Ouch............................

     Besides insecurity, the Famine imbued those who fled it to come to America with a bone-deep distrust of the free-market economy and its justifying doctrine.  Ireland's British rulers had not caused the Famine, but, as a consequence of their laissez-faire ideology, they did little to relieve the distress it brought, fearing that the moral fiber of the eight million starving Irish would be destroyed if Her Majesty's government bestirred itself to feed them.  The idea was to let them die morally intact, so to speak.

-Jack Beatty,   The Rascal King:  The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley