Thomas Sowell's advice

"What should the civil rights movement be for now?"

Dissolution. They've won. Declare victory, go home, and start putting your efforts into something else like education, entrepreneurship, and all kinds of other things that have a much bigger payoff. pic.twitter.com/AD1ctPEfAL

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) September 4, 2020

Selections from The Thomas Sowell Reader

On Ronald Reagan:

One of his first acts as President was to end price controls on petroleum. The New York Times condescendingly dismissed Reagan's reliance on the free market and repeated widespread predictions of "declining domestic oil production" and skyrocketing gasoline prices.

The price of gasoline fell by more than 60 cents a gallon.

(Sound familiar to what is happening under Trump?)


When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," there were howls of disapproval in the media. When he proposed meeting a Soviet nuclear buildup in Eastern Europe with an American nuclear buildup in Western Europe, there were alarms that he was going to get us into a war.

The result? President Reagan's policies not only did not get us into a war, they put an end to the Cold War that had been going on for decades.

pages 131 and 132 of The Thomas Sowell Reader published by Basic Books

Another tribute to Thomas Sowell

Among the many tributes to Thomas Sowell is this one from Bookworm. At age 86 Dr. Sowell has decided to hang up his writing career, and try photography.

Succinct

Have you noticed that so often it is after someone dies that we find out what a good person he or she was? That isn't the case with Thomas Sowell. He is alive and kickin' at 86, and, because he has ended his column at Creators Syndicate, he is now going to devote his energies to photography. He is much loved. The Atheist Conservative has a tribute, with 50 of his best quotes here.

How many pied pipers are we going to follow off to parts unknown?

Thomas Sowell asks,

...Does Trump have conservative principles? Does he have any principles at all, other than promoting Donald Trump? A smorgasbord of political positions — none of them indicating any serious thought about complicated issues — is not a principle. Nor is cheering for himself and boasting about all the great things he is going to do as President.

Haven't we seen this movie before? Wasn't Barack Obama going to heal the racial divide, end the partisan bickering in Washington, have the most transparent administration ever, lower the cost of health care and let you keep your own doctor?

...There was absolutely nothing in Obama's track record that should have led anyone to think that he would even try to do any of the things he declared he was going to do. But why spoil a great vision, and soaring rhetoric, by checking track records?

It was bad enough for the voters to make the colossal mistake of being taken in by appearances and ignoring realities. But to repeat that very same mistake with Trump, immediately after the Obama administration, is truly staggering. How many pied pipers are we going to follow off to parts unknown?

The many betrayals of the voters by the Republican establishment, year after year, no doubt set the stage. And Trump is a great theatrical performer on any stage.

But is that enough? It has been enough politically to put some of the great demagogues of history in power, especially after the existing establishment has discredited itself.

The discredited Weimar Republic in Germany was vulnerable to the verbal attacks by Adolf Hitler that brought him to power. Now we know, too late, that Hitler turned out to be a bigger catastrophe — for Germany and the world — than the Weimar Republic.

Donald Trump is not an evil man like Hitler. But his headstrong shallowness and fecklessness make him a dangerous man to have in the White House, with our enemies around the world on the march, and developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver nuclear bombs.

For conservatives especially, there is finally a real choice for a change — and a sharp contrast with Donald Trump. Senator Ted Cruz has a track record that leaves no doubt as to his adherence to conservative principles. And he is as thoroughly versed in the issues facing this country as anyone who has run for President since Ronald Reagan.

...The outcome of this Tuesday's primaries may tell us whether the voters want to vent their feelings or to choose someone to lead the nation in a time of dangers, at home and abroad.

Read more here

Thomas Sowell endorses Ted Cruz

Well, I guess this is an endorsement of Ted Cruz. Highly respected economist Thomas Sowell writes,

Among the other Republican candidates, Dr. Ben Carson is a monumental figure in his field, and he is clearly revered even by people who would not vote for him. But votes are how elections are decided.

The governors among the Republican candidates can at least be judged by how their track record stands up in running a governmental organization. So can Senator Ted Cruz, who was solicitor general in Texas. But Senator Marco Rubio has no comparable experience -- and his inexperience has shown up in his abortive attempt to join Democrats in promoting amnesty.

If the Republicans are to avoid having Donald Trump lead them -- and the country -- to disaster, they are going to have to have the majority of non-Trump supporters get behind some given candidate.

Senator Ted Cruz has been criticized in this column before, and will undoubtedly be criticized here again. But we can only make our choices among those actually available, and Senator Cruz is the one who comes to mind when depth and steadfastness come to mind.

As someone who once clerked for a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he will know how important choosing Justice Scalia's replacement will be. And he has the intellect to understand much more.

Read more here.

"Grow up!"

Thomas Sowell takes on Donald Trump in The American Spectator:

Of all the many things said about Donald Trump, what was said by Roger Ailes, head of the Fox News Channel, said it all in just two words: “Grow up!”

It is amazing how many people have been oblivious to this middle-aged man’s spoiled brat behavior, his childish boastfulness about things he says he is going to do, and his petulant response to every criticism with ad hominem replies.

He has boasted that his followers would stick by him even if he committed murder. But is that something to boast about? Is it not an insult to his followers, if it is true? Moreover, his cockiness is misplaced, because he still does not have a majority among Republican voters, while you need a majority of all the voters to win any state in the general election.

Read more here.

Do you believe the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer?

Walter Williams writes in Front Page Magazine a review of the latest book by Thomas Sowell, which is entitled Wealth, Poverty, and Politics.

How many times have we been told that the rich are prospering at the expense of the poor? Sowell points out that most households in the bottom 20 percent in income have no one working. How can someone who isn't producing anything have something taken from him?

What about the supposed "paradox of poverty" in a rich society such as ours? Sowell says that this is a paradox only to those who start out with a preconception of an egalitarian world in defiance of history and have a disregard for the arbitrariness of government definitions of poverty. Poverty occurs automatically and has been mankind's standard fare throughout its entire history. It is high productivity and affluence that are rare in mankind's history and require an explanation.

One of the biggest problems in analyzing poverty is the vision that the poor are permanently poor. A University of Michigan study followed specific working Americans from 1975 to 1991. It found that particular individuals who were in the bottom 20 percent in terms of income saw their real incomes rise at a much higher rate than those in the top 20 percent. An IRS study, covering the period from 1996 to 2005, found a similar result. Workers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent saw their incomes rise by 91 percent. Over the same span, those in the top 1 percent saw their incomes fall by 26 percent. The outcomes of both studies give lie to the claim that "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer."

Sowell argues that another source of confusion in discussions of economic differences is the failure to distinguish between income and wealth. The use of the term "the rich" to describe people in higher income brackets is just one sign of confusion. Being rich means having an accumulation of wealth rather than having a high income in a given year. This distinction is not just a matter of semantics. Calls for raising income tax rates to make "the rich" pay their undefined "fair share" are an exercise in futility because income taxes do not touch wealth. Higher income taxes are a tax on people trying to accumulate wealth.

...Dr. Sowell's new book tosses a monkey wrench into most of the things said about income by politicians, intellectuals and assorted hustlers, plus it's a fun read.

Read more here.

Impact of the welfare state

Thomas Sowell asks,

In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?

...Murder rates among black males were going down -- repeat, DOWN -- during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read "Life at the Bottom," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization -- including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain -- without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state -- and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

Read more here.

The left's preconceptions

Thomas Sowell writes:

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Please read more here.

When liars use statistics

Today in school my son Jon's teacher told him that Republicans are causing women to make less money than men. Jon was the only student who challenged her. I am going to tell Jon about this article written yesterday by Thomas Sowell. He writes,

The "war on women" political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.

It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn -- and that this is because of discrimination.

How surprising is it that women with children do not earn as much as women who do not have children? If you don't think children take up a mother's time, you just haven't raised any children.

How surprising is it that men with children earn more than men without children, just the opposite of the situation with women? Is it surprising that a man who has more mouths to feed is more likely to work longer hours? Or take on harder or more dangerous jobs, in order to earn more money?

If the 77 percent statistic was for real, employers would be paying 30 percent more than they had to, every time they hired a man to do a job that a woman could do just as well. Would employers be such fools with their own money? If you think employers don't care about paying 30 percent more than they have to, just go ask your boss for a 30 percent raise!

Read more here.

Self-awarded halos

Thomas Sowell writes,

If truth-in-packaging laws applied to Congress, a campaign finance law would have to be labeled an “Incumbents Protection Act.”

The very high rate of incumbent re-elections, even while polls show the public disgusted with Congress in general, shows how well incumbents are protected.

The media are accessories to this scam. So long as the information and opinions that reach the public are selected by mainstream media people, whom polls show to be overwhelmingly on the left, the left’s view of the world prevails.

Hence the great alarm in the media, and in equally one-sided academia, over the emergence of conservative talk radio programs and the Fox News Channel on television.

Are Republicans willing to learn?

On March 25 Thomas Sowell addressed the issue of how Republicans can reach out to black voters.

Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to “reach out” is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson — that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats.

The issue on which Democrats are most vulnerable, and have the least room to maneuver, is school choice. Democrats are heavily in hock to the teachers’ unions, who see public schools as places to guarantee jobs for teachers, regardless of what that means for the education of students.

There are some charter schools and private schools that have low-income minority youngsters equaling or exceeding national norms, despite the many ghetto public schools where most students are nowhere close to meeting those norms. Because teachers’ unions oppose charter schools, most Democrats oppose them, including black Democrats up to and including President Barack Obama.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent cutback on funding for charter schools, and creating other obstacles for them, showed a calloused disregard for black youngsters, for whom a decent education is their one shot at a better life.

But did you hear any Republican say anything about it?

Many people today would be surprised to learn that there were once years when the unemployment rate for black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was under 10 percent. But their unemployment rates have not been under 20 percent in more than half a century. In some years, their unemployment rate has been over 40 percent.

Why such great differences between earlier and later times? In the late 1940s, inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage set in 1938. Without that encumbrance, black teenagers found it a lot easier to get jobs than after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in the 1950s.

Young people need job experience, at least as much as they need a paycheck. And no neighborhood needs hordes of idle young men hanging around, getting into mischief, if not into crime.

Republicans have failed to explain why the minimum wage laws that Democrats support are counterproductive for blacks. Worse yet, during the 2012 election campaign Mitt Romney advocated indexing the minimum wage for inflation, which would not only guarantee its bad effects, but would put an end to discussing those bad effects.

"The morals of thugs and the agenda of totalitarians

Thomas Sowell writes that the Obama administration has the

morals of thugs and the agenda of totalitarians.

He cites the example of filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, who is being prosecuted for contributing $20,000 to a political candidate, an amount Sowell describes as

chicken feed, compared to what can be raised inside of an hour at a political fundraising breakfast or lunch.

Could this singling out of D'Souza for prosecution have something to do with the fact that he made a documentary movie with devastating exposures of Barack Obama's ideologies and policies? That movie, incidentally, is titled "2016: Obama's America," and every American should get a copy of it on a DVD. It will be the best $10 investment you are ever likely to make.

Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it or lose it. But is our generation up to fighting for it?

Why lie, if what you believe in is true?

Thomas Sowell points out that there is not and never has been an economist who advocated "trickle down." It is just another lie of the left. He asks,

The time is long overdue for people to ask themselves why it is necessary for those on the left to make up a lie if what they believe in is true.