QUOTE OF THE DAY

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”

Thomas Sowell

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.”

Thomas Sowell

The Lure of Socialism

Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders, and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.

Many of those older people have lived long enough to have seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela, with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.

But, most of the young have missed all that, and their dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of socialism than to present its dismal track record.

Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision — a world of the imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.

Who would not want to live in a world where college was free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!

Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.

Continue reading “The Lure of Socialism”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.

Homer Simpson

That such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be president of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism — and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand — speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture.

Thomas Sowell

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Ludwig von Mises

The ‘Gun Control’ Farce

Guest Post by Thomas Sowell

President Obama’s intrusion into the mourning community of Roseburg, Oregon, in order to promote his political crusade for stronger gun control laws, is part of a pattern of his using various other sites of shooting rampages in the past to promote this long-standing crusade of the political left.

The zealotry of gun control advocates might make some sense if they had any serious evidence that more restrictive gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes. But they seldom even discuss the issue in terms of empirical evidence.

Saving lives is serious business. But claiming to be saving lives and refusing to deal with evidence is a farce. Nor is the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association the real issue, despite how much the media and the intelligentsia focus on them.

If there is hard evidence that stronger gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes in general or reduce murders in particular, the Second Amendment can be repealed, as other Amendments have been repealed. Constitutional Amendments exist to serve the people. People do not exist to be sacrificed to Constitutional Amendments.

But if hard evidence shows that restrictions on gun ownership lead to more gun crimes, rather than less, then the National Rifle Association’s opposition to those restrictions makes sense, independently of the Second Amendment.

Since this all boils down to a question of hard evidence about plain facts, it is difficult to understand how gun control laws should have become such a heated and long-lasting controversy.

There is a huge amount of statistical evidence, just within the United States, since gun control laws are different in 50 different states and these laws have been changed over time in many of these states. There are mountains of data on what happens under restrictive laws and what happens when restrictions are lifted.

Statistics on murder are among the most widely available statistics, and among the most accurate, since no one ignores a dead body. With so many facts available from so many places and times, why is gun control still a heated issue? The short answer is that most gun control zealots do not even discuss the issue in terms of hard facts.

Continue reading “The ‘Gun Control’ Farce”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.”

But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century-even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery.

The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who have been separated from them during the era of slavery. A contemporary journalist reported meeting black men walking along the roads of Virginia and North Carolina, many of whom had walked across the state-looking for their families. Others reported similar strenuous and even desperate efforts of newly freed blacks to find members of their families.”

Thomas Sowell

“By projecting a vision of a world in which the problems of blacks are the consequences of the actions of whites, either immediately or in times past, white liberals have provided a blanket excuse for shortcomings and even crimes by blacks. The very possibility of any internal cultural sources of the problems of blacks has been banished from consideration by the fashionable phrase “blaming the victim.” “

Thomas Sowell

“The general orientation of white liberals has been one of “What can we do for them?” What blacks can do for themselves has not only been of lesser interest, much of what blacks have in fact already done for themselves has been overshadowed by liberal attempts to get them special dispensations-whether affirmative action, reparations for slavery, or other race-based benefits-even when the net effect of these has been much less than the effects of blacks own self-advancement.”

Thomas Sowell

Voter Fraud and Voter I.D.

Guest Post by Thomas Sowell

One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.

Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by Old Dominion University indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote.

The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book “Injustice” by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.

One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up — uninvited — the day the ballots arrived and “help” the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out and forged the signatures of the voters.

These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil.

As for race-based “voter suppression,” amid all the political hysteria, how many hard facts have you heard? Probably none that supports that claim. Widely available free photo identification cards mean that poverty is no barrier to voting.

Since blacks and whites both have to show photo I.D. for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo I.D. for voting caused such shrill outcries? Unfortunately, this is part of the cynical politics of promoting as much racial polarization and paranoia as possible, in hopes of getting more black voters to turn out to vote for the Democrats.

Nothing is too gross when promoting racial hysteria in an election year. Veteran Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel from Harlem declared that Republicans “don’t disagree — they hate!” According to Rangel, “Some of them believe that slavery isn’t over and that they won the Civil War!”

Republicans did win the Civil War. That’s why there is no more slavery. It was a Republican president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a Republican-controlled Congress that voted for the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery.

In the 1960s, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we are going to talk about history, let’s at least get the facts right.

Only an utter ignorance of history, in this era of dumbed-down education, could allow demagogues like Rangel to get away with the absurdities that abound in election year politics. Images of lynching and Jim Crow laws that made blacks sit in the back of buses are used against Republicans, even though the “solid South” was solidly controlled by Democrats during that era.

Bull Connor, who turned police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat. So were other Southern segregationists. In those days, you could go hundreds of miles through the Jim Crow South without seeing a single Republican official. That is why political observers called it “the solid South.”

Perhaps the biggest voter fraud of all is the fraud against black voters, by telling them bogey man stories, in order to try to get them to come out on election day to vote for Democrats.

The most cynical of these bogey man ploys is Attorney General Holder’s threats of legal action against schools that discipline a “disproportionate” number of black boys. Unless you believe that black boys cannot possibly be misbehaving more often than Asian American girls, what does this political numbers game accomplish?

It creates another racial grievance, allowing Democrats like Holder to pose as rescuers of blacks from racist dangers. The real danger is allowing disruptive students in ghetto schools to destroy the education of other black students — in a world where education is the only hope that most ghetto youngsters have for a better life.

Sacrificing these young people’s futures, in hopes of gaining some additional black votes today, is as cynical and fraudulent as it gets.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.

Obama’s priority: Not protecting Americans

Guest Post By Thomas Sowell

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is both a danger in itself and a wake-up call for Americans – about President Obama, about the institutions of this country and, most important, about ourselves.

There was a time when an outbreak of a deadly disease overseas would bring virtually unanimous agreement that our top priority should be to keep it overseas. Yet Barack Obama has refused to bar entry to the United States by people from countries where the Ebola epidemic rages, as Britain has done.

The reason? Refusing to let people with Ebola enter the United States would conflict with the goal of fighting the disease. In other words, the safety of the American people takes second place to the goal of helping people overseas.

As if to emphasize his priorities, President Obama has ordered thousands of American troops to go into Ebola-stricken Liberia, disregarding the dangers to those troops and to other Americans when the troops return.

What does this say about Obama?

At a minimum, it suggests that he takes his conception of himself as a citizen of the world more seriously than he takes his role as president of the United States. At worst, he may consider Americans’ interests expendable in the grand scheme of things internationally. If so, this would explain a lot of his foreign policy disasters around the world, which seem inexplicable otherwise.

Those critics who have been citing Barack Obama’s foreign policy fiascoes and disasters as evidence that he is incompetent may be overlooking the possibility that he has different priorities than the protection of the American people and America’s interests as a nation.

This is a monstrous possibility. But no one familiar with the history of the 20th century should consider monstrous possibilities as things to dismiss automatically. Nor should anyone who has followed Barack Obama’s behavior over his lifetime, and the values that behavior reveals.

A few critics who, early on, sensed something un-American, if not anti-American, in Barack Obama succumbed to the idea that he was not a native-born citizen. That claim blew up in their faces.

Nor was birthplace crucial anyway. People born overseas have put their lives on the line to defend America, and scientists who escaped from Europe in the 1930s played a major role in creating the nuclear bomb that made the United States a superpower. Conversely, the country’s most notorious traitor – Benedict Arnold – was born on American soil.

Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, that led to President Obama’s foreign-policy disasters around the world – with the crowning disaster of all, a nuclear Iran, looming on the horizon – it cannot be a simple lack of knowledge or experience. Various former members of the Obama administration are telling the same story, of information and advice from knowledgeable and experienced officials being ignored by this vain and headstrong man.

Back in the 18th century, Edmund Burke pointed out that, whatever the institutions of government, most of the outcomes of what it does “must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.”

What did the American voters know about the prudence and uprightness of this untried man they elected president, as a result of his glib rhetoric and his racial symbolism? It is not just bad luck when a reckless gamble turns out disastrously.

No one knows at this point how big the Ebola danger may turn out to be. But what we do know is that official reassurances about this and other dangers have become worthless.

The erosion of constitutional government over the years has become, under the Obama administration, a deluge of arbitrary edicts and defiant lawlessness protected by a grossly politicized Department of Justice.

It may be time to consider reorganizing the institutions of government, so that high officials who try to reassure the public about medical crises are not officials who serve “at the pleasure of the president.” Nor should the attorney general, whose duty is to enforce the laws, be part of an administration whose law-breakers the Justice Department can protect from prosecution.

EDUCATED, SMART & IGNORANT

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

George Orwell

Fact-Free Liberals

Written By : Thomas Sowell
January 21, 2014

Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words — “educated,” “smart” and “ignorant.” Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality? That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term “socialism.” Those communities all collapsed.

It was tried even earlier, in 18th century Georgia, when that was a British colony. People in Georgia ended up fleeing to other colonies, as many other people would vote with their feet in the 20th century, by fleeing many other societies around the world that were established in the name of economic equality.

But who reads history these days? Moreover, those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the left — which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study — are not likely to get much attention.

The net results are bright people, with impressive degrees, who have been told for years how brilliant they are, but who are often ignorant of facts that might cause them to question what they have been indoctrinated with in schools and colleges.

Recently Kirsten Powers repeated on Fox News Channel the discredited claim that women are paid only about three-quarters of what a man is paid for doing the same work.

But there have been empirical studies, going back for decades, showing that there is no such gap when the women and men are in the same occupation, with the same skills, experience, education, hours of work and continuous years of full-time work.

Income differences between the sexes reflect the fact that women and men differ in all these things — and more. Young male doctors earn much more than young female doctors. But young male doctors work over 500 hours a year more than young female doctors.

Then there is the current hysteria which claims that people in the famous “top one percent” have incomes that are rising sharply and absorbing a wholly disproportionate share of all the income in the country.

But check out a Treasury Department study titled “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005.” It uses income tax data, showing that people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes fall — repeat, fall — by 26 percent by 2005.

What about the other studies that seem to say the opposite? Those are studies of income brackets, not studies of the flesh-and-blood human beings who are moving from one bracket to another over time. More than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that their incomes were going down while there was widespread hysteria over the belief that their incomes were going up.

Empirical studies that follow income brackets over time repeatedly reach opposite conclusions from studies that follow individuals. But people in the media, in politics and even in academia, cite statistics about income brackets as if they are discussing what happens to actual human beings over time.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians’ warning that correlation is not causation. For example the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers — and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks.

But was correlation causation? American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites — and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.

When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans — and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.

Facts are not liberals’ strong suit. Rhetoric is.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.

SHOWING THEIR TRUE COLORS

The children slaughtered in Connecticut by a drugged up mental defective haven’t even been put into the ground yet and Obama is convening a gun banning convention in Washington DC today. Hysterically, the Philadelphia Chief of police is headed down to provide his brilliant insight. Meanwhile, we enter the final week of 2012 and Philly will finish the year with around 330 homicides, the highest since 2007. Philadelphia has the toughest gun laws in the state. I’m sure if we ban guns, the lowlife scumbags in North Philly and West Philly will abide by the new rules. Maybe a few NO GUNS ALLOWED signs will work. Doctor Sowell does his usual fantastic job poking holes in the left wing liberal storyline. I’m sure he hasn’t been invited to Washington DC for his thoughts on the matter. We wouldn’t want any divergent points of view.

If you had any remaining thought that the Mainstream media in this country was impartial and just journalists reporting the facts, you are badly mistaken. This past week was probably an eye opener for anyone with critical thinking skills. The propaganda and misinformation is being screeched over the airwaves, in Op-Eds and by Cartoonists across the land. The dead children were barely cold before Bloomberg, Obama, and the left wing do-gooder control freaks on MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the liberal propaganda machines began spewing their standard storyline. This tragedy will not go to waste. Maddow, Matthews and Shultz were probably high fiving as the news reports came in. There was a tingle up their legs.

I always knew the press had a liberal bias, but this tragedy has revealed the true colors of these faux journalists. It appears that 90% of the mainstream media has a liberal agenda and is nothing but a mouthpiece for the government assuming more and more control over every aspect of our lives. When it became clear that the murderer was a drugged up psychopath, just like the previous mass murderers, the MSM dutifully trotted out the mouthpieces for the drug industry and the psychology industry to deny that his mental illness and their drugs had anything to do with it. Corporate media helping corporate advertisers helping bought off politicians.

There will be new laws. There will be new regulations. There will be new rules. There will be new paperwork and bureaucrats and police. The mindless sheep will be surveyed and they will beg for gun control. Obama will have a grand signing ceremony surrounded by the families of the dead children. Crime rates will go higher. Homicides will go higher as the criminals will know that their victims won’t be armed. The do-gooders and the MSM will call for more laws to save the sheeple.

And so it goes.

Invincible Ignorance

by Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots’ choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a “study” that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

December 18, 2012

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

HUNGER HOAX

I’d like to report from West Philly that I again saw no emaciated starving poor lying on the sidewalks as I travelled to and from work this week. I did notice a tremendous number of obese poor shuffling along talking on their cell phones headed to their local KFC or Pizza place. The government drones certainly need to spend billions of your tax dollars to educate the poor to eat fruits and vegetables. I just know this will work.

The ‘Hunger’ Hoax

by Thomas Sowell

Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over “hunger in America.”

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, “one in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.

Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.

The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the “hunger in America” hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.

Burgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25th by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is “to get people to see cooking as a joy.” For this, he says, “we need action both cultural and political.” In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!

Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don’t find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don’t always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.

An arrogant elite’s condescension toward the people – treating them as children who have to be jollied along – is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society.

Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.

Why are such people called “poor”? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.

Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.

Politicians, welfare state bureaucrats and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment in their lives by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.

October 5, 2011