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What Thomas Sowell Can Teach Us About Standing Up to the Mob

The Biden administration has committed to “advance racial equity” with a host of leftist economic policies. These policies don’t work, says economist Thomas Sowell. (Photo: Free To Choose Media)
Joe Biden says he’ll “advance racial equity” by making “bold investments” in “Affordable Housing,” aiding “businesses owned by Black and Brown people,” establishing an “Equity Commission,” etc.
Gosh, that’ll do it.
Others demand reparations for slavery, more social programs, and defunding the police.
Yet, economist Thomas Sowell says, “I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where policies advocated for Blacks in the United States lifted any people out of poverty.”
The Left has declared war on our culture, but we should never back down, nor compromise our principles. Learn more now >>
Sowell’s a black man who grew up in poverty. His father died before he was born, and his mother died soon after.
“We were much poorer than the people in Harlem and most anywhere else today,” he reflects. “But in the sense of things you need to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most Black kids today.”
That’s because he discovered the public library. “When you start getting in the habit of reading when you’re 8 years old, it’s a different ballgame!”
Exploring Manhattan, he saw disparities in wealth. “Nothing in the schools or most of the books seemed to deal with that. Marx dealt with that,” says Sowell. He then became a Marxist.
What began to change his beliefs was his first job at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was told to focus on the minimum wage.
At first, he thought the minimum wage was good: “All these people are poor, and they’ll get a little higher income. That’ll be helpful,” he reasoned.
But then he realized: “There’s a downside. They may lose their jobs.”
His colleagues at the Labor Department didn’t want to think about that. “I came up with how we might test this. I was waiting to hear ‘congratulations!’ (but) I could see these people were stunned. They’d say, ‘oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that would ruin us all.’”
Once he saw how government workers often cared more about preserving their turf than actually solving problems, Sowell rethought his assumptions.
He turned away from Marxism and became a free market economist, writing great books like “Basic Economics,” “Race and Culture,” and my favorite title, “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”
Today’s self-anointed leaders talk constantly about how America’s “systemic racism” holds black people back.
“Propaganda,” Sowell calls it. “If you go back into the ’20s, you find that married-couple families were much more prevalent among Blacks. As late as 1930, Blacks have lower unemployment rates than whites.”
But if systemic racism was the cause of inequality, he says, “All these things that we complain about, and attribute to the era of slavery, should’ve been worse in the past than in the present!”
Sowell says the bigger cause of black Americans’ problems today is government welfare initiated in the 1960s. The programs encouraged people to become dependent on handouts.
“You began to have the mindset that goes with the welfare state,” Sowell says. “No stigma any longer attached to being on relief.”
Sowell concludes that government programs that are supposed to help minorities do more harm than good. Affirmative Action, for example.
In 1965, he took a teaching position at Cornell. The college, he said, had lowered admission standards to diversify the student body, and most students admitted under affirmative action did not do well.
“Half of the Black students were on academic probation,” he wrote, later adding, “Something like one-fourth of all the Black students going to MIT do not graduate. [There is] a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school.”
Saying such things makes Sowell an outcast in academia, and now most everywhere.
Sowell writes, “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules… that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.”
Starting next week, you can watch a new documentary on Sowell’s life, “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World,” online at FreeToChooseNetwork.org.
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March 31, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Please explain to me if you ever do plan to balance the budget while you are President? I have written these things below about you and I really do think that you don’t want to cut spending in order to balance the budget. It seems you ever are daring the Congress to stop you from spending more.

“The credit of the United States ‘is not a bargaining chip,’ Obama said on 1-14-13. However, President Obama keeps getting our country’s credit rating downgraded as he raises the debt ceiling higher and higher!!!!
Washington Could Learn a Lot from a Drug Addict
Just spend more, don’t know how to cut!!! Really!!! That is not living in the real world is it?
Making more dependent on government is not the way to go!!
Why is our government in over 16 trillion dollars in debt? There are many reasons for this but the biggest reason is people say “Let’s spend someone else’s money to solve our problems.” Liberals like Max Brantley have talked this way for years. Brantley will say that conservatives are being harsh when they don’t want the government out encouraging people to be dependent on the government. The Obama adminstration has even promoted a plan for young people to follow like Julia the Moocher.
David Ramsey demonstrates in his Arkansas Times Blog post of 1-14-13 that very point:
Arkansas Politics / Health Care Arkansas’s share of Medicaid expansion and the national debt
Posted by David Ramsey on Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 1:02 PM

- Mark Herreid
- Baby carrot image via Shutterstock
Imagine standing a baby carrot up next to the 25-story Stephens building in Little Rock. That gives you a picture of the impact on the national debt that federal spending in Arkansas on Medicaid expansion would have, while here at home expansion would give coverage to more than 200,000 of our neediest citizens, create jobs, and save money for the state.
Here’s the thing: while more than a billion dollars a year in federal spending would represent a big-time stimulus for Arkansas, it’s not even a drop in the bucket when it comes to the national debt.
Currently, the national debt is around $16.4 trillion. In fiscal year 2015, the federal government would spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion to fund Medicaid expansion in Arkansas if we say yes. That’s about 1/13,700th of the debt.
It’s hard to get a handle on numbers that big, so to put that in perspective, let’s get back to the baby carrot. Imagine that the height of the Stephens building (365 feet) is the $16 trillion national debt. That $1.2 billion would be the length of a ladybug. Of course, we’re not just talking about one year if we expand. Between now and 2021, the federal government projects to contribute around $10 billion. The federal debt is projected to be around $25 trillion by then, so we’re talking about 1/2,500th of the debt. Compared to the Stephens building? That’s a baby carrot.
______________
Here is how it will all end if everyone feels they should be allowed to have their “baby carrot.”
How sad it is that liberals just don’t get this reality.
Here is what the Founding Fathers had to say about welfare. David Weinberger noted:
While living in Europe in the 1760s, Franklin observed: “in different countries … the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (15 October 1747 – 5 January 1813) was a Scottish lawyer, writer, and professor. Tytler was also a historian, and he noted, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan
April 6, 1816
[Jefferson affirms that the main purpose of society is to enable human beings to keep the fruits of their labor. — TGW]
To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, “the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.” If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra taxation violates it.
[From Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert E. Bergh (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 14:466.]
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Jefferson pointed out that to take from the rich and give to the poor through government is just wrong. Franklin knew the poor would have a better path upward without government welfare coming their way. Milton Friedman’s negative income tax is the best method for doing that and by taking away all welfare programs and letting them go to the churches for charity.
_____________
_________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Williams with Sowell – Minimum Wage

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell – Reducing Black Unemployment
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