This passage is an excerpt from a speech given by liberal New York Senator Herbert Lehman in 1950. Lehman supports expanding many of the reforms that had been initiated during the New Deal, and this quote is basically defending the concept of a welfare state from detractors who claim that it infringes on the rights of individuals. Lehman is speaking at the height of the second Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he is concerned that government regulation of economic activity has become identified with communism. Lehman argues that far from taking freedom away from individuals, the welfare state creates meaningful freedom for people. People are not truly free, he argues, if they suffer from economic "insecurity." By protecting people from "actual hunger,actual homelessness or oppression by reason of race creed or color," he is saying, the welfare state can provide people with true freedom--the freedom to pursue happiness, and to live a full life. Freedom, he suggests, is meaningless if one's basic needs are not being met, and the poverty of many people is not an acceptable price to pay for full economic freedom. In short, then, this quote is a defense of the welfare state whose foundations lay in FDR's New Deal.