“Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.”
Joseph Sobran
“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”
Charles Peguy
“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”
Hannah Arendt
“Minimum-wage laws are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of racists.”
Walter E. Williams
“Statism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others – on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program.”
Leonard Read
“The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I have no faith in political arithmetic.”
Adam Smith
“The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.”
Walter E. Williams
“Inflation is not a benign element in the economy’s operation. It is, as it has always been, the most dangerous and destructive form of taxation.”
Robert Higgs
“Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone.”
Harry Browne
“Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.”
Walter E. Williams
“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
C. S. Lewis
“When I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.”
Ron Paul
“If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
Winston Churchill
“The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.”
Walter E. Williams
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
Noam Chomsky
“Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return.”
Doug Casey
“Socialism always begins with a universal vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people having to eat their own pets.”
Toby Young
“In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician’s major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.”
Walter E. Williams
“We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.”
Ayn Rand
Guest Post by Thomas Sowell
Walter Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read his syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom.
Walter once said he hoped that, on the day he died, he would have taught a class that day. And that is just the way it was, when he died on Wednesday, December 2, 2020.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
My “Rewriting American History” column of a fortnight ago, about the dismantling of Confederate monuments, generated considerable mail. Some argued there should not be statues honoring traitors such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who fought against the Union. Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts. Let’s look at some of the facts and ask: Did the South have a right to secede from the Union? If it did, we can’t label Confederate generals as traitors.
Article 1 of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the war between the Colonies and Great Britain, held “New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States.” Representatives of these states came together in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a constitution and form a union.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
President-elect Donald Trump’s threats against American companies looking to relocate in foreign countries have won favorable review from many quarters. Support comes from those alarmed about trade deficits, those who want a “level playing field” and those who call for “free trade but fair trade,” whatever that means.
Some American companies relocate in foreign lands because costs are lower and hence their profits are higher. Lower labor costs are not the only reason companies move to other countries.
Life Savers, a candy manufacturing company, was based in Holland, Michigan, for decades. In 2002, it moved to Montreal. It didn’t move because Canada had lower wages. Canadian wages are similar to ours. The mayor of Holland offered Kraft, the parent company of Life Savers, a 15-year tax break worth $25 million to stay. But Kraft’s CEO said it would save $90 million over the same period because sugar was less expensive in Canada. Congress can play favorites with U.S. sugar producers by keeping foreign sugar out, enabling them to charge higher sugar prices, earn higher profits and pay their employees higher wages. Our Congress has no power to force the Canadian Parliament to impose similar sugar import restrictions.
“But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?”
Walter E. Williams
“The War between the States… produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today’s federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. … [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’.”
Walter E. Williams
“No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong”
Walter E. Williams
“Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.”
Walter E. Williams
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Donald Trump’s surprise win has millions of Americans, many of whom are black, in a tizzy. Many, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, are writing about what it means to be black during a Trump administration even though Trump’s presidency has yet to begin. My argument has always been that the political arena is largely irrelevant to the interests of ordinary black people.
Much of the 1960s and ’70s civil rights rhetoric was that black political power was necessary for economic power. But the nation’s most troublesome and dangerous cities, which are also cities with low-performing and unsafe schools and poor-quality city services, have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century — with blacks having significant political power, having been mayors, city councilors and other top officials, such as superintendents of schools and chiefs of police.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled “Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don’t know.” Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers.
The Senate Budget Committee’s blog says, “Top Economists Are Backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on Establishing a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage.” It lists the names of 210 economists who call for increasing the federal minimum wage. The petition starts off, “We, the undersigned professional economists, favor an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as of 2020.” The petition ends with this: “In short, raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour by 2020 will be an effective means of improving living standards for low-wage workers and their families and will help stabilize the economy. The costs to other groups in society will be modest and readily absorbed.”
The people who are harmed by an increase in the minimum wage are low-skilled workers. Try this question to economists who argue against the unemployment effect of raising the minimum wage: Is it likely that an employer would find it in his interests to pay a worker $15 an hour when that worker has skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value an hour to the employer’s output? Unlike my fellow economists who might argue to the contrary, I would say that most employers would view hiring such a worker as a losing economic proposition, but they might hire him at $5 an hour. Thus, one effect of the minimum wage law is that of discrimination against the employment of low-skilled workers.
In our society, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults.
Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable household environments. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
The 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress report, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, shows that U.S. educational achievement, to put it nicely, leaves much to be desired.
When it comes to reading and math skills, just 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of U.S. eighth-grade students tested proficient or above — that is, performed at grade level or above. Recent test scores show poor achievement levels in other academic areas. Only 18 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in U.S. history. It’s 27 percent in geography and 23 percent in civics.
The story is not much better when it comes to high schoolers. According to 2010 and 2013 NAEP test scores, only 38 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading. It was 26 percent in math, 12 percent in history, 20 percent in geography and 24 percent in civics (http://www.nationsreportcard.gov).
Many of these poorly performing youngsters gain college admission. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reports, “Every year in the United States, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students discover that, despite being fully eligible to attend college, they are not ready for postsecondary studies.” That means colleges spend billions of dollars on remedial education. Many of the students who enroll in those classes never graduate from college. The fact that many students are not college-ready takes on even greater significance when we consider that many college courses have been dumbed down.
Richard Vedder, emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University, argues that there has been a shocking decline in college academic standards. Grade inflation is rampant. A seminal study, “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, argues that very little improvement in critical reasoning skills occurs in college. Adult literacy is falling among college graduates. Large proportions of college graduates do not know simple facts, such as the half-century in which the Civil War occurred.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Many public primary and secondary schools are dangerous places. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in 2012, there were about 749,200 violent assaults on students. In the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year. In Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. Each year, roughly 10 percent of primary- and secondary-school teachers are threatened with bodily harm.
Many public schools not only are dangerous but produce poor educational results. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 2013, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card (http://tinyurl.com/mn6snpf), only 33 percent of white 12th-graders tested proficient in math, and 47 percent tested proficient in reading. For black 12th-graders, it was a true tragedy, with only 7 percent testing proficient in math and 16 percent in reading. These grossly disappointing educational results exist despite massive increases in public education spending.
Many parents want a better education and safer schools for their children. The best way to deliver on that desire is to offer parents alternatives to poorly performing and unsafe public schools. Expansion of charter schools is one way to provide choice. The problem is that charter school waiting lists number in the tens of thousands. Another way is giving educational vouchers or tuition tax credits for better-performing and safer schools. But the education establishment fights tooth and nail against any form of school choice.
Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Last week’s column highlighted college campus absurdities and the ongoing attack on free speech and plain common sense. As parents gear up to fork over $20,000 to $60,000 for college tuition, they might benefit from knowing what greets their youngsters. Deceitful college officials, who visit high schools to recruit students and talk to parents, conceal the worst of their campus practices. Let’s expose some of it.
Christina Hoff Sommers is an avowed feminist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s spent a lifetime visiting college campuses. Recently, upon her arrival at Oberlin College, Georgetown University and other campuses, trigger warnings were issued asserting, in her words, that her “very presence on campus” was “a form of violence” and that she was threatening students’ mental health. At Oberlin, 30 students and the campus therapy dog retired to a “safe room” with soft music, crayons and coloring books to escape any uncomfortable facts raised by Sommers.
The problem for students and some professors is that Sommers challenges the narrative, with credible statistical facts, that women are living in a violent, paternalistic rape culture. As a result, she has been “excommunicated from the church of campus feminism” in order to protect women from her uncomfortable facts. This prompted Sommers to say, “There’s a move to get young women in combat, and yet on our campuses, they are so fragile they can’t handle a speaker with dissenting views.” I wonder whether there will be demands for the military to have therapy dogs and safe rooms in combat situations.
The University of New Hampshire published a “Bias-Free Language Guide,” which “is meant to invite inclusive excellence in (the) campus community.” Terms such as “American,” “homosexual,” “illegal alien,” “Caucasian,” “mothering,” “fathering” and “foreigners” are deemed “problematic.” Other problematic terms include “elders,” “senior citizen,” “overweight,” “speech impediment,” “dumb,” “sexual preference,” “manpower,” “freshmen,” “mailman” and “chairman.” For now, these terms are seen as problematic. If the political correctness police were permitted to get away with it, later they would bring disciplinary action against a student or faculty member who used the terms.
