How America lifted millions out of poverty

Mike Lee:

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In 1861, Abraham Lincoln told Congress that the “leading object” of American government was: 

“to elevate the condition of men - to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

In a single sentence, Lincoln explains precisely what poverty is, and what government ought to do about it. As Lincoln knew first hand, true poverty was not for most people an absence of money, but an absence of opportunity – a lack of access to those social and economic networks where human opportunities are created. Then, as now, people were not isolated because they were poor – they were poor mostly because they were isolated. 

And so, in America’s original war on poverty, government did not give the poor other people’s money. It gave them access to other people. 

In Lincoln’s era – even during a cataclysmic war that was itself a struggle for human freedom and opportunity – that meant dredging rivers, building canals and cutting roads. It meant the Homestead Act and land-grant universities. These public goods weren’t designed to make poverty more tolerable – but to make it more temporary. They reduced the time it took to get products to market, increased access to banks and land, and increased the speed at which knowledge could be developed and shared. 

Poor farmers and trappers in Lincoln’s Mid-West were no worse at their trades than their more affluent counterparts back east. They just didn’t enjoy the same access to networks of human, social, and economic capital. 

In the same way, poor children today do not lack the ability to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to flourish in our market economy and civil society. But they absolutely lack the same access to the networks of human opportunity where that knowledge and those skills are acquired. 

Properly considered, then, the war on poverty is not so much about lifting people up. It’s about bringing people in. And so the challenge to conservatives today is to rethink the war on poverty along these lines, to bring into our economy and society the individuals, families, and communities that have for five decades been unfairly locked out. 

Nineteen-sixty-four wasn’t the year Americans started fighting poverty; it was the year we started losing that fight. To start winning again, conservatives are going to have to lead the way - not simply by offering criticism, but alternatives. Our job is to identify the obstructions that impede Americans’ access to our market economy and civil society and clear them. And if we’re looking for impediments to mobility and opportunity, we’ve certainly come to the right place!
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There is much more.

This is a brilliant speech that should be read in full.  Lee explains the route out of the tyranny of liberalism.  It is about creating opportunity instead of dependency.  This is from a speech Sen. Lee gave to the Heritage Society.