Fairness and justice come from adherence to Constitutional principles of personal freedom and limited government according to Dr. Walter E. Williams, an economist and author who appears regularly on national media.

Williams addressed about 600 people gathered in Wichita’s Mary Jane Teall Theater Thursday evening. His speech, “The Legitimate Role of Government in a Free Society,” lasted about 45 minutes and laid a foundation for understanding why government’s role should be limited, as the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended.

“A primary justification for the growth of government in our country – far beyond what the founders envisioned for us – is to promote fairness and justice,” Williams said. “And indeed, fairness and justice is a worthy goal but we might ask what is fairness and justice.”

Williams said taxes represent an affront to liberty and contrasted government spending today, about 30 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, with less than three percent until the 1920s. “The average taxpayer works from Jan. 1 until the late part of May to pay federal, state and local taxes.”

“It means that we’re going on four months of the year and we do not have rights to decide the uses of our earnings,” Williams said. “Now keep in mind a good working definition of slavery is you work 12 months out of the year and it is someone else tha decides how the fruits of your labor will be used.”

He noted that the Constitution does not authorize more than three quarters of federal spending, including farm subsidies, corporate bailouts and midnight basketball. “We made a significant departure from the Constitutional principles of individual freedom and limited government that made us a rich nation in the first place.”

Williams laid blame for the departure on both politicians and citizens. “Fore the past half century free enterprise and what it implies has been under unrelenting attack in out country. American from all walks of life, whether they realize it or not, have demonstrated a deep and abiding contempt for private property rights economic freedom and privacy.

Free enterprise is threatened in our country today not because of its failure, Williams said, but somewhat ironically because of its success. Capitalism has been so successful in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind such as pestilence, disease and gross poverty and hunger that most other human problems appear to us to be at once inexcusable and unbearable.

The desire to eliminate the problems have led us, Williams said, away from the basic ideals and principles on which our nation was built and toward other ideals such as equality of income, sex and race balance, affordable housing, medical care and consumer protection, among others. This has led to personal liberties becoming secondary or tertiary considerations.

At the end of his speech Williams answered several questions submitted by audience members, including “What’s up with Obams?”

Williams mentioned Obama’s relationships with, “a whole history of people who hate our country” and blamed white guilt for Obama’s election. “I believe a lot of the reason why Obama got elected to office is because a lot of white people want to show, I’m not a racist, I voted for a black man.”

Williams noted that his website features a “gift” amnesty for Americans of European ancestry that urges them, “Not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.”

The last question asked what one government rule or regulation Williams would change. Williams said he asked the same question of Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrick Hayek in the 1990s. Hayek’s answer: “Congress can not do for one American what it does not do for all Americans.”

Williams said Hayek cited,by example, government payments to farmers for not raising pigs. “Congress should pay every American who is not raising pigs,” Hayek said according to Williams.

“The thing we should strive for is not equality but equality before the law,” Williams said. “The only kind of equality that is consistent with liberty is equality before the law.”

Williams said it’s good to pay attention to the greatness America. “Black Americans have made the greatest gains over some of the highest hurdles over the shortest period of time than any other race in history.”

Blacks, as a nation, Williams said, would be the 16th richest on the face of the earth.”The significance of this is that in 1865 neither slave nor slave owner would have believed that these kinds of gains would have been possible in just a little bit over a century”

“It speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people, but just as importantly it speaks to the greatness of a nation. These kinds of gains would only have been possible in the United States, nowhere else on the face of the Earth.”

Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980. His appearance in Wichita was sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and underwritten by the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation.

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“The natural progress of things is for the government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.”

Thomas Jefferson