Posts By Author » Thomas Sowell
Big Lies in Politics
22 May 2012 
12:06 am
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run.
Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the …
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A Book for Republicans
22 May 2012 12:01 am
Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of “tax cuts for the rich” — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent.
What was the difference then?
The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case …
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A Racial Revolution?
19 May 2012 12:05 am
Now that census data show — for the first time in American history — the number of white babies born exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?
Politically, it means that minorities who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats can ensure that the country veers ever further to the left over the years, making America more like the welfare states of Europe, whose unsustainable spending led ultimately to financial crises and widespread riots.
But this is not …
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A Censored Race War?
15 May 2012 12:06 am
When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.
“The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or …
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The Moral Infrastructure
8 May 2012 12:04 am
The “Occupy” movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created.
The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the laws” to all its citizens.
How did the “Occupy” movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to …
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A Cynical Process
1 May 2012 12:05 am
Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do.
Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric. However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off.”
That mask has been …
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Who Is ‘Racist’?: Part II
28 Apr 2012 12:02 am
Around this time of year, I sometimes hear from parents who have been appalled to learn that the child they sent away to college to become educated has instead been indoctrinated with the creed of the left. They often ask if I can suggest something to have their offspring read over the summer, in order to counteract this indoctrination.
This year the answer is a no-brainer. It is a book with the unwieldy title, “No matter what … they’ll call this book Racist” by Harry Stein, a writer for what is …
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Who Is ‘Racist’?
24 Apr 2012 12:05 am
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice.
An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking — that prevailed back in the days of the old Jim Crow South, where complexion counted more than facts in determining how people were treated.
One of the first things presented in the media was a transcript …
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Mixing and Matching
17 Apr 2012 12:05 am
Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions.
Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of …
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Random Thoughts
10 Apr 2012 12:06 am
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on, and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.
Have you noticed …
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Political Word Games
4 Apr 2012 12:04 am
One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring.
That talent was displayed just this week when he was asked whether he thought the Supreme Court would uphold ObamaCare as constitutional or strike it down as unconstitutional.
He replied: “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
But how …
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The Invincible Dogma
3 Apr 2012 12:05 am
A long-standing legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. FedEx denied it.
Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3 million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. …
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The Death of Mrs. G
30 Mar 2012 12:01 am
Although we all know that death is inevitable, we are still seldom fully prepared for the death of someone who has been important in our lives. So it was with the recent death of Dr. Marie D. Gadsden, at the age of 92.
Mrs. Gadsden’s only official connection with me was that she taught me freshman English at Howard University, more than half a century ago. But she and Professor Sterling Brown were my two idols when I was a student there — and both remained so for the rest of …
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Geraldo’s Point
27 Mar 2012 12:05 am
It is not often that I agree with Geraldo Rivera, but recently he said something very practical and potentially life-saving, when he urged black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies.
There is no point in dressing like a hoodlum when you are not a hoodlum, even though that has become a fashion for some minority youths, including the teenager who was shot and killed in a confrontation in Florida. I don’t know the whole story of that tragedy, any more than those who are making …
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Race and Rhetoric
20 Mar 2012 12:05 am
One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: “White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80′s, Census Shows.”
The 1980s? Wasn’t that the years of the Reagan administration, the “decade of greed,” the era of “neglect” of the poor and minorities, if not “covert racism”?
More recently, during the administration of America’s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, “Wealth …
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The ‘Inevitability’ Vote
17 Mar 2012 12:08 am
Many people may be voting for Mitt Romney because of the view in some quarters that he is the inevitable Republican candidate for President of the United States and the candidate with the best chance of beating Barack Obama, rather than because they actually prefer Romney to the other candidates.
Inevitability has a very unreliable track record. Within living memory, totalitarianism was considered to be “the wave of the future.” During the primary season, people should vote for whomever they prefer, on their own merits, not because pundits have pronounced them …
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Racial Quota Fallout
15 Mar 2012 12:02 am
Many years ago, I learned of an episode in the life of a promising young black man that is relevant to things happening now. He had been educated at a good school, and went on to receive degrees at good colleges and universities. Then he went for a Ph.D. in mathematics at one of the leading departments in that field.
When he encountered difficulties, his professors essentially wrote his doctoral thesis for him. No doubt they felt good about doing something to help a promising young black man, and perhaps took …
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The Big Hoax
13 Mar 2012 12:04 am
There have been many frauds of historic proportions — for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff’s hoax has made headlines.
But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong — namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.
The latest example of …
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Iran and Obama
7 Mar 2012 12:04 am
What are we to make of President Barack Obama’s latest pronouncements about Iran’s movement toward nuclear bombs? His tough talk might have had some influence on Iran a couple of years ago, when he was instead being kinder and gentler with the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring nation. Now his tough talk may only influence this year’s election — which may be enough for Obama.
The track record of Barack Obama’s pronouncements on a wide range of issues suggests that anything he says is a message written in sand, and easily blown away …
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James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)
6 Mar 2012 12:05 am
There are undoubtedly many people who are alive today because of James Q. Wilson, who died last week. He was not a doctor or medical scientist, nor was he a fireman or coast guardsman who rescued people from immediate dangers.
James Q. Wilson was a scholar who studied crime. He saved lives because his penetrating analyses of crime, and the effect of the criminal law, debunked the theories of other intellectuals, which had led judges and legislators to ease up on criminals — leading in turn to skyrocketing rates of crime, …
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Who Is Brett Kimberlin?
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