Star Parker, founder and president of the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), told the Wichita Rotary Club during a Monday luncheon that freedom and personal responsibility, though under attack from Washington, are the cure for poverty. She went on to say that poverty in the black community was made worse by government dependency.

During her address she told of her visit Sunday to a local church where she heard from people who identified with her journey from Los Angeles welfare mother to entrepreneur to activist. Parker quit the welfare roles, went to college, started her own business and lost it to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

During the journey she says she learned how to live free and take responsibility for herself. Now she takes that message nationwide, pushing back against those who want to trade freedom for government control. Her message for the black community is, “We haven’t even been free yet. We went from slavery to Jim Crow and from Jim Crow to the welfare state.”

Parker’s 2005 book, “Uncle Sam’s Plantation,” told of two Americas, a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism. “I left the plantation,” Parker told the Rotary audience. “It was not easy to get out of a system that is designed to keep you going into this little dark hole.”

That hole is the trap of government dependency. “The rules keep you entrapped with a political promise that because somebody has something somebody else doesn’t have, we’ll hire a politician to go and take it from them and give it to you.”

Parker wove a moral component into her strong support for free market philosophy and strong, moral families.  “We’re not thinking beyond the fact that we’ve stolen this resource from somebody that was productive and whether it’s going to increase your productivity.”

With a moral foundation education is an important prerequisite to moral self-sufficiency according to Parker. Education is the path to a job. A job is the path to ownership of property. “Without a moral framework, education is meaningless, in fact, it’s just a moral framework to get a bunch of stuff,“ Parker said. Without that framework someone can easily say, “Why don’t I just take what you have.”

Parker supports school choice, including charter schools and vouchers, as a way to improve education in the black community. “Why can’t we allow poor people the same opportunities and freedoms that others have, to be able to pick for themselves the schools that can best educate their children?”

Family decay is linked to problems in other areas according to Parker. “The reason education collapses after family collapses is that the first lesson a little kid learns in a household that is not moral is that commitment is not important. And as they go through life and do not see commitment they do not commit in other areas of their life.”

Parker said her goal is to help people go from letting someone else manage their life through a case number to having control over their own life. “Freedom is an opportunity for all of us to look at our individual gifts and talents, not consider our fate our final destiny, work hard, keep a good family life, save and invest — give back. Anyone can break out of poverty in one generation in this great country of ours.”