Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to the Principles of Freedom Committee, and also to the Institute for Humane Studies of Menlo Park, California, for their help and encouragement to me in writing this book.
The Conquest of Poverty
The Conquest of Poverty
1. The Problem of Poverty
THE HISTORY OF POVERTY IS ALMOST THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. THE ancient writers have left us few specific accounts of it. They took it for granted. Poverty was the normal lot.
2. Poverty and Population
SINCE THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVERY MEANINGFUL study of the causes of poverty has at some point referred to the growth of population. It was the achievement of Malthus to have pointed out the connection in so impressive a way that it could never again be ignored.
3. Defining Poverty
ANY STUDY OF POVERTY SHOULD LOGICALLY BEGIN WITH A DEFINITION of the problem we are trying to solve. Precisely what is poverty?
4. The Distribution of Income
FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY SOCIALIST WRITERS HAVE LEVELED TWO main charges against capitalism: (1) It is not productive (or only wastefully productive, or far less productive than some imaginable socialist system would be); (2) It leads to a flagrantly unjust “distribution” of the wealth that it does produce; the workers are systematically exploited; “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
5. The Story of Negro Gains
THE MYTH STILL ASSIDUOUSLY CULTIVATED IN SOME QUARTERS IS THAT the Negro community has been sunk in hopeless poverty and despair, because it has not been allowed to participate in the general economic prosperity of the last ten or twenty years. The actual record does not support this.
What we find, in fact, is that the Negroes as a whole have not only made great absolute economic gains in this period, but gains at least fully proportional to those made by the white population.
6. Poor Relief in Ancient Rome
INSTANCES OF GOVERNMENT RELIEF TO THE POOR CAN BE FOUND FROM the earliest times. Though the records are vague in important particulars, we do know a good deal about what happened in ancient Rome. A study of that case may enable us to draw a few lessons for our own day.
7. The Poor Laws of England
ONE WOULD GET THE IMPRESSION, READING MOST OF THE DISCUSSIONS in today’s American newspapers and magazines, that no one had ever thought of doing anything for the poor until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, or even until President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. Yet private charity is as old as mankind; and the history of governmental poor relief, even if we ignore the ancient world, can be traced back more than four centuries.
8. The Ballooning Welfare State
MOST OF THE SELF-STYLED LIBERALS OF THE PRESENT DAY WOULD BE astonished to learn that the father of the welfare state that they so much admire was none other than the fervent antiliberal and advocate of “blood and iron,” Otto von Bismarck.
