Walter E. Williams – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

Liberals’ Use of Black People

Last week’s column focused on the ways liberals use blacks in pursuit of their leftist agenda, plus their demeaning attitudes toward black people. Most demeaning are their double standards. It was recently reported that Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House majority whip, spoke at a 2002 gathering hosted by white supremacist leaders when he was a Louisiana state representative. Some are calling on Scalise to step down or for House Speaker John Boehner to fire him. There’s no claim that Scalise made racist statements.

Hardly anyone blinks an eye at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s racist statements, such as: “White folks was in the caves while we (blacks) was building empires. … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was. … We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

Sharpton again: “So (if) some cracker come and tell you ‘Well, my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold your pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of. That means their forefathers was crooks.” Sharpton also offered, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

Despite such racism, President Barack Obama has made Sharpton his go-to guy on matters of race. But not to worry. Obama himself spent 20 years listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic and racist sermons. The news media and intellectual elite don’t condemn Sharpton or Obama, because they have two standards of behavior: one for whites and a lower one for blacks.

The news media’s narrative about the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, is that a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man who was holding his hands up. Their New York City narrative is that a white cop used a chokehold that killed a black man. The news media people and their liberal allies know the facts, but they need to promote the appearance of injustice to keep black people in a state of grievance.

During grand jury testimony about the Ferguson incident, seven black witnesses testified that Michael Brown was charging the policeman when he was shot.

The autopsies, performed by three sets of forensic experts, including one representing Brown’s family, confirmed Officer Darren Wilson’s version of the event. The news media’s narrative of Eric Garner’s death in New York is that he died because a chokehold had stopped his breathing. He actually died later, in an ambulance, where his heart stopped while being taken to a hospital. The chokehold was instrumental in triggering Garner’s pre-existing health problems of acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity and heart disease, but he was not choked to death as claimed by the media. Both Brown and Garner would be alive today if they had not resisted arrest. But pointing that out would not serve the purpose of keeping blacks in a perpetual state of grievance.

I’m old enough to remember the racist lynching mentality of yesteryear. Regardless of the evidence, if a white woman merely accused a black man of raping her, the man was all but dead. Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955, was accused of flirting with a white woman. Klansmen took him to a barn. They beat him and gouged out one of his eyes. Then they shot him in the head and tossed his body in the Tallahatchie River.

The New York Times published the street name on which Officer Wilson lived. Had the frenzied mob caught up with him, regardless of evidence, he might have suffered the same fate as Till.

Multiethnic societies are inherently unstable, and how we handle matters of race is contributing to that instability. Decent Americans should see the dangers posed by America’s race hustlers, who are stacking up piles of combustible racial kindling, ready for a racial arsonist to set it ablaze.

Should Profiling Be Banned?

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling.

A good definition of profiling in general is the use of an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess for some other, difficult-to-observe characteristic. The reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling.

Imagine a chief of police in a city where there has been a rash of automobile hubcap thefts and he’s trying to capture the culprits. Should he have his officers stake out and investigate residents of senior citizen homes? What about spending resources investigating men and women 40 or older? I would imagine that he would have greater success in capturing the culprits by focusing most of his resources on younger people — and particularly on young men. Doing so would more likely lead to the capture of the culprits because hubcap theft is a young man’s game. My question to you is whether you’d bring charges against the police chief because he used age and sex profiling — and didn’t investigate seniors and middle-aged adults.

Some years ago, a Washington, D.C., taxicab commissioner, who is black, issued a safety advisory urging D.C.’s 6,800 predominantly black cabbies to refuse to pick up “dangerous looking” passengers. Cabbies in D.C. and other cities often bypass black males for fear of robbery or of being taken to an unsafe neighborhood. We seriously misunderstand the motives of a taxi driver who racially profiles and passes up a black customer if we use racism as the sole explanation for his behavior.

The reality is that race and other behavioral characteristics are correlated, including criminal behavior. That fact does not dispel the insult, embarrassment, anger and hurt a law-abiding black person might feel when being stopped by police, being watched in stores, being passed up by taxi drivers, standing at traffic lights and hearing car door locks activated, or being refused delivery by merchants who fear for their safety in his neighborhood. It is easy to direct one’s anger at the taxi driver or the merchant. However, the behavior of taxi drivers and owners of pizza restaurants cannot be explained by a dislike of dollars from black hands. A better explanation is they might fear for their lives. The true villains, to whom anger should be directed, are the tiny percentage of people in the black community who prey on both blacks and whites and have made black synonymous with crime.

There’s little-noticed racial profiling in medicine. Some racial and ethnic groups have a higher incidence of mortality from various diseases than the national average. Mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases are approximately 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. Cervical cancer rates are almost five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest known diabetes rate in the world. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as it is among white men. Would one condemn a medical practitioner for advising greater screening and monitoring of black men for cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer or greater screening and monitoring for cervical cancer among Vietnamese-American women or the same for diabetes among Pima Indians? It surely would be racial profiling — using race as an indicator of a higher probability of some other characteristic.

God would never do profiling of any sort, because God is omniscient. We humans lack that quality and must depend upon sometimes-crude substitutes for finding out things. By the way, my attempting to explain profiling doesn’t require one to take a position for or against it any more than the attempt to explain gravity requires one to be for or against gravity.

What’s Rule of Law?

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

President Barack Obama said just before the recent Ferguson, Missouri, riots, “First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law.” Most Americans have little or no inkling of what “rule of law” means. Many think it means obedience to whatever laws legislatures enact. That’s a vision that has led to human tragedy down through the ages. Historically, it sanctioned the divine right of kings, whereby a monarch was subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. More recently, it’s a vision that included the Nuremberg laws, which led to the genocide of European Jews, and the brutal laws of the regimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, which led to tens of millions of murders.

Let’s ask ourselves what the characteristics of laws in a free society should be. Let’s think about baseball rules (laws) as a way to approach this. Some players, through no fault of their own, hit fewer home runs than others. In order to create baseball justice, or what’s sometimes called a level playing field, how about a rule requiring pitchers to throw easier pitches to poorer home run hitters? Alternatively, we could make a rule that what would be a double for a power hitter is a home run for someone who doesn’t hit many homers.

Some pitchers aren’t so good as others. How about allowing those pitchers to stand closer to home plate? Better yet, we could rule their first two pitches as strikes, regardless of whether they are or not. In the interest of baseball justice, we might make special rules for some players and not for others. That would level the playing field between old players and young players, black players and white players and fast runners and slow runners. Umpires would become arbiters of baseball justice.

You say, “Williams, you can’t be serious! Can you imagine all the chaos that would ensue: players lobbying umpires, umpires deciding who gets what favor, and lawsuits — not to mention violence?” You’re absolutely right. The reason baseball games end peaceably — with players and team owners satisfied with the process, whether they win or lose — is that baseball rules (law) are applied equally to all players. They’re fixed, and umpires don’t make up rules as they go along. In other words, baseball rules meet the test of “abstractness.” They envision no particular game outcome in terms of winners and losers. The rules that govern baseball simply create a framework in which the game is played.

Laws or rules in a free society should have similar characteristics; there should be “rule of law.” Rule of law means that laws are certain and known in advance. Laws envision no particular outcome except that of allowing people to peaceably pursue their own objectives. Finally, and most importantly, laws are equally applied to everyone, including government officials.

Sir Henry Sumner Maine, probably the greatest legal historian ever, wrote, “The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.” In non-progressive societies, rule of law is absent. Laws are not general. They’re applied according to a person’s status or group membership. There’s rule not by legis, the Latin word for law, but by privilegium, the Latin term for private law.

Let’s look at our country and ask whether we live under rule of law. Just about every law that Congress enacts violates the requirements for rule of law. How do we determine violations of rule of law? It’s easy. See whether the law applies to particular Americans, as opposed to all Americans. See whether the law exempts public officials from its application. See whether the law is known in advance. See whether the law takes action against a person who has taken no aggressive action against another. If one conducts such a test, he will conclude that it is virtually impossible to find a single act of Congress that adheres to the principles of the rule of law. The supreme tragedy is Americans do not want rule of law.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Elite Contempt for Ordinary Americans

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and paid architect of Obamacare, has shocked and disgusted many Americans. In 2013, he explained to a University of Pennsylvania audience: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” He added that the “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” Most insulting were his previous statements that “the American voter is too stupid to understand” and his boast of Obamacare’s “exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”

We recall that back in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” That comment was just as insightful as her response to a CNSNews.com reporter who asked, “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Unable to respond intelligently, Speaker Pelosi gave her best political response: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” When asked recently about Gruber, Pelosi said: “I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.” She was quickly caught in a lie because during the 2009 health care debate, she mentioned Gruber’s analysis at a news conference.

One little-noticed feature of Gruber’s speeches was the type of place where he felt comfortable talking about the use of deception and mocking American intelligence. His speeches took place at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rhode Island. Universities are home to the academic elite — people who believe they have more intelligence than and superior wisdom to the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Gruber and his fellow academic elite have what they consider to be good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. But every tyrant who has ever lived has had what he considered good reasons.

America’s elite found on university campuses, in news media and in political office are chief supporters of reduced private property rights and reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion by the state. Their plan requires the elimination or attenuation of the free market and what is implied by it — voluntary exchange. Their reasoning is simple. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, tyrants want to replace the market and voluntary exchange with economic planning. Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

In a 1991 speech, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.” I watched the videos of Gruber’s speeches. Academics raised little concern as to either the dishonesty of Obamacare or the claim that Americans were too stupid to understand.

A study by my George Mason University colleague Daniel B. Klein, along with Charlotta Stern of the Swedish Institute for Social Research, titled “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists” (http://tinyurl.com/qxne3db) concluded: “The academic social sciences are pretty much a one-party system. Were the Democratic tent broad, the one-party system might have intellectual diversity. But the data show almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors when it comes to the regulatory, redistributive state: they like it. Especially when it comes to the minimum wage, workplace-safety regulation, pharmaceutical regulation, environmental regulation, discrimination regulation, gun control, income redistribution, and public schooling.”

Focusing only on Professor Gruber’s arrogance, we ignore the more important fact that he is highly representative of the academic mindset — the people who are brainwashing our youngsters.

Obama vs. Us

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, “Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he’s one or the other!” I’d say, “Hold your horses. What are his intentions?” If the driver’s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell’s column last week, in which he says, “Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.” After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn’t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation’s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.

Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: “We are going to fundamentally change America” and “We will change America. We will change the world.” Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.

As Sowell says, “people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.”

The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama’s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.

We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won’t, in violation of the Constitution’s Article 2, but is his administration’s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?

The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.

The courts are bound by the Constitution’s Article 3. Part of the courts’ responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.

Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we’ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It’s the American people who’ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington’s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.

Educational Fraud

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

It would be unreasonable to expect a student with the reading, writing and computing abilities of an eighth-grader to do well in college. If such a student were admitted, his retention would require that the college create dumbed-downed or phantom courses. The University of North Carolina made this accommodation; many athletes were enrolled in phantom courses in the department of African and African-American studies. The discovery and resulting scandal are simply the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a much larger problem.

A UNC learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the years 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Eight to 10 percent read below a third-grade level. These were black high-school graduates, and their high-school diplomas were clearly fraudulent. How cruel is it for UNC to admit students who have little chance of academically competing on the same basis as its other students? Black students so ill-equipped run the risk of ridicule and reinforcing white stereotypes of black mental incompetence. If these students are to retain their athletic eligibility or minimum GPA requirements, universities must engage in academic fraud.

Academic fraud benefits the entire university community except the black students. If universities can maintain the scholar-athlete charade, they earn tens of millions of dollars in sports revenue. Other than as a pretense, academics can be ignored. The university just has to create academic slums, where weak students can “succeed.” Stronger academic departments benefit because they do not have to compromise their standards and bear the burden of having to deal with weak students. Then there’s that feather in the diversity hat upon which university administrators are fixated. I guarantee you that academic fraud is by no means unique to UNC. As such, it represents gross dereliction and dishonesty on the parts of university administrators and faculty members.

Unfortunately, and to the detriment of black people, there is broad support among black members of the academic community for practices that lead to academic fraud. In the wake of the UNC scandal, the Carolina Black Caucus — a campus group of administrators, staff and faculty — rushed to the defense of the black athletes and the department of African and African-American studies, claiming an unfair investigation and unfair public and media attack. One campus student group said that the student-athlete fraud scandal is actually a result of “white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism.”

Focusing solely on the academic problems of blacks at the college level misses the point. It is virtually impossible to repair 12 years of rotten primary and secondary education in the space of four or five years of college. Proof of that is black student performance on postgraduate tests, such as the GRE, LSAT and MCAT. The black-white achievement gap on those tests is just as wide as it is on the SAT or ACT, which high schoolers take. That’s evidence that primary and secondary education deficiencies have not been repaired during undergraduate years.

The academic achievement level for white students is nothing to write home about. Only 25 percent of white high-school graduates taking the 2011 ACT met its benchmarks for college readiness in all subjects for which it tests. Only 4 percent of black students were college-ready in all subjects, according to their scores on the ACT.

The high academic failure rate among blacks means one of two things. Either black students cannot learn or primary and secondary schools, parental choices, black student attitudes, and cultural values regarding education are not conducive to what young blacks need for academic excellence. Colleges admitting underperforming black students conceal, foster and perpetuate the educational damages done to these youngsters in their earlier education.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Scholar-Athlete Charade

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Last year’s column “Dishonest Educators” (1/9/2013) reported on the largest school cheating scandal in U.S. history. In more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated, teachers changed student answers on academic achievement tests. Cheating orders came directly from school administrators. The cheating was brazen. One teacher told a colleague, “I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell.” Atlanta’s not alone. Teacher cheating has been discovered in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington.

Rampant academic cheating is not confined to primary and secondary schools. Cheating occurs in the nation’s colleges, as discovered during an investigation at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, the state’s flagship university. Over two decades, more than 3,100 students enrolled in and received credit for taking nonexistent phantom classes in the university’s department of African and African-American studies. Nearly 50 percent of the students taking the phantom classes were athletes on the university’s football and basketball teams.

Students officially enrolled in African and African-American studies lecture courses that never met. According to a university-commissioned report, Deborah Crowder, the department’s administrative assistant, required students to turn in a single paper. The papers were often largely plagiarized or padded with fluff. The students were given A’s or B’s after a cursory read. The classes were widely known on campus as “paper classes.” The department’s chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, was the professor of record for many of the fake classes. The university’s academic support program for student-athletes notified both Nyang’oro and Crowder of what grades students needed “to remain academically or athletically eligible.”

Professor Nyang’oro retired in 2012, after news of the scheme came to light. A grand jury indicted him on a felony charge for taking money for a class he didn’t teach. Recently, the state’s district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against Nyang’oro because of his cooperation with former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein’s investigation into athletic and academic issues at the university. So far, nine university employees have been fired or are under disciplinary review.

Let’s look at the motivation for this gross academic fraud. If you said follow the money, go to the head of the class. UNC’s basketball team generates $20 million in profits for the university. Football generates $22 million. Basketball and football coaches are paid salaries in excess of $2 million. The only way a university can pay those salaries and generate that kind of revenue is to assemble a winning team. That means many universities are more interested in an athlete’s playing skills than in his academic skills. In other words, whether a student can read, write and compute means little compared with whether he can slam-dunk a basketball or make touchdowns.

Last week, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt issued an apology and an institutional mea culpa. It has a hollow ring. She must have been aware of the efforts of Mary Willingham, the whistleblower academic adviser at UNC who had spoken out against the gross fraud regarding the academic performance of revenue-sport athletes. Plus, former UNC basketball player Rashad McCants told ESPN that he received top grades in classes that did not require attendance and that he turned in papers that tutors wrote for him.

This cheating scandal raises another issue, namely that of exploiting athletes for the benefit of universities. I think that the time has come to abandon the athlete-scholar charade. Universities ought to pay athletes a competitive salary in line with everyone else involved in college sports. Most basketball and football players will see their playing days end when they leave college. Many players who participate in university fraud in order to maintain their player eligibility are black. Where will they end up when they graduate in possession of a fraudulent college degree other than sad, embittered, used and having nowhere to turn?

While UNC’s cheating agenda has been fully exposed, I’d bet the rent money that similar fraudulent practices are widespread at other universities, and whistleblowers should come forth.

Africa: A Tragic Continent

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Here’s how my Aug. 11, 2003, column began: “Anyone who believes President Bush’s Africa initiative, including sending U.S. troops to Liberia, will amount to more than a hill of beans is whistling Dixie. Maybe it’s overly pessimistic, but most of Africa is a continent without much hope for its people.” More than a decade has passed since that assessment, and little has changed to suggest a more optimistic outlook. Now Ebola threatens the very existence of the West African nations Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Moreover, the deadly disease is likely to spread to neighboring nations.

Each year, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation publish an “Index of Economic Freedom,” which measures economic liberty around the world. Mauritius is the only one of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to rank among the 10 freest economies in the world. Botswana is the second-freest African country, followed by Cape Verde. South Africa used to be near the top but has since declined. Of the other sub-Saharan countries, 11 are rated as “repressed” and 26 are “mostly unfree.” Eight of the world’s 20 least free economies are in Africa’s sub-Saharan region.

Poverty is not a cause but a result of Africa’s problems. What African countries need the West cannot provide. They need personal liberty. That means a political system in which there are guarantees of private property rights, free markets, honest government and the rule of law. Africa’s poverty is, for the most part, self-inflicted. Some people might disagree because their college professors taught them that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Third World countries such as Ethiopia, Liberia, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, yet they are home to some of the world’s poorest people.

There’s no complete explanation for why some countries are affluent while others are poor, but there are some leads. Rank countries according to whether they are closer to being a free market economy or whether they’re closer to having a socialist or planned economy. Then rank countries by per capita income. Doing so, we will find a general, though not perfect, pattern whereby those having a larger measure of economic freedom find their citizens enjoying a higher standard of living. Also, if we ranked countries according to how Freedom House or Amnesty International rates human rights protections, we’d find that citizens of freer market economies enjoy a greater measure of human rights protections. You can bet the rent money that the correlation among free markets, wealth and human rights protections is not coincidental.

With but few exceptions, most African countries are worse off now than they were during colonialism, both in terms of standard of living and in terms of human rights protections. Once a food-exporting country, Zimbabwe recently stood near the brink of starvation. Sierra Leone is rich in minerals — especially diamonds — has highly fertile land and is the best port site in West Africa, but it has declined into a state of utter despair. Africa is the world’s most natural-resources-rich continent. It has 50 percent of the world’s gold, most of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, and millions of acres of untilled farmland, as well as other natural resources. Before independence, every African country was self-sufficient in food production; today many depend on imports, and others stand at the brink of famine.

Though there’s a strong case for us to help with the Ebola crisis, the worst thing Westerners could do to Africa would be to send more foreign aid. Foreign aid provides the financial resources that enable Africa’s grossly corrupt and incompetent regimes to buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for the leaders to live lavishly and set up “retirement” accounts in foreign banks.

Embarrassing Economists

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

So as to give some perspective, I’m going to ask readers for their guesses about human behavior before explaining my embarrassment by some of my fellow economists.

Suppose the prices of ladies jewelry rose by 100 percent. What would you predict would happen to sales? What about a 25 or 50 percent price increase? I’m going to guess that the average person would predict that sales would fall.

Would you make the same prediction about auto sales if cars’ prices rose by 100 percent or 25 or 50 percent? Suppose that you’re the CEO of General Motors and your sales manager tells you the company could increase auto sales by advertising a 100 percent or 50 percent price increase. I’m guessing that you’d fire the sales manager for both lunacy and incompetency.

Let’s try one more. What would you predict would happen to housing sales if prices rose by 50 percent? I’m guessing you’d predict a decline in sales. You say, “OK, Williams, you’re really trying our patience with these obvious questions. What’s your point?”

It turns out that there’s a law in economics known as the first fundamental law of demand, to which there are no known real-world exceptions. The law states that the higher the price of something the less people will take of it and vice versa. Another way of stating this very simple law is: There exists a price whereby people can be induced to take more of something, and there exists a price whereby people will take less of something.

Some people suggest that if the price of something is raised, buyers will take more or the same amount. That’s silly because there’d be no limit to the price that sellers would charge. For example, if a grocer knew he would sell more — or the same amount of — milk at $8 a gallon than at $4 a gallon, why in the world would he sell it at $4? Then the question becomes: Why would he sell it at $8 if people would buy the same amount at a higher price?

There are economists, most notably Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who suggest that the law of demand applies to everything except labor prices (wages) of low-skilled workers. Krugman says that paying fast-food workers $15 an hour wouldn’t cause big companies such as McDonald’s to cut jobs. In other words, Krugman argues that raising the minimum wage doesn’t change employer behavior.

Before we address Krugman’s fallacious argument, think about this: One of Galileo’s laws says the influence of gravity on a falling body in a vacuum is to cause it to accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. That applies to a falling rock, steel ball or feather. What would you think of the reasoning capacity of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who’d argue that because human beings are not rocks, steel balls or feathers, Galileo’s law of falling bodies doesn’t apply to them?

Krugman says that most minimum-wage workers are employed in what he calls non-tradable industries — industries that can’t move to China. He says that there are few mechanization opportunities where minimum-wage workers are employed — for example, fast-food restaurants, hotels, etc. That being the case, he contends, seeing as there aren’t good substitutes for minimum-wage workers, they won’t suffer unemployment from increases in the minimum wage. In other words, the law of demand doesn’t apply to them.

Let’s look at some of the history of some of Krugman’s non-tradable industries. During the 1940s and ’50s, there were very few self-serve gasoline stations. There were also theater ushers to show patrons to their seats. In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Now most gas stations are self-serve. Theater ushers disappeared. And only 2 percent of today’s labor force works in agricultural jobs. There are many other examples of buyers of labor services seeking and ultimately finding substitutes when labor prices rise. It’s economic malpractice for economists to suggest that they don’t.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

SLAVERY REPARATIONS HUSTLE

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination.

First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living.

Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today’s blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there’s a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?

There’s another moral or fairness issue. A large percentage, if not most, of today’s Americans — be they of European, Asian, African or Latin ancestry — don’t even go back three or four generations as American citizens. Their ancestors arrived on our shores long after slavery. What standard of justice justifies their being taxed to compensate blacks for slavery? For example, in 1956, thousands of Hungarians fled the brutality of the USSR to settle in the U.S. What do Hungarians owe blacks for slavery?

There’s another thorny issue. During slavery, some free blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves — to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these slaveholding blacks eligible for and deserving of reparations?

When African slavery began, there was no way Europeans could have enslaved millions of Africans. They had no immunity from diseases that flourished in tropical Africa. Capturing Africans to sell into slavery was done by Arabs and black Africans. Would reparations advocates demand that citizens of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and several Muslim states tax themselves to make reparation payments to progeny of people whom their ancestors helped to enslave?

Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged argument that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s nonsense that cannot be supported by fact. Slavery doesn’t have a very good record of producing wealth. Slavery was all over the South, and it was outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations argument about the riches of slavery, one would conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our nation were places where slavery flourished — Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.

One of the most ignored facts about slavery’s tragic history — and it’s virtually a secret today — is that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It did not become a moral issue until the 18th century. Plus, the moral crusade against slavery started in the West, most notably England.

I think the call for slavery reparations is simply another hustle. Advocates are not demanding that government send checks to individual black people. They want taxpayer money to be put into some kind of reparations fund from which black leaders decide who receives how much and for what purpose.

WHITE PRIVILEGE

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

What would you think if your 8-year-old came home and told you that “white privilege is something that white people have, meaning they have an advantage in a lot of things and they can get a job more easily”? You would have heard that at the recent 15th annual White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, attended by 2,500 public-school teachers, administrators and students from across the nation (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b).

The average parent has no idea of the devious indoctrination going on in classrooms in many public schools. What follows are some of the lessons of the conference.

In one of the workshops, “Examining White Privilege and Building Foundations for Social Justice Thinking in the Elementary Classroom,” educators Rosemary Colt and Diana Reeves told how teachers can “insert social justice, anti-racist information” into their lessons that “even little kids” can understand.

Kim Radersma, a former high-school English teacher, hosted a session titled “Stories from the front lines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher.” She said that teaching is a purely political act and that neutral people should “get the f—- out of education.” (http://tinyurl.com/q5adt2d). She also explained: “Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor. I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way” (http://tinyurl.com/q4z969q).

But the propaganda and lunacy go even deeper. Jacqueline Battalora, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, informed conference participants that “white people did not exist before 1681. Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681″ (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b). That’s truly incredible. If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)? Were these men people of color, or did they not exist?

John A. Powell, a University of California, Berkeley law professor, told his audience, “And right now, I’m going to suggest to you that race is driving almost everything that’s happening in the country.” He explained the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans by saying, “They took money away from protecting the levees because the levees were protecting black people.”

Stephanie Baran’s message to conference participants was that capitalism is the cause of racism in the world today. This adjunct professor at Kankakee Community College, who calls herself a vulgar Marxist, added that racism was invented in Colonial America by white capitalists as a tool to divide labor and keep the working class in their place.

Educator Paul Kivel explained what he sees as Christian hegemony, saying, “Very simply, I define it as the everyday pervasive, deep-seated and institutionalized dominance of Christian values, Christian institutions, leaders and Christians as a group, primarily for the benefit of Christian ruling elites.”

Speaker Leonard Zeskind, citing work done by the MacIver Institute, explained that “the longer you are in the tea party the more racist you become.” He added, “Parents put their kids in private schools because they’re racist.”

University of Iowa Professor Adrien Wing gave some of her observations about white privilege, asking, “Does having a black president change that? Has it changed that? Unfortunately, it hasn’t. … (President Obama) ends up being the front man for the system. … He works for the master of the system of white privilege.”

I can’t imagine people being stupid enough to believe all that was said at the White Privilege Conference. There’s something else at work. I think it’s white guilt. That’s why, for almost three decades, there has appeared on my website a certificate of amnesty and pardon that I’ve granted to Americans of European ancestry in the hope that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools (http://tinyurl.com/opd8vgd).

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