How Welfare Destroys Black Families

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Welcome back to another episode of Apologia TV, you guys can get more at ApologiaRadio .com,

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A -P -O -L -O -G -I -A -R -A -D -I -O .com, that's where you go to get all the past television episodes, our after show, our

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Apologia Academy, everything's there, if there's a subject or topic we've probably handled it.

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To my right is Luke the Bear. What up? I'm the Ninja. Jeff the Ninja. That's Randy. Randy's actually on the

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TV show today. It's the first time. Oh yeah, I love our guest. First time. Yeah, he couldn't help himself.

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He had to join us. Actually, we made him. So to my left over here is King Ginger, our producer and director.

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How's it going, man? Good, man. Excited. And let's dive right in. Big show today. Very important show today.

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We actually have a special guest with us today. His name is Professor Walter Williams. A little bit of his biography here from WalterWilliams .com.

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He's born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Walter Williams holds a BA in Economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and MA and PhD degrees in Economics from UCLA.

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He also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College.

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Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College. And Dr. Honoris Causa and Sciences Socialis from Universidad Francisco Medellín in Guatemala.

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I said all the wrong, I'm sure. It's all wrong. Where he is also Professor Honorario. Dr. Williams has served on the faculty of George Mason University.

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I actually did a tournament at George Mason University. Yeah, that was right by Earl's Thumping Ground. That's right. George Mason. It's called the

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Capital Classics. Big martial arts tournament. It's one of the biggest ones in the United States. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

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As John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics. Also served at the faculties of Los Angeles City College, California State University, Los Angeles.

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I mean, it just goes on and on. Here's the cool part. Dr. Williams is the author of over 150 publications which have appeared in scholarly journals.

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And the list goes on and on. Lots of television and radio appearances. Dr. Williams, thank you so much for joining us today, sir.

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Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a privilege. And I can tell you, Dr. Williams, Marcus, our producer and director, never really joins us for the television program.

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But he couldn't help himself. Unless he's really excited. Unless he's super excited. I'm super excited. And so I'm going to actually give it to you,

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Ginger. What should we talk about today with Dr. Williams? I want to talk about Walter Williams and your book,

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Race and Economics. Because I just read that book and it really just opened up a new world to me.

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I'm a big free market guy. And so I think the first thing is, could you just explain to us the foundation of a free market and why that's important to society?

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Well, I think if you look around the world and you ask the question, well, where are people richer?

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Where is the per capita income higher for the average person? Well, it turns out to be higher in those countries that are closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum.

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And the people are the poorest at the communist end of the economic spectrum.

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And when you talk about free markets, it means that for the most part, people are able to have the right to engage in peaceable voluntary exchange.

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And there's a reduced initiation of violence. And so there's no purely free market economy in the world.

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But we can say that there's some are more free market and some are less free market. And another feature of countries that are towards the free market end of the continuum is that there are greater human rights protections.

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And then also the people just have greater wealth.

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And so I think the free market is consistent with the standards of high standards of morality.

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And when you ask the question, when I start thinking about many, many issues, my initial premise is that I am my property.

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I am my private property and you are your private property. And so if you start off with the idea of self -ownership, the notion that we each own ourselves, then certain things are moral and certain things are immoral.

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That is the reason why murder is immoral. It violates private property. Rape and theft is immoral because they too violate private property.

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And so a system of a free market with limited government, I think, is far more moral than anything else on earth.

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That's fantastic. Wow. There's a lot to be said about that for sure. You know, Dr. Williams, if I could just interject here for a moment.

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I'm sure everyone wants to throw some stuff at you. Here's the interesting thing. I'd like to at least start off hearing you on.

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You are a black man in our current culture who is heralding and praising and talking about the value of a free market and things like capitalism and private property, personal ownership.

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And you're saying all of that in our current context where that might sound strange coming from you.

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It might sound strange coming from any American. I think that the average

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American believes that it's OK for the government, for Congress, to forcibly use one

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American to serve the purposes of another American. Whether it forces you to pay for business bailouts out of your income or for food stamps or farm subsidies.

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And I think it's immoral to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another. And matter of fact, a good working definition of slavery is indeed the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

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That's right. And one of my disappointments, I'm 80 years old, but one of my disappointments is that so many black

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Americans who have been major sufferers in our history of being forcibly used to serve the purposes of somebody else, they too are right in the game.

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They want to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. That's fantastic.

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Exactly, Dr. Williams. Slavery is the ownership of someone else's production. And that is happening on such a massive scale these days.

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And you're absolutely right. It's such a foreign concept to us today. This last generation in particular just believes that this is just the way things go.

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We force somebody to pay for our own stuff. And it's just really interesting how you how you put that, because I think the thing that's a jolt to many in our current context is how you put it.

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You said taking somebody else's money to pay for somebody else's stuff because people would say, well, no, that's the government's money.

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That's theirs. But I think one has to recognize is that that that Congress has no resources of its very own.

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And so that made it so. And moreover, there's no tooth fairy or Santa Claus giving the

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Congress the money. Recognize that government has no resources of its very own.

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That force you to recognize that the only way the government can give one American citizen one dollar is to first through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other

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American. And if you think I'm being too loose with the term terminology, intimidation, threats and coercion.

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Well, you got April 15th. Check me out on that. Boom. All right, guys. Be right back. Dr. Walter Williams. I love this man already.

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Apology Radio dot com. All right.

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Welcome back to Apology Radio. You're supposed to do that. That's what you're supposed to do.

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I can ask the questions, but you can do. This is Apology TV and that's Marcus and he's so excited.

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He can't contain himself. Jump in. Jump in. Professor Williams, I want to know, because in your book,

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Race and Economics, you really show how actually prior to the anti -segregation laws of the 1950s and 60s, and even before that, during the times of Reconstruction and even during the time of slavery, black people were really successful and they became millionaires and they were really prosperous.

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And then there was a shift once they received their freedom and then the government helped them out that it actually went the opposite direction.

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And you show stats that show their employment rate, for example, and stuff. How did that happen?

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Well, I think that there are relatively few black millionaires, but there were some during the 1800s.

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But I think that the rules of the game help determine the outcome of the game.

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And I pointed out in there, I showed the statistics from Department of Labor that black teenage unemployment in 1948 was less than white teenage unemployment in 1948.

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Today, black teenage unemployment is some multiple of white teenage unemployment.

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And so how do you explain the lower rate of unemployment among black teenagers, let's say, in 1948?

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Well, you can't say, well, there was less racial discrimination in our country. You can't say that, well, gee, black teenagers had greater skills than white teenagers, that that explains it.

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Nothing explains it more than the minimum wage law. The minimum wage law was increased so many times, as a matter of fact, people are talking about increasing again.

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And the effect of the minimum wage law can be easily seen if you put yourself in the place of an employer and say, look, if I must pay $7 .25

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an hour to no matter whom I hire, does it pay me to hire the person who is so unfortunate so as to have skills that would only enable him to produce $3 or $4 worth of value per hour?

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Now, the average employer would look at that as a losing economic proposition. And so the effect of the minimum wage law, not the intention, but the effect of the minimum wage law is discriminating against the employment of low -skilled people.

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And who are the low -skilled people in our labor market? Well, they're teenagers, they lack the experience and maturity of adults, and then black teenagers, they not only share those characteristics, but they share the additional characteristics of going to rotten schools and poor neighborhoods and poor family backgrounds.

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So a minimum wage law is going to discriminate mostly against black teenagers. Man, wow.

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And if you read my, I have another book that I wrote in 1989 or 1990, it's called

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South Africa's War Against Capitalism. And I did extensive study of labor markets in South Africa during the apartheid era.

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And the major supporters of minimum wage laws in South Africa were white racist unions that would never have a black as a member.

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And their stated reason was to protect white workers from having to compete with low -skilled, low -wage black workers.

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That is, they said, we want to make the wage high enough so that companies will not hire blacks.

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Wow, man, I love this man. Good gracious. That's fantastic.

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So I have more questions. You know, going back to what we said before the break, I don't want what we're, our conversation before the break,

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I don't want the listeners to think that I don't care about my fellow man in need. I think that to help one's fellow man in need by reaching into your own pockets to do so is praiseworthy and laudable.

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I think helping one's fellow man in need by reaching into somebody else's pockets to do so I think is worthy of condemnation.

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And for those of us who are Christians, I'm very sure when God gave Moses the commandment, thou shalt not steal, he did not mean thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in Congress.

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Oh, man. That's awesome. I like you so much more now. You are a genius, sir.

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Wonderful. Well, this is, I'm going to give it to Randy. Randy, I have more I want to ask, but I'm going to give you a chance.

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Sure. As a family union, when we think of a family unit, that's kind of the micro economic planning unit.

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So what is wrong when the government establishes, let's say, well -meaning policies such as health care?

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What's the impact on that in the free market and what's the outcome for lower income groups?

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Well, we see some of that going on right now. When the government mandates that a business provide health care for the employees, well, that's just like mandating higher wage.

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That is, if the wage is now $7 .25 an hour, let's say, just for example, and you mandate $5 worth of health care per hour for a person or per day, that just raises the cost of the employee.

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And so what employers will do, they will seek to economize on it.

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And what we see today that many employers are hiring part -time workers instead of full -time workers, or the full -time workers that they do hire, they give them overtime instead of hiring new workers.

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They keep the older workers on and they pay them overtime. That's cheaper than hiring somebody else than having to pay all the health care costs.

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And so I think that by and large, whatever government does, or most of the federal mandates, actually do harm to many people, but surely they help some people.

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That is, some people, you have a higher skilled person, he would love to make it very, very costly for you to hire a low -skilled worker because it gets some of his competition out of the market.

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Yeah. Well, let me ask you, Dr. Williams, this would be, I think, a very important point to make, especially now that we have you on and we can have you describe it for us.

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What are some of the impacts upon, say, the black community when you have the government, just with the size of the welfare program and assistance programs that it has right now, how does it impact the black community?

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Because that's typically what you'll see even in the debate, is you'll see some of the

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Democrats' policies and more of the liberal policies as moving towards the black communities.

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And you'll see, in the media at least, you'll see, well, the black community praises these things and they need these things and they will complain if they don't have them.

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I'd love for you to talk about the impact that it has on the black community. Well, just very briefly,

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I have a lot of this materials on my webpage, which is WalterEWilliams .com,

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and one of the documentaries that I did recently a couple of years ago, it's called

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Suffer No Fools, and I pointed out in there that the welfare state has done to black

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Americans what slavery could not have done, what the harshest Jim Crow and racists could not have done, namely, to destroy the black family.

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Now, right now, today, roughly slightly over 30 % of black kids live in two -parent families.

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And these statistics are available on race and economics. Back during the 1870s, up to 75 % and 80 % of black kids lived in two -parent families.

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In 1925 New York, 85 % of black kids lived in two -parent families.

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Today, you'd be hard put to find 15 % to live in two -parent families. And so, what the welfare state has done, it has made slovenly behavior less costly.

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If you look at illegitimacy among black, black illegitimacy right now is around 75%.

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That is, 75 % of black babies are born out of, their mothers are not married to the father.

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But, however, in 1938, I think the number was something like 9 % of the black kids were born illegitimately.

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And so, we see with the emergence of the welfare state, you found a whole lot of the family disintegration.

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Now, it's not just a black thing. That is, white illegitimacy now is slightly over 30%, whereby in 1940,

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I think white illegitimacy was somewhere around 3%. And if you look at Sweden, which is the motherhood of socialism, the illegitimacy rate there is 54%,

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I think. And so, the welfare state is an equal opportunity destroyer of families and family values.

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And when I was a kid, when I grew up in the housing project in North Philadelphia, and my father deserted me, deserted my mother when

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I was three and my sister was two. Dr. Williams, hang on to that one second.

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I want to hear the rest of the story. We're going to commercial break real fast, guys. Hang on for more of the story. Apologia Radio with Dr.

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Williams. Be right back. If so what is a philosophically devastating critique of your worldview, it is not a worldview you should hold on to any longer.

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Virginia Tech, 2007. So what? 32 children, kids, students are killed.

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So what? Andrea Yates, 2001, killed her four children. So what? No, we're not baby eaters.

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So what? Wow, this is already turning out to be one of my favorite episodes.

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We've done an apology at TV. Dr. Walter E. Williams, you can get him at WalterEWilliams .com.

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You're just telling us, Dr. Williams, about your particular upbringing and what happened to you. Please continue, sir.

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My sister and I, we were in our neighborhood, in the Richard Allen Housing Project, in our neighborhood.

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We were the only kids that did not have a mother and father in the house. Today, it would be exactly the opposite.

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That is, mostly it would be rare to find a kid with a mother and father in the house.

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And so a lot of the things that you see among black Americans today, you look at Baltimore, you look at Ferguson, you look at Oakland, and all these places.

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Those things are entirely new among black people. I mean, the disrespect of teachers, the assault on teachers.

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And I think in Baltimore, it was estimated that there were four teacher assaults per week.

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And it's inconceivable for older Americans to think that a kid would assault a teacher.

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And so many of these things that people are saying among black Americans, and also as well among white

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Americans, is entirely new. It represents a breakdown of our culture. Wow, that's incredible.

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I was just going to comment that we had all these people that are, recently you mentioned, pushing for a higher minimum wage.

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And what's been the immediate result, we've all seen it, is places like McDonald's, the bank,

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Wendy's. They're going to automated tellers and places to order your food.

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And so everybody that's pushing for these higher wages, all they're doing is eliminating the job force almost altogether in some places.

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That's absolutely right. There are many things that have been automated. When I was a kid, you pull into a gasoline station, and there's a kid to check your tire, to pump your gas.

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And you don't wash your windshields, and you don't see that anymore. And it's not because Americans of the day like to smell gasoline fumes at self -service stations.

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In neighborhood theaters, there are ushers to show you to your seat. And today, we don't have ushers, and it's not because Americans of the day like to stumble down the aisles to find their seat.

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It's that the minimum wage has destroyed these and many, many other jobs. And so when employers are going to face a higher cost, they're going to try to find ways to minimize that cost.

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And the reason why they're going to find ways to minimize the cost, that is to automate, is because customers who buy their products, they prefer lower prices to higher prices.

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That's right. So you talk about in your book, you talk about how the moral delinquency and how economic restrictions increase moral delinquency.

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And so my question is right now, because it seems like big government, increase minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, that sort of conversation is everywhere.

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It's everywhere. And so my question is, what's a solution? How do we combat this?

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Where's our hope as a nation in this? Well, I think you need to tell me, because I don't see much of a chance of reversal.

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You see some, there are organizations who are fighting against various regulations, government regulations, such as the

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Institute for Justice. They're fighting taxicab regulations or licensing regulations that license people out of the market.

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But that's just a drop in the bucket. I think that we're just headed in the wrong way as the nation.

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And I don't see any chance of recovery. So when you look at the moral foundations of our nation, when we began,

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I mean, you had a particular view of the world that was sort of in the atmosphere, a particular view about God.

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You had, you know, many of the colonies had state churches even, it was so representative. And like you said, Dr. Williams, like, you know, the ideas of personal property and stuff belonging to yourself and the ideas of a small government, you know, those ideas didn't exist in a vacuum.

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There was a particular thing that led up to it. And you point, I think, in a spectacular way to, thou shall not steal, you know, that applies across the board and it applies to government as well.

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You've seen some, you go ahead. And it's unique in our history. I mean, the founding fathers, if they were to come back today, they would be utterly shocked by the

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American people. Yes. And what the American people have come to accept. And if you just read some of the quotations on my webpage from the founders, you would see that they would just be utterly shocked at what

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Congress is able to do, what the American people want Congress to do. I don't blame politicians. The American people are asking for, to ask politicians to make it possible for them to live at the expense of other people.

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And anybody, any politician who does not go along with the program, he'll be run out of office. That's fantastic.

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All right, Dr. Williams, just two minutes left here. I'd love for you to give us a reading list of some of your works that you think would be important, maybe to train this younger generation in understanding how government's supposed to work, how economics work, and maybe even giving us some understanding of how some of these policies and how we run the government today and take people's money has actually destroyed us.

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Well, what's a good starting reading list? Well, on my website, I have a whole bunch of reading and recommended sites and recommended books and videos to read and to look at.

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But however, I think that one of the greatest writers, I think of all times in the period, in the ideas of liberty, has to be a

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French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, B -A -S -T -I -A -T.

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And he wrote a book called The Law. And it's a very, very small book and is available at the

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Foundation for Economic Education. And it explains a whole lot about the moral role of government, that is, what government should be doing.

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And so, as a matter of fact, he has a question. To identify a government plunder, see if government does things that a private person, if he did the same thing, he would go to jail.

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Yeah, that's right. So much of what Congress does is exactly that, things that if we did the same thing privately, we'd go to jail.

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Yeah, powerful. Dr. Williams, you're a gift and a blessing, sir. And we're just really, really grateful to have had your time today.

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So you guys can get more at WalterEWilliams .com. Professor Williams, thank you so much for your graciousness today, sir.

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And we hope to maybe have you on again sometime. This was fantastic. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much.

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All right, God bless you, sir. Thank you. All right. All right, guys, so this has been ApologiaTV.

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That was fantastic. Good choice. Good find, Marcus. Yeah. Good choice. All right, guys, so we are going to have…

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We could have talked to him for another hour. We could. We're going to have more on this discussion. We're going to do it on the after show. On the after show.

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