for an inside look at how the body performs during exercise. Now with new exercises, stretches, and exercise variations, and with more of Frédéric Delavier’s signature art, the fourth edition of this classic work sets the standard by which all other strength training resources will be judged.

No other resource combines the visual detail of top anatomy texts with expert strength training advice. Over 700 anatomical illustrations, including 90 new to this edition, depict 231 exercises and variations to reveal the primary muscles involved as well as all the relevant surrounding structures, including bones, ligaments, tendons, and connective tissue.



Henry Hazlitt

Economics In One Lesson

A million copy seller, Henry Hazlitt’s classic primer is an essential guide to the basics of economic theory. A fundamental influence on modern libertarianism, Hazlitt defends capitalism and the free market from economic myths that persist to this day.

Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.

Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.



support

If you like what we do and want to support us, then you are a fine humanitarian. Click the link below to find out more.

Donate Now

Support the liberty movement

Become a contributor

Want to join the fight and publish your content here? Email us at team at libertyportal dot com!

Collaborate with Liberty Portal

