What a racially segregated system once taught the young black about living with his inferiority is now taught by a benevolent social welfare system. The difference was that in an earlier age a black parent could fight the competing influences.

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

The most troubling aspect of social policy towards the poor in late 20th century America is or how much it costs, but what it has bought.

The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.

People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned - it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned - and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.

The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.

Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.