I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
report from JP Morgan Chase & Co. finds that the summer employment rate for teenagers is nearing a record low at 34 percent. The report surveyed 15 U.S. cities and found that despite an increase in summer positions available over a two year period, only 38 percent of teens and young adults found summer jobs.
This would be worrying by itself given the importance of work experience in entry-level career development, but it is also part of a long-term trend. Since 1995 the rate of seasonal teenage employment has declined by over a third from around 55 percent to 34 percent in 2015. The report does not attempt to examine why summer youth employment has fallen over the past two decades. If it had, it would probably find one answer in the minimum wage.
Most of the 15 cities studied in this report have minimum wage rates above the federal level, with cities such as Seattle having a rate more than double that. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics seen in the chart show exactly how a drastic rise in the minimum wage rate affects the rate of employment.
Seattle has experienced the largest 3 month job loss in its history last year, following the introduction of a $15 minimum wage. We can only imagine the impact such a change has had on the prospects of employment for the young and unskilled.
Raising the minimum wage reduces the number of jobs in the long-run. It is difficult to measure this long-run effect in terms of the numbers of never materializing jobs. However, the key mechanism behind the model—that more labor-intensive establishments are replaced by more capital-intensive ones—is supported by evidence. That is why recent research suggesting that minimum wages barely reduce the number of jobs in the short-run, should be taken with caution. Several years down the line, a higher real minimum wage can lead to much larger employment losses.
Several empirical studies have been conducted over the course of more than two decades, with all evidence pointing toward negative effects of minimum wage rises on employment levels among the young and unskilled. A study conducted by David Neumark and William Wascher in 1995 noted that “such increases raise the probability that more-skilled teenagers leave school and displace lower-skilled workers from their jobs. These findings are consistent with the predictions of a competitive labor market model that recognizes skill differences among workers. In addition, we find that the displaced lower-skilled workers are more likely to end up non-enrolled and non-employed.”
Policy makers who continuously raise the minimum wage simply assure that those young people, whose skills are not sufficient to justify that kind of wage, will instead remain unemployed. In an interview Milton Freidman famously asked “What do you call a person whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage? Permanently unemployed.”
The upshot: Raising the minimum wage at both federal and local levels denies youth the skills and experience they need to get their career going.
_____________
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
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
In another display of selfless masochism, I watched the Trump–Biden debate last night.
The candidates behaved better, for whatever that’s worth, but I was disappointed that there so little time (and even less substance) devoted to economic issues.
One of the few exceptions was the brief tussle regarding the minimum wage. Trump waffled on the issue, so I don’t give him any points, but Biden fully embraced the Bernie Sanders policyof basically doubling the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The economic of this issue are very simple. If a worker generates, say, $9 of revenue per hour, and politicians say that worker can’t be employed for less than $15 per hour, that’s a recipe for unemployment.
Earlier this month, Professor Steven Landsburg on the University of Rochester opined for the Wall Street Journal on Biden’s minimum-wage policy.
It isn’t only that I think Mr. Biden is frequently wrong. It’s that he tends to be wrong in ways that suggest he never cared about being right. He makes no attempt to defend many of his policies with logic or evidence, and he deals with objections by ignoring or misrepresenting them. …Take Mr. Biden’s stance on the federal minimum wage, which he wants to increase to $15 an hour from $7.25. …So why does Mr. Biden want to raise the minimum wage…? He hasn’t said, so I have two guesses, neither of which reflects well on him. Guess No. 1: He’s dissembling about the cost. …The minimum wage…comes directly from employers but indirectly (after firms shrink and prices rise) from consumers. A minimum wage is a stealth tax on eating at McDonald’s or shopping at Walmart. …Mr. Biden should acknowledge the cost of wage hikes and argue for accepting it. Instead he’s silent about the cost, hoping he can foist it on people who won’t realize they’re footing this bill. Guess No. 2: He’s rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. New York is going to vote for Mr. Biden. The state also has a high cost of living and high wages—so New Yorkers would be largely unaffected by the minimum-wage hike. Alabama is going to vote against Mr. Biden. Alabama has a low cost of living and relatively low wages—so under the Biden plan Alabama firms would shrink, to the benefit of competitors in New York. Alabama workers and consumers would pay a greater price than New Yorkers.
And Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute recently highlighted some of the adverse effects for unskilled workers.
It’s an economic reality that workers compete against other workers, not against employers, for jobs, and higher wages in the labor market. And it’s also true that lower-skilled, limited-experience, less-educated workers compete against higher-skilled, more experienced, more educated workers for jobs. …If the minimum wage is increased…, that will…take away from unskilled workers the one advantage they currently have to compete against skilled workers – the ability to offer to work for a significantly lower wage than what skilled workers can command. …Result of a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour? Demand for skilled workers goes up, demand for unskilled workers goes down, and employment opportunities for unskilled workers are reduced.
Since I recently shared videos with Milton Friedman’s wisdom on both taxes and spending, here’s what he said about the minimum wage.
Let’s share one last bit of evidence. Mark Perry’s article referenced some new research by Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa Kahn, and Jonathan Meer.
Here’s what those scholars found in a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
We investigate whether changes in firms’ skill requirements are channels through which labor markets respond to minimum wage increases. …Data from the American Community Survey show that recent minimum wage changes resulted in increases in the average age and education of the individuals employed in low-wage jobs. Data on job vacancy postings show that the prevalence of a high school diploma requirement increases at the same time. The shift in skill requirements begins within the first quarter of a minimum wage hike. Further, it results from both within-firm shifts in postings and across-firms shifts towards firms that sought more-skilled workers at baseline. Given the poor labor market outcomes of individuals without high school diplomas, these findings have substantial policy relevance. This possibility was recognized well over a century ago by Smith (1907), who noted that the “enactment of a minimum wage involves the possibility of creating a class prevented by the State from obtaining employment.” Further, negative effects may be exacerbated for minority groups in the presence of labor market discrimination.
So why do politicians push for higher minimum wages, when all the evidence suggests that vulnerable workers bear the heaviest cost?
Part of the answer is that they don’t understand economics and don’t care about evidence.
But there’s also a more reprehensible answer, which is that they do understand, but they want to curry favor with union bosses, and those union bosses push for higher minimum wages as a way of reducing competition from lower-skilled workers.
P.S. Here’s my CNBC debate with Joe Biden’s top economic advisor on this issue.
P.P.P.S. But if you’re pressed for time, don’t listen to me pontificate. Instead, watch this video.
_____________
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
While I understandablydon’t like politicians, I rarely think they are stupid. They do lots of idiotic things, of course, but they are making calculated decisions that it’s okay to hurt the economy if they achieve some political benefit. That’s immoral, but not dumb.
However, sometimes politicians say things so absurdly inaccurate that it makes me wonder if they actually are…what’s the politically correct term?…cognitively challenged.
Moreover, it appears that “all” doesn’t include the Congressional Budget Office.
The bean counters at CBO don’t have a reputation for being fire-breathing libertarians, so it’s especially noteworthy that its new estimates show that a higher minimum wage will reduce economic output, destroy 1.4 million jobs, raise prices, and increase the burden of government spending.
As the old joke goes, “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”
And “all” doesn’t include America’s premier source for financial news. The Wall Street Journalopined on Biden’s plan this morning.
…his proposal for a $15 federal minimum wage…by 2025, according to the CBO’s new average estimate, would result in a loss of 1.4 million jobs.The idled workers would be disproportionately younger and less educated, and CBO projects that half of themwould drop out of the labor force. …The federal budget deficit through 2031 would increase $54 billion, CBO says, as the government spent more on unemployment benefits and health-care programs. …setting the minimum wage at a high of $15 would essentially put the country through an economic experiment. This would mean imposing the urban labor costs of San Francisco and Manhattan on every out-of-the-way gas station in rural America.
Of course, we’ve already experienced some real-world experiments.
P.P.S. I strongly recommend this video on the topic from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
And now Joe Biden is showing he can be similarly detached from the real world, claiming this past weekend that a $15-per-hour minimum wage is a good idea because, “all the economics show that if you do that the whole economy rises.”
Though maybe that’s true if one can somehow claim that “1 out of 40” is the same as “all.”
It sometimes feels as if advocates and opponents of minimum wage hikes are talking in different universes. In large part, that stems from completely opposite interpretations of the balance of the academic literature on the subject.
Research on the minimum wage in the U.S. has been extensive, yet one can read Paul Krugman claiming “There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America,” right through to other academics concluding “There is considerable support for the competitive market hypothesis that an effective minimum wage would result in lower employment.”
Which view better reflects our understanding? In a new working paper, economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley assemble the entire set of published papers that examine the impact of minimum wage hikes on employment outcomes at the state and local level in the U.S. since 1992. Contacting the researchers who wrote the papers, they identify those researchers’ “core” or preferred results in each case whenever possible, using the gathered estimates to summarize the last three decades of research.
Their conclusions, contrary to what you might read in the rest of the media, are clear:
The overwhelming majority of papers analyzing the U.S. estimate a negative effect on employment of minimum wage hikes (79.3 percent of them). In fact more than half of all papers have a negative impact that is statistically significant at the 10% level or more.
The negative impact is stronger for teens, young adults, and less‐educated workers, and especially strong for directly affected workers (those who see their wage rate increase automatically through the policy.)
There is no evidence of these impacts becoming less negative in studies from more recent years.
Studies that look at the impact of minimum wage hikes on low‐wage industries (rather than population groups) are less likely to find a negative impact on employment. But these are less good at identifying the impact of a wage floor hike on low‐wage workers as a group, because the proportion of workers directly affected is obviously smaller, and the employment results may reflect employers substituting low‐skilled labor for higher‐skilled labor.
Neumark and Shirley summarize their findings by saying: “our evidence indicates that concluding that the body of research evidence fails to find disemployment effects of minimum wages requires discarding or ignoring most of the evidence.”
Next time someone says “there’s no evidence the minimum wage costs jobs or hours,” point them in the direction of this paper, or indeed the Cato Policy Analysis of University of California, San Diego economist Jeffrey Clemens, who concluded that the “new conventional wisdom misreads the totality of recent evidence for the negative effects of minimum wages. Several strands of research arrive regularly at the conclusion that high minimum wages reduce opportunities for disadvantaged individuals.”
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Cato scholars have also written on the economic arguments used to justify a $15 federal minimum wage, the particular risks of hiking minimum wages during this pandemic, and why there is no free lunch where minimum wage hikes are concerned (even if employment does not fall).
Ep. 4 – From Cradle to Grave [6/7]. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980)
February 9, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Thank you for taking time to have your office try and get a pulse on what is going on out here in the country.
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
All too often, the policy debates of today are simply refights of the battles of yesteryear. As a result, old arguments often retain a striking relevance.
In February 1973, economist Milton Friedman gave an interview to Playboy magazine. It was a wide ranging interview, covering topics from monetary policy to political philosophy. Friedman was an economist with a rare gift for translating technical arguments into clear prose (as you will find in his books Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose). His remarks on the minimum wage, as given in that interview, are startlingly contemporary.
PLAYBOY: But you prefer the laissez-faire—free-enterprise—approach. FRIEDMAN: Generally. Because I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse. Take, for example, the minimum wage, which has the effect of making the poor people at the bottom of the wage scale—those it was designed to help—worse off than before.
PLAYBOY: How so? FRIEDMAN: If you really want to get a feeling about the minimum wage, there’s nothing more instructive than going to the Congressional documents to read the proposals to raise the minimum wage and see who testifies. You very seldom find poor people testifying in favor of the minimum wage. The people who do are those who receive or pay wages much higher than the minimum. Frequently Northern textile manufacturers. John F. Kennedy, when he was in Congress, said explicitly that he was testifying in favor of a rise in the minimum wage because he wanted protection for the New England textile industry against competition from the so-called cheap labor of the South. But now look at it from the point of that cheap labor. If a high minimum wage makes unfeasible an otherwise feasible venture in the South, are people in the South benefited or harmed? Clearly harmed, because jobs otherwise available for them are no longer available. A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
PLAYBOY: Isn’t it, rather, a law that requires employers to pay a fair and livable wage? FRIEDMAN: How is a person better off unemployed at a dollar sixty an hour than employed at a dollar fifty? No hours a week at a dollar sixty comes to nothing. Let’s suppose there’s a teenager whom you as an employer would be perfectly willing to hire for a dollar fifty an hour. But the law says, no, it’s illegal for you to hire him at a dollar fifty an hour. You must hire him at a dollar sixty. Now, if you hire him at a dollar sixty, you’re really engaging in an act of charity. You’re paying a dollar fifty for his services and you’re giving him a gift of 10 cents. That’s something few employers, quite naturally, are willing to do or can afford to do without being put out of business by less generous competitors. As a result, the effect of a minimum-wage law is to produce unemployment among people with low skills. And who are the people with low skills? In the main, they tend to be teenagers and blacks, and women who have no special skills or have been out of the labor force and are coming back. This is why there are abnormally high unemployment rates among these groups.
_____________
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
While I freely self-identify as a libertarian, I don’t think of myself as a philosophical ideologue.
Instead, I’m someone who likes digging into data to determine the impact of government policy. And because I’ve repeatedly noticed that more government almost always leads to worse outcomes, I’ve become a practical ideologue.
In other words, when looking at at an issue, I now have a default assumption that government is going to be the problem, not the solution.
I think more people will share my viewpoint if they peruse this chart from Mark Perry.
It shows changes in prices for selected goods and services over the past 21 years, and the inescapable conclusion (as I noted when writing about the 2014 version of his chart) is that we get higher relative prices in sectors where there’s the most government intervention.
By contrast, we see falling relative prices (and sometimes falling absolute prices!) in sectors where there is little or no government intervention.
Here’s some of Mark’s description of what we can learn from his chart.
I’ve updated the chart above with price changes through the end of last year. During the most recent 21-year period from January 2000 to December 2020, the CPI for All Items increased by 54.6% and the chart displays the relative price increases over that time period for 14 selected consumer goods and services, and for average hourly wages.…Various observations that have been made about the huge divergence in price patterns over the last several decades… The greater (lower) the degree of government involvement in the provision of a good or service the greater (lower) the price increases (decreases) over time, e.g., hospital and medical costs, college tuition, childcare with both large degrees of government funding/regulation and large price increases vs. software, electronics, toys, cars and clothing with both relatively less government funding/regulation and falling prices.
We find that prices have skyrocketed in areas of the healthcare sector where government plays a big role, especially hospital care.
By contrast, prices have been steady (or even falling!) in areas of the healthcare sector where competitive markets are allowed to operate, most notably for cosmetic procedures.
It’s almost as if it makes sense to have a default assumption that government is the problem rather than the solution.
P.S. While the data in Mark’s chart tell a depressing story about the harmful effect of government intervention, he shares one bit of good news in his article.
The annual increase in college tuition and fees of only 1.4% last year was the smallest annual increase in the history of the CPI for college tuition and fees going back to 1978, and the only annual increase ever below 2%. That increase is far below the average annual increase in college tuition of nearly 7% over the last 42 years. So perhaps the “higher education bubble” is finally starting to show signs of deflating?
1. You spend your own money on yourself.
2. You spend your own money on someone else.
3. You spend someone else’s money on yourself.
4. You spend someone else’s money on someone else.
You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.
Jason Fried wrote this on Mar 03 2010 There are43 comments.
About Jason Fried
Jason co-founded 37signals back in 1999. He also co-authored REWORK, the New York Times bestselling book on running a “right-sized” business. Co-founded, co-authored… Can he do anything on his own?
And I don’t like Obamacare because it further enriches and empowers Washington’s political class.
But I also like being honest and that means I’m willing to acknowledge that there’s one small part of Obamacare that will have a positive impact.
More specifically, the so-called Cadillac tax on expensive employer-provided health plans will slightly reduce the distortion in the tax code that encourages over-insurance and exacerbates the healthcare system’s pervasive third-party payer problem.
Indeed, we’re seeing some signs of this already, even though the tax preference isn’t capped until 2018. Here are some excerpts from a story published by Fox News, starting with a description of the law.
…companies desperate to avoid a 40 percent ObamaCare “Cadillac tax” are finding ways to shift the costs to workers. The so-called “Cadillac tax,” now four years away, will affect health plans that spend more than $10,200 per worker. “The excise tax, when it hits in 2018, will affect both employers and employees,”said Brian Marcotte, president of the National Business Group on Health.
Allow me to make an important correction before sharing other parts of the story.
Companies aren’t shifting costs to workers. The money currently spent on health insurance policies is part of total employee compensation.
Think of it this way. If a company hires you for a salary of $50,000 and also includes a $10,000 health insurance policy, what’s your total compensation?
If you give an answer other than $60,000, you’re either very bad at math or you have the logic skills of a politician.
So the story should have stated that the Cadillac tax is merely making workers more aware of costs that already exist.
Thanks for letting me vent. Now back to our main point, which is that the Cadillac tax discourages overinsurance, and this is already leading to some positive changes in the marketplace.
Employees will get incentives to reduce costs through such arrangements as wellness programs, including losing weight or stopping smoking. Meanwhile, employers are shifting workers into plans with higher deductibles, just as ObamaCare does in the health care exchanges, and using health savings accounts to help defray the costs.
I’m particularly happy that employers and employees are shifting to plans with higher deductibles. As I’ve explained before, health insurance should cover large, unanticipated costs, such as the onset of cancer or getting injured in a car wreck.
But it shouldn’t cover annual checkups, elective surgery, and other routine and/or predictable expenses.
And we have one other bit of good news. The tax isn’t going to raise nearly as much money as the politicians wanted!
The “Cadillac tax” was originally intended to take effect sooner, but unions and other groups convinced officials to delay it until 2018, reducing the anticipated income from $137 billion to $80 billion over ten years. But many analysts predict it will be far less than that. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution said, “before then, it’s expected that most of the businesses that offer that form of insurance will back off and make the insurance less generous, so the tax won’t bite.” …if employers are able to avoid it and less than expected is collected, ObamaCare could fall tens of billions short in paying for itself as promised.
I should hasten to add, by the way, that I’m glad that Obamacare isn’t paying for itself since that simply means lots of taxes to accompany all the additional spending.
I’d be even happier, of course, if we could figure out how to get rid of all the spending as well.
Just in case folks are thinking I’ve gone soft, let’s close today’s post with some humor directed at the rest of Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act, in its brief time on this earth, has endured its share of storm and stress. The bungled rollout of the federal online interface cost proponents lots of political capital. There have been high-wire legal challenges to surmount. While public approval of the law’s ends remains steadily high, the popularity of the law itself is often recorded as lacking. There have been uneasy periods for Obamacare’s chief proponents as they’ve waited for enrollment milestones to be reached and rate-hike hysteria to be put to bed. (There’s recent news on that front, actually.) And as the law promises so much, over such a long time frame, there will be more uneasy periods to endure for the lawmakers who put their stamp on the reform.
But the simple fact is that some lawmakers voted for Obamacare and some voted against it, and there’s only so far any of them can run from their decision. That’s why I’ve had the occasion to talk about “the Obamacare bet.” The bill’s opponents have largely settled on a claim: The law is going to fail and their admonitions against it will be proven wise and correct. The bill’s supporters should go ahead and stake the opposite claim. Many of those who supported the bill, however, have been reluctant to go “all in” on the decision they made. Especially among those who voted for the law and have since found themselves in a tough electoral race.
Today, however, comes a change. As Greg Sargent reports over at The Plum Line, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) — currently in a tough re-election race against his Republican opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton — is up with a new ad in which he heralds his yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. You can watch the spot and read the transcript below. While Pryor doesn’t exactly go “all in,” he lays more of his chips on the felt.
DAVID: When Mark was diagnosed with cancer, we thought we might lose him.
MARK: My family and my faith helped me through the rough times.
DAVID: But you know what? Mark’s insurance company didn’t want to pay for the treatment that ultimately saved his life.
MARK: No one should be fighting an insurance company while you’re fighting for your life. That’s why I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
(David, by the way, is Mark’s dad as well as a former senator from and governor of Arkansas.)
Now Mark Pryor’s ad could have been a bit bolder. You’ll note that nowhere does he say the words “Obamacare” or “Affordable Care Act,” just that he “pass[ed] a law.” Of course, he does make mention of the law’s most popular features — it prevents people from getting kicked off plans when the time comes to avail themselves of their coverage, and it ends the practice of denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. It’s hard to imagine voters tolerating a return to the status quo ante, which is one of the reasons that it’s been so devilish for the law’s opponents to craft an alternative.
Pryor may have buried the lead in this ad, in fact. As Gallup reported earlier this month, Arkansas leads “all other states in the sharpest reductions in their uninsured rate among adult residents since the healthcare law’s requirement to have insurance took effect at the beginning of the year.”
Republicans will undoubtedly cast this as an acknowledgment that their attacks on Pryor over the law are working and could no longer be ignored. They’ll argue Pryor is, in desperation, using his faith and personal experience as a shield against those attacks. But this misses what’s really going on here. This ad is actually coming at a point where there are signs the anti-Obamacare fires are cooling somewhat. GOP advertising against the law has fallen off sharply, and is surprisingly low in Arkansas.
This is correct. As Bloomberg News’ Heidi Pryzbyla reported earlier this week, Republicans have cut way back on on ads that attack Obamacare, in “a sign that the party’s favorite attack against Democrats is losing its punch.” Pryzbyla continues:
The shift — also taking place in competitive states such as Arkansas and Louisiana — shows Republicans are easing off their strategy of criticizing Democrats over the Affordable Care Act now that many Americans are benefiting from the law and the measure is unlikely to be repealed.
“The Republican Party is realizing you can’t really hang your hat on it,” said Andrew Taylor, a political science professor at North Carolina State University. “It just isn’t the kind of issue it was.”
There is a good reason for this shift. As Matt Yglesias pointed out back in June, the “phony Obamacare debate” — the one that broadly alleged that death panels existed, that the fubar launch of the federal website was the law’s death knell, that enrollment numbers would be way off target — has run its course, leaving only the most fundamental debate of all:
[Obamacare] is a large-scale effort to improve living standards for people in the bottom half of the income distribution by giving them additional economic resources. One of America’s political parties doesn’t like that idea in any non-health context and they don’t like it for health care either. They think the money it costs to provide those subsidies should be taken away, and it should be given to high-income households in the form of tax cuts.
This is an excellent and important policy debate to have. One of the great ideological issues not just of our time and place, but of democratic politics across eras and countries. Should economic resources be distributed more equally or less equally?
Since Yglesias wrote that piece, we’ve seen a brief return to the “phony” debate, thanks to a pair of judges on the D.C. Circuit appeals court, who issued a ruling in the Halbig v. Burwell case contending that (to quote Simon Maloy in Salon) “a single poorly worded snippet of the Affordable Care Act invalidates subsidies for people who purchased health coverage through the federal exchanges.” As Maloy inventively points out, this is a hilariously bad-faith argument to make, akin to George Costanza’s “Moops” argument in “Seinfeld”:
Beyond that, however, we are ultimately left with the discussion that Yglesias mentions as the real underlying debate: whether it is right and proper to redistribute money from the top to the bottom so that those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder can live and work longer without going into catastrophic debt.
This argument’s signature virtue is that — unlike all the “death panels” and doom-saying — it is, legitimately, a good-faith argument. Which may cause one to wonder: Why has it taken so long to burn off all the bad-faith arguments and get down to the real bone of contention? I’d posit that arguing that poor people aren’t morally fit enough to deserve health insurance lacks a certain salability outside the Ayn Rand set.
With that in mind, you might think it’s strange that so many of Obamacare’s proponents have seemed reluctant to take “the Obamacare bet.” I agree! It’s strange. From my perspective, the die has long been cast, so lawmakers who affirmed the bill with their vote may as well own it. Pryor’s ad suggests that perhaps those lawmakers long deemed to be vulnerable due to their votes on the Affordable Care Act may be coming around to this position.
None of this should cause you to expect some sort of sea change in the overall fundamentals of the 2014 election. The GOP is still in great shape for the midterms, and they may even discover that they don’t need an anti-Obamacare blitz to win in November. But that’s really just an even better reason for vulnerable lawmakers who supported the Affordable Care Act to put some sustained ballyhoo behind their decision to vote for the law. Win or lose, may as well remind people where you stood. Pryor’s effort is a lot bolder than most.
___________ Halbig, King and ObamaCare (Michael F. Cannon) Published on Jul 22, 2014 Two federal circuit courts have now ruled on ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges and have arrived at different conclusions. Michael Cannon, one of the chief architects of this legal challenge, explains what the rulings mean and what’s in store for the future health […]
Arkansas’ own Nick Horton featured on Dan Mitchell’s blog!!! Below is the best video I have ever seen on Obamacare’s lies about Medicaid!!!! An Under-Appreciated Victory over Obamacare July 14, 2014 by Dan Mitchell Let’s enjoy some semi-good news today. We’ve discussed many times why Obamacare is bad news, whether we’re looking at it from […]
_______________ Obamacare increased government spending by expanding Medicaid and big subsidies for private insurance and it will bankrupt country eventually!!! The Hidden Economic Damage of Obamacare June 25, 2014 by Dan Mitchell Obamacare resulted in big increases in the fiscal burden of government (ironically, it would be even worse if Obama hadn’t unilaterally suspended parts of […]
________ Obamacare will explode the budget and we must eliminate it!!! Obamacare is Bad News for Your Wallet Today and Worse News for Your Wallet Tomorrow July 8, 2014 by Dan Mitchell I wrote a few weeks ago about the hidden economic damage of Obamacare, particularly the harm to the job market. Today, let’s get further […]
_________ Obama keeps putting off Obamacare like he was a king!!!! Some of the cartoons below point this out. Dan Mitchell always has great posts about the issues that I care about and he does a good job of picking out editorial cartoons that are very funny too. I really do miss Milton Friedman but […]
________ Will Republicans defeat Obamacare in Arkansas? February 21, 2014 4:24PM Spending Restraint in Arkansas By Nicole Kaeding Share For the fourth day in a row, the Arkansas House of Representatives has refused to approve the yearly appropriation for its Medicaid program, dubbed the “private-option.” If the legislature continues this refusal and reverses its […]
Open letter to President Obama (Part 520) (Emailed to White House on 5-3-13.) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get […]
__________ Obama just made the 18th executive branch’s unilateral change to Obamacare but who will challenge him on it? Obamacare and the Corruption of the Rule of Law February 11, 2014 by Dan Mitchell We’ve reached the stage where Obamacare is the punchline to a bad joke. The law has been a disaster, both for the economy […]
____________ Obamacare Death Panels Kills Jobs more often than people!!! Crying about Obamacare, but also Laughing at Obamacare February 8, 2014 by Dan Mitchell I asked back in September whether all the bad news about Obamacare meant it was time to feel sorry for President Obama and other statists. Some people apparently didn’t realize I was […]
Open letter to President Obama (Part 514) (Emailed to White House on 4-15-13.) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get […]
Forget women’s empowerment, it takes a real civil rights leader to use federal power to humiliate and endanger women on behalf of biological men
You may have missed it, but Joe Bidendevoted part of his very first day in officeto addressing one of this nation’s most pressing problems: Girls’ sports.
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The main problem with girls’ sports, obviously, is that they lack diversity: Only girls get to play. That’s wrong, and Joe Biden plans to fix it; to break the turf ceiling, if you will.
Now, for the first time in history, men will be allowed to compete in, for example, girls’ field hockey, and then change in the girls’ locker room afterward. Joe Biden has signed an executive order requiring it. Even Barack Obama didn’t do that.
This makes Joe Biden a #civilrightshero. There’s been a lot of talk recently about women’s empowerment, but it takes a real leader, a once-in-a-generation moral visionary, to go further than that and use federal power to humiliate and endanger women on behalf of biological men. That is next-level feminism. That is real empowerment.
That’s the Joe Biden program, and he’s been planning it for years. This is what he said last February:
BIDEN: Well, no, the animating promise of this country, that all men and women are created equal, has never been fulfilled.
By “equal,” Joe Biden means “identical”. There are no differences between men and women, that’s the position. Those gender categories we’ve heard about since the dawn of recorded history are fake. So there’s no reason to protect women from men under any circumstances, because the whole idea of men and women isn’t real.
Not everyone believes this, of course. Science isn’t always popular (or the peasants don’t understand it). There are still troglodytes out there in the year 2021 who are trying to keep men out of women’s sports. Yes, Donald Trump is gone. But that doesn’t mean hate has taken a holiday.
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But Joe Biden is not intimidated by that. He doesn’t care that pretty much no one in America agrees with him or even understands what he’s talking about. When Joe Biden watches girls’ gymnastics, as he frequently does, and doesn’t see a single biological man walking the balance beam or swinging from the uneven bars, he doesn’t just sit back and accept the status quo. He acts with force and certainty.
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Now, activism like that may seem modern, but it’s not new for Joe Biden. For 60 years, he has been fighting transphobia. Way back in the summer of 1962, decades before it was fashionable, Joe Biden confronted a vicious transphobe called Corn Pop, who wanted to keep men out of the girls’ changing room at a public pool in Wilmington. It was a different time back then, but Joe Biden wouldn’t have it. He threatened to beat Corn Pop with a six-foot chain, and that was just the beginning.
Decades later, Joe Biden flew all the way to South Africa to free Nelson Mandela from prison. Most of us assumed he was risking his life to fight the racist policies of the South African government. What we didn’t know was that Joe Biden was actually fighting a more insidious foe, gender apartheid. Robben Island was men-only, segregated by sex, if you can imagine.
But the fight isn’t over yet. Joe Biden’s holy war of liberation continues. Even now, in this supposedly liberated time, groups of women still saunter to the ladies room together in restaurants across America with not a single man joining them in the stall. That happens, believe it or not. It happens right now. There are still sexually segregated public showers in this nation, not to mention dressing rooms in retail stores, that men aren’t allowed to enter. And what about your house? How many boys slept over at your seventh grade daughter’s most recent slumber party?
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year-old child decides, ‘You know, I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It’ll make my life a lot easier. There should be zero discrimination
Joe Biden has a solution. Sixty years ago, he fought Corn Pop with a chain to protect the right of biological men to be present when girls change into their bathing suits, and he’ll bring that same moral clarity to your daughter’s lacrosse team.
Leadership like that will change this country. In time, you won’t hear people claiming to be the first female this or first female that because honestly, in a truly liberated society, who can say what’s female? Why shouldn’t Mike Pence announce that actually, he was the first woman to serve as vice president? Who could call him wrong?
Not us. We don’t do hate speech here.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson’s opening commentary on the Jan. 22, 2021 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
An executive order rigs competition by requiring that biological boys be allowed to compete against girls.
By
Abigail Shrier
President Biden signs an executive order in the Oval Office, Jan. 20.
PHOTO: DOUG MILLS/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK
Amid Inauguration Day talk of shattered glass ceilings, on Wednesday President Biden delivered a body blow to the rights of women and girls: the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. On day one, Mr. Biden placed all girls’ sports and women’s safe spaces in the crosshairs of the administrative state.
The order declares: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or school sports. . . . All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.” The order purports to direct administrative agencies to begin promulgating regulations that would enforce the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision Bostock v. Clayton County. In fact, it goes much further.
In Bostock, the justices held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited an employer from firing an employee on the basis of homosexuality or “transgender status.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a 6-3 majority, took pains to clarify that the decision was limited to employment and had no bearing on “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes”—all regulated under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments. “Under Title VII, too,” the majority added, “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”
The Biden executive order is far more ambitious. Any school that receives federal funding—including nearly every public high school—must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department. If this policy were to be broadly adopted in anticipation of the regulations that are no doubt on the way, what would this mean for girls’ and women’s sports?
“Finished. Done,” Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told me. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights—that’s going to be diminished.” Ms. Blade noted that parents of teen girls are generally uninterested in watching their daughters demoralized by the blatant unfairness of a rigged competition.
I say rigged because in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.
It should be no surprise, then, that the two trans-identified biological males permitted to compete in Connecticut state track finals against girls—neither of whom was a top sprinter as a boy—consistently claimed top spots competing as girls. They eliminated girls from advancement to regional championships, scouting and scholarship opportunities and trophies, and they set records no girl may ever equal.
How big is this performance gap? To take one example cited by the Connecticut female runners in their complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the fastest female sprinter in the world is American runner Allyson Felix, a woman with more gold medals than Usain Bolt. Her lifetime best for the 400-meter run is 49.26 seconds. Based on 2018 data, nearly 300 high-school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it.
Even if allowing biological boys to join girls’ teams means girls can’t win, isn’t it still worth trying out for the team? Actually, no—even in sports that involve no contact and little injury risk, like running or tennis. It isn’t merely the trophies and scholarships and opportunities at stake. It isn’t even all the benefits sports have so long provided to young women—in self-esteem and health and camaraderie with friends. It isn’t merely that girls who participate in sports tend to earn better grades, that so many female Fortune 500 executives were athletes, or that sports force teen girls out of their own heads, where they might otherwise sit and stew to their detriment.
It’s the profound and glaring injustice of it: the spectacular records and achievements that Jackie Joyner, Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolph would never have achieved had the world pitted their bodies against men.
Yet here we are. Decades of women’s achievement and opportunity rolled back by executive fiat. Battered women’s shelters, women’s jails and other safe spaces that receive federal funding and constitute “dwellings” under the Fair Housing Act may be next. Women’s rights turn out to be cheap and up for grabs. Who will voice objection?
Certainly not those caught up in the “historic” moment of the first female vice president. Hillary Clinton swooned on Twitter : “It delights me to think that what feels historical and amazing to us today—a woman sworn in to the vice presidency—will seem normal, obvious, ‘of course’ to Kamala’s grand-nieces as they grow up.” If only this je ne sais quoi weren’t accompanied by a far more material theft of female opportunity.
Ms. Shrier is author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”
I must say I share your love for the LION, WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C.S. Lewis. Sadly he died on the same day as two other notable gentleman (JFK and Aldous Huxley). Just like you I have a love for books!
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
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Republican Claudia Tenney ran against Democrat Anthony Brindisi for New York’s 22nd congressional district Heather Ainsworth, File/AP
Republican Claudia Tenney will be declared the winner of her nail-biting rematch against upstate Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi following a marathon three-month recount.
It was the only 2020 congressional race in the country that hadn’t been decided.
The recount and reported irregularities has been a black eye on New York’s handling of elections amid the pandemic.
“Every single valid vote that was cast in New York’s 22nd Congressional District has been accounted for, and counted,” wrote state Supreme Court Justice Scott Del Conte, oversee the disputed recount, in a ruling released Friday.
Tenney led Brindisi by 109 votes — 156,099 votes to Brindisi’s 155,989.
Brindisi defeated Tenney in 2018 during the blue wave mid-term congressional elections. But Tenney has reclaimed her seat that covers eight counties — including the Binghamton and Utica regions.
Doug Kellner, co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, confirmed that Tenney will be declared the winner following the court ruling and could be seated as early as Monday after reading the judge’s decision.
“I’m honored to have won this race. It was a hard-fought campaign and I thank Anthony Brindisi for his service. Now that every legal vote has been counted, it’s time for the results to be certified,” Tenney said in a statement.
“The voters need a voice in Congress, and I look forward to getting to work on behalf of New York’s 22nd Congressional District.”
Brindisi is mulling an appeal of the decision but the judge rejected his request to hold off on certifying the election results until his court appeal could be heard.
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DelConte, in his nine-page decision, slammed county election officials for
“systemic violations of state and federal election law” that affected both candidates.
He rapped Oneida County’s failure to process more than 2,400 applications from voters who registered through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But the judge determined that it’s up to the state elections board and Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature — not the courts — to fix errors.
Del Conte there was no deliberate fraud.
State GOP chairman Nick Langworthy said, “Congratulations to Congresswoman-elect Claudia Tenney and to all of the residents of New York’s 22nd congressional district who will finally have their voices represented in Washington during this critical time for our nation and New York.
“This was a long and frustrating process, but at the end of the day, both candidates were heard in court and every legal vote was counted. It’s time for Anthony Brindisi to concede and for Nancy Pelosi to recall her henchmen back to Washington. The voters and the courts have spoken, and the will of the people must not be delayed or denied any further.”
Then-Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., answers reporters’ questions on Sept. 6, 2018. She was narrowly defeated for reelection later that year, but is leading in her 2020 rematch, which is still undecided. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty)
The only remaining congressional race still not certified will have to wait until at least Jan. 27—and even after that, legal appeals will likely ensue.
Republican Claudia Tenney currently leads Democrat Anthony Brindisi by 29 votes in the race in New York’s 22nd Congressional District.
But late Wednesday, a state judge ordered the Oneida County Board of Elections to review more than 1,000 provisional ballots. Of those, about 300 are likely to be counted, Tenney said.
Some 311,695 votes were cast and counted so far. Tenney said Thursday that her campaign expected to “maintain our lead” even with the new count.
The Left has declared war on our culture, but we should never back down, nor compromise our principles. Learn more now >>
“It certainly underscores that there is a problem with elections and the fact that we are not able to come up with a certified winner. We are closing in on February of the following year—and in about a month, we start circulating petitions for [the 2022] primary season in New York,” Tenney told The Daily Signal.
The November contest was a rematch from 2018, when Brindisi won a close race over then-freshman incumbent Tenney in a strong year for Democrats. Brindisi’s first term expired, so the seat is vacant until the election is certified.
As for when the race finally wraps up, said Tenney: “Who knows?”
“There is an appeals process. I’m certain that will probably happen. It’s unfortunate that people in New York’s 22nd District, they do not have a voice in Washington or a representative right now,” she said.
Brindisi’s campaign did not respond to email and phone inquiries for this report.
Earlier this month, Brindisi announced he would be running again for the seat in 2022, regardless of this year’s outcome.
“I am hopeful that I will be certified the winner in this race for New York’s 22nd District,” Brindisi said in a statement after filing with the Federal Election Commission. “And I will get right back to fighting for bipartisan solutions, making Congress work for working families, and standing up to anyone on behalf of this district.
“Serving this community is the honor of a lifetime. I look forward to being reelected and stand ready to continue to serve this community for years to come,” he added.
Most of the problems arose from major legal changes in mail-in voting as well as from the federal “motor voter” law, Tenney said. Also, the state of New York has a more expansive version of that law.
“My case showed that we are continuing to allow votes to be counted for people who technically weren’t registered under New York law or didn’t get their ballots there, weren’t in on time,” Tenney said. “So, here we are looking at ballots from people whose registrations weren’t processed back in November, and we are going to go back and count those votes.”
She added:
Federal law says you have the right to cast a vote. But the question is, you don’t necessarily have the right to have that vote count. If you are not an eligible voter, that vote shouldn’t count. There is no process, it seems, in New York where, if a vote is cast and canvassed, if it’s not legal, how do you take it back?
In August, partly in response to a troubled process in the June primaries, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed executive orders to expand absentee balloting. Cuomo also signed laws he called “sweeping” that would make it easier to vote.
Cuomo and state lawmakers did little to address some of the Empire State’s worst problems, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.
“This is a symptom of the fact that New York has one of the worst-run election systems in the country,” von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission commissioner and member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, told The Daily Signal. “They lack the basic security protocols, such as voter ID, and no interest in comparing voter registration lists to other states to find out who has moved out. This election just epitomizes all of those problems.”
Local election officials complained they lacked the resources to comply with the new rules. Tenney said she didn’t excuse mistakes by Oneida election officials, but framed their new burdens in the context of a business.
“If you take our optimum week and output, and say you’ve got to do five or 10 times that in the midst of a pandemic with the same people doing the same number of hours with the same equipment and the same facility, we are not going to make the goal,” Tenney said. “And even if we get close to the goal, there are going to be a lot of mistakes made. This is a lot of what happened.”
Late Wednesday, more than two and a half months after the Nov. 3 election, New York state Judge Scott DelConte ordered the Oneida County Board of Elections to review more than 1,000 ballots in the race. That was because the Oneida County Board of Elections failed to process 2,418voter registration forms.
However, many did not meet the legal deadline. So, the judge ordered the county election staff to determine how many of the 1,000 provisional ballots should be counted.
The judge didn’t give either campaign what it was looking for.
Tenney’s campaign legal team argued the court could not retroactively register the voters. Conversely, Brindisi’s lawyers argued the court should count only 69 additional votes they determined belonged to Democrats, but not more than that, according to the Syracuse Post-Standard.
“Both candidates press this Court to disregard either some, or all, of the potentially valid ballots because it is strategically advantageous for them in this election,” the judge wrote, adding, “Both of these arguments ignore the fact that this problem only exists because … the Oneida County Board of Elections failed to comply with [election law] and review its records.”
He gave the county a Jan. 27 deadline to report the results of the review.
Tenney thinks that could be favorable to her campaign.
“We think there is somewhere between 290 [and] 300 of those. Those votes, the judge is going to have recounted next week,” she said, noting the judge rejected the Democrats’ push for a selective count. “There are 140 or so Republicans in that group, along with conservatives. We feel like, in the worst-case scenario, we’re not going to lose any votes. We’ll maintain our lead.”
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we will consider publishing your remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature.
(CNN)There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the 2018 midterm elections.
While Democrats will have a majority next Congress, Republicans vastly outperformed expectations and nearly pulled off an election shocker.
As of this writing, CNN has projected that Democrats have won in 219 seats. Republicans have been projected the winners in 203 seats. There are 13 races outstanding, per CNN projections.
Of those 13, the Democratic candidates lead in a mere two of them. (One of these 13 is going to a runoff, where the Republicans are heavily favored to win.)
In other words, if every one of those 13 seats went to the party leading in them right now, Democrats would have 221 seats to the Republicans’ 214 seats in the next Congress.
Talk about a fairly close call for Democrats.
Now, Democrats may end up winning a few of the seats where they are currently trailing, but chances are they will end up at or south of 225 seats.
Compare that to what most quantitative forecasters who look at a slew of indicators predicted. Jack Kersting came the closest at 238 seats. FiveThirtyEight clocked in at 239 seats. The Economist modelpredicted that Democrats would win a median of 244 seats in their simulations.
While much attention was paid to the polling misses on the presidential level, they were more accurate by comparison. In the presidential race, the final polling averages got every state right, except for Florida and North Carolina.
Indeed, the forecasts for the presidential race were considerably better than for the House races. The race raters at the Crystal Ball, for example, got every state but North Carolina correct on the presidential level.
Any sort of shy Trump vote was far smaller than a potential shy House Republican vote.
Of course, the value of quantitative forecasts is that they don’t just provide one number. They provide the probability of different outcomes occurring.
In that regard, the Republican performance is even more astounding.
The Economist said there was less than a 1-in-100 chance Democrats would have 221 seats or fewer in the next Congress. The chance they would get 225 seats or fewer was 1-in-100.
FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gave Republicans a realistic, but still fairly low shot of what seems to have happened. The chance Democrats would earn 221 seats or fewer was approximately 1-in-17, while the chance they’d have 225 seats or fewer was approximately 1-in-10.
I should note that 1-in-10 probabilities happen all the time. There’s a reason something is a 1-in-10 chance and not 0%. That said, Republicans simply did better than what folks thought.
A large part of what happened was that the national political environment was more friendly to Republicans than what polls suggested. The final average of generic congressional ballot polls had Democrats ahead by 7 points nationally. Democrats are only ahead by 2 points in the national House vote right now. That may end up closer to 3 points once the votes are all tallied.
A 4- or 5-point miss is considerable.
If Democrats had done 5 points better in every race than they currently are doing, they’d be ahead in 239 seats. That, of course, is right in line with the forecasts.
A lot of these quantitative forecasts also rely upon House ratings from groups like the Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and The Crystal Ball.
These too seemed to undersell Republican chances. Take the Cook Political Report ratings, which have historically been very good.
As of this writing, Republicans are leading in 27 of the 27 seats the Cook Political Report deemed toss-up before the election. They are ahead in all 26 of the seats that were deemed either leaning or likely Republican. Republicans are also leading in 7 of the 36 seats that were either leaning or likely to be taken by the Democrats.
That is, Republicans not only pretty much swept the tossups, but they marched into Democratic territory as well.
The Crystal Ball, which bravely has no tossups in its final rating, had Democrats net gaining 10 House seats. It will actually be the Republicans who will likely net gain 10 seats or more.
The end result of which is that Republicans are much closer to a House majority than we believed they would be after 2020 and have put themselves in a strong position heading into the 2022 midterms.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority has shrunk in House, a shock to Democrats and pollsters who were projecting the California Democrat would expand her caucus after Tuesday’s election.
Democrats were optimistic they could flip roughly 10 seats but their expansion efforts came up short, especially in Texas, and they ended up losing seats in Flordia, Oklahoma, Minnesota and elsewhere.
DEM CAUCUS ERUPTS AS MEMBERS SAY PARTY’S LEFTWARD DRIFT HURT MODERATES IN ELECTION
As of 3 p.m. on Friday, Democrats had won 212 seats compared to Republicans’ 194. Another 29 races have yet to be called. Democrats had a net loss of four seats.
Outstanding races are in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere. When all those votes are counted, Republicans are optimistic their numbers could swell to 208 and beyond, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
What’s known is that Republicans have flipped at least seven seats from blue to red and an eighth seat in Michigan that was most recently occupied by a Libertarian. Here’s a snapshot of the GOP victories:
GOP gains in the House
–In Florida, Republican candidate Carlos Gimenez defeated freshman Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in the 26th district. Republican Maria Elvira Salazar defeated freshman Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala in the 27th district.
–In Oklahoma, Republican Stephanie Bice unseated freshman Democratic Rep. Kendra Horn. Horn flipped the seat from red to blue last cycle.
— In South Carolina, freshman congressman Democrat Joe Cunningham was projected to lose his reelection to state GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, flipping South Carolina’s 1st District back to red.
— In Minnesota, Republican Michelle Fischbach ousted longtime Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson, toppling the powerful chairman of the House Agriculture Committee in the most pro-Trump district held by a Democrat.
— In New Mexico, Republican Yvette Herrell defeated freshman Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, a freshman Democrat who flipped the 2nd Congressional seat from red to blue in 2018.
— In Iowa’s First Congressional District, Republican state representative and former TV news anchor Ashley Hinson defeated Democratic incumbent Abby Finkenauer.
– In West Michigan, Republican Peter Meijer, an Iraq war veteran whose grandfather started Meijer superstores, defeated Democrat Hillary Scholten, a former Department of Justice and nonprofit lawyer. The Third Congressional District was open after Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican-turned-Libertarian, did not seek reelection.
Party officials are most optimistic about reclaiming two seats in New York that Democrats flipped in 2018. Votes are still being counted but Republican Nicole Malliotakis has a notable lead over freshman Rep. Max Rose in the Staten Island-Brooklyn district. And former GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney was also ahead in the 22nd District seat she lost two years ago to Rep. Anthony Brindisi.
Democrats have gained two open seats in North Carolina thanks to redrawn congressional maps that favored them and will welcome Deborah Ross and Kathy Manning to their caucus in January.
And Democrats flipped Georgia’s 7th Congressional District held by retiring Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga. Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux beat GOP candidate Rich McCormick in the suburban Atlanta district, the Associated Press called on Friday.
That means Democrats so far have a net loss of four seats in the House.
WHERE THINGS STAND: BATTLE FOR THE SENATE
Democrats think they can hold onto many close races that have not been called and have two other possible pick-up opportunities by defeating Rep. Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey and Rep. Mike Garcia in California.
On a call Thursday afternoon with Democratic House members, Rep. Cheri Bustos, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), expressed frustration with the polling and election forecasts that all pointed to House Democrats expanding their majority.
“I’m furious,” Bustos told her colleagues, according to a source familiar with the call. “Something went wrong here across the entire political world. Our polls, Senate polls, Gov polls, presidential polls, Republican polls, public polls, turnout modeling, and prognosticators all pointed to one political environment – that environment never materialized.”
My great fear is that the “social capital” of self reliance in America will slowly disappear and that the United States will turn into a European-style welfare state.
Well, this Glenn McCoy cartoon has a similar theme.
The only thing I would change is that the rat would become a “pro-government voter” or “left-wing voter” instead of an “Obama voter.” Just like I wasn’t satisfied with an otherwise very good Chuck Asay cartoon showing the struggle between producers and moochers.
That’s for two reasons. First, I’m not partisan. My goal is to spread a message of liberty, not encourage people to vote for or against any candidate.
But I’m getting wonky. Enjoy the cartoon and feel free to share it widely.
Eight Reasons Why Big Government Hurts Economic Growth
Uploaded on Aug 17, 2009
This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video analyzes how excessive government spending undermines economic performance. While acknowledging that a very modest level of government spending on things such as “public goods” can facilitate growth, the video outlines eight different ways that that big government hinders prosperity. This video focuses on theory and will be augmented by a second video looking at the empirical evidence favoring smaller government.
If the increase in food stamps was just because of the recession then why did the spending go from $19.8 billion in 2000 to $37.9 billion in 2007? The Facts about Food Stamps Everyone Should Hear Rachel Sheffield and T. Elliot Gaiser May 27, 2013 at 12:00 pm (7) Newscom A recent US News & […]
Welfare Can And Must Be Reformed Uploaded on Jun 29, 2010 If America does not get welfare reform under control, it will bankrupt America. But the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has a five-step plan to reform welfare while protecting our most vulnerable. __________________________ We got to slow down the growth of Food Stamps. One […]
Eight Reasons Why Big Government Hurts Economic Growth __________________ We got to cut spending and we must first start with food stamp program and we need some Senators that are willing to make the tough cuts. Food Stamp Republicans Posted by Chris Edwards Newt Gingrich had fun calling President Obama the “food stamp president,” but […]
Milton Friedman’s negative income tax explained by Friedman in 1968: We need to cut back on the Food Stamp program and not try to increase it. What really upsets me is that when the government gets involved in welfare there is a welfare trap created for those who become dependent on the program. Once they […]
Welfare Can And Must Be Reformed Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Jun 29, 2010 If America does not get welfare reform under control, it will bankrupt America. But the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has a five-step plan to reform welfare while protecting our most vulnerable. __________________________ If welfare increases as much as it has in the […]
The sad fact is that Food stamp spending has doubled under the Obama Administration. A Bumper Crop of Food Stamps Amy Payne May 21, 2013 at 7:01 am Tweet this Where do food stamps come from? They come from taxpayers—certainly not from family farms. Yet the “farm” bill, a recurring subsidy-fest in Congress, is actually […]
I am glad that my state of Arkansas is not the leader in food stamps!!! Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which State Has the Highest Food Stamp Usage of All? March 19, 2013 by Dan Mitchell The food stamp program seems to be a breeding ground of waste, fraud, and abuse. Some of the horror stories […]
Government Must Cut Spending Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Dec 2, 2010 The government can cut roughly $343 billion from the federal budget and they can do so immediately. __________ We are becoming a country filled with people that dependent on the federal government when we should be growing our economy by lowering taxes and putting […]
Uploaded by oversightandreform on Mar 6, 2012 Learn More at http://oversight.house.gov The Oversight Committee is examining reports of food stamp merchants previously disqualified who continue to defraud the program. According to a Scripps Howard News Service report, food stamp fraud costs taxpayers hundreds of millions every year. Watch the Oversight hearing live tomorrow at 930 […]
The best way to destroy the welfare trap is to put in Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. A Picture of How Redistribution Programs Trap the Less Fortunate in Lives of Dependency I wrote last year about the way in which welfare programs lead to very high implicit marginal tax rates on low-income people. More specifically, they […]
December 06, 2011 03:54 PM Milton Friedman Explains The Negative Income Tax – 1968 0 comments By Gordonskene enlarge Milton Friedman and friends.DOWNLOADS: 36 PLAYS: 35 Embed The age-old question of Taxes. In the early 1960′s Economist Milton Friedman adopted an idea hatched in England in the 1950′s regarding a Negative Income Tax, to […]
Why are despicable people sometimes subsidized by taxpayers? Are You Happy that Your Tax Dollars Subsidized the Tsarnaev Family? April 28, 2013 by Dan Mitchell The bad news is that there are despicable and evil people seeking to kill innocents. The worse news is that some of these pathetic excuses for protoplasm are subsidized by […]
Testing Milton Friedman – Preview Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on Feb 21, 2012 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth. His work and ideas continue to make the world a better place. As part of Milton Friedman’s Century, a revival of the ideas featured in the landmark television series Free To Choose are being […]
I ran across this very interesting article about Milton Friedman from 2002: Friedman: Market offers poor better learningBy Tamara Henry, USA TODAY By Doug Mills, AP President Bush honors influential economist Milton Friedman for his 90th birthday earlier this month. About an economist Name:Milton FriedmanAge: 90Background: Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science; […]
Testing Milton Friedman – Preview Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on Feb 21, 2012 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth. His work and ideas continue to make the world a better place. As part of Milton Friedman’s Century, a revival of the ideas featured in the landmark television series Free To Choose are being […]
What a great man Milton Friedman was. The Legacy of Milton Friedman November 18, 2006 Alexander Tabarrok Great economist by day and crusading public intellectual by night, Milton Friedman was my hero. Friedman’s contributions to economics are profound, the permanent income hypothesis, the resurrection of the quantity theory of money, and his magnum opus with […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
The new documentary “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” tells the story of Sowell’s life and how his penetrating intellect has influenced society. (Photo: Rod Searcy)
Thomas Sowell is considered by many to be one of the most influential and brilliant minds of the past half-century. He is most famous for his work as an economist, but is also a bestselling author, syndicated columnist, historian, and academic.
Yet he hasn’t received much recognition. “When people talk about the great black intellectuals today, you hear names like Henry Louis Gates at Harvard or Cornel West … or today you hear Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi,” says Jason Riley, a journalist, scholar, and member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
“But in my view, Tom has written circles around those guys and is much broader in subjects that he’s covered as well as much deeper and his analysis is much more rigorous than those guys’,” Riley says.
You can watch the full-length documentary hereor by visiting SowellFilm.com.
Plus, John Cooper, associate director of institute communications at The Heritage Foundation and a big football fan, joins us to talk about what we can expect to see during Super Bowl LV this weekend.
We also cover these stories:
Democrats urge President Joe Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for student loan borrowers.
Biden addresses the National Prayer Breakfast.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is joining The Heritage Foundation as a distinguished fellow.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Virginia Allen: Many consider Thomas Sowell to be one of the greatest minds of our day. Sowell is most well-known for his groundbreaking work as an economist, but is also a bestselling author, a photographer, syndicated columnist, historian, and academic. He is a man in pursuit of truth, and when he finds it, he stands by it, even when that truth may not be popular.
Free To Choose Media has just produced a one-hour documentary on the life and work of Thomas Sowell. The film is called “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World.” …
“Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest minds of the past half-century,” says Jason Riley. And Mr. Riley, who narrated the film, is here with us today to discuss the documentary. Mr. Riley, welcome to the show.
Jason Riley: Thank you for having me.
Allen: You narrated this one-hour documentary on Thomas Sowell. I watched it last week and was just completely captivated by the film. I’ve known a little bit about Thomas Sowell, but I learned so much watching this documentary.
What you’ve really done here in this film is essentially take viewers through the life of Thomas Sowell and really show the impact that he has had on people and across so many areas of our world.
So I want to begin by asking you just to share a little bit of your own personal story of how Thomas Sowell—his writings, his rhetoric, his logic, and his honesty—has really impacted you personally.
Riley: Well, I discovered Tom Sowell in college in the early 1990s. I was working on the school paper and having a conversation with my fellow students about affirmative action one day and someone piped in and said, “Jason, you sound like Tom Sowell.” And I said, “Tom, who?”
And the person wrote down the name of a book on a piece of paper and I went to the school library that evening and checked it out and read it in one sitting that evening and went back to school the next morning and checked out everything else they had by Tom Sowell and was pretty much hooked on him by then.
While I was working at The Wall Street Journal on the editorial board in the mid-’90s is when I first got to meet Tom Sowell.
He was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University then, still is, and he would travel through New York on book tours and meet with various editorial boards. So that’s when I first got to meet him.
I later went out to Stanford to write a profile of him for the newspaper, that would have been in the mid-2000s. And that’s when we sort of struck up a friendship that has sort of endured since then.
Allen: So when you learned, “OK, there’s this film project,” I mean, yourself being a journalist, a scholar, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, what made you say, “This is a film project that is something that I have to be a part of”?
Riley: Well, they came to me, the Free To Choose folks came to me. I had been working on a biography of Sowell—that’ll be out in May—and when they found out that I was working on this biography, they approached me and said, “We want to do a film, a documentary about Tom’s life. Would you care to narrate it?” And I did not hesitate.
Allen: Share a little bit about your book that’s coming out. And what did give you kind of that passion and drive to say, “You know what? I appreciate his work so much that I am going to take on this challenge and not only be a part of this film, but also write this book”?
And it is the first ever biography of Tom. He has no other biographer. He’s written a memoir himself and he’s written about his personal life in his many columns over the years, but this was the first a biography of Tom.
It’s primarily an intellectual biography. I don’t focus much on his personal life, although there is a bit of that in there, but I do focus on his ideas, the scholarship, how he’s distinguished himself as an intellectual over the past half-century and sort of what his legacy will be, how he’ll be remembered.
I was sort of trying to get him to cooperate with the biography. He’s a very private person for a while, for more than a decade, actually, and I think he’s 90 years old now, so maybe I just wore him down. But he did cooperate, he sat for a bunch of long interviews for the book.
I also interviewed a bunch of colleagues of his, acquaintances, and people who are familiar with his work over the years. So it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to write.
He’s meant a lot to me in terms of my own intellectual development over the decades. And so I wanted to introduce him and his work to a new generation. And I don’t think that Tom has gotten the exposure that he sort of deserves.
When people talk about the great black intellectuals today, you hear names like Henry Louis Gates at Harvard or Cornel West and people like that, or today you hear Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. But in my view, Tom has written circles around those guys and is much broader in subjects that he’s covered as well as much deeper and his analysis is much more rigorous than those guys.
I don’t think that Thomas would have gotten the attention and the exposure he deserves. So I’m hoping the film will wet people’s appetite and get them to pick up some books by Tom, as well as the biography I hope does the same thing, gets more people interested in Tom and his scholarship.
Allen: You mentioned Thomas Sowell’s legacy, and I think that the film does a great job of really explaining what that legacy is, and I’m sure your book does the same, but could you just give us a little bit of a teaser of, in your opinion, what is the legacy that Thomas Sowell has already left and will leave?
Riley: I think in a number of areas he’s really made his mark.
Very broadly speaking though, he’s made his mark as a sort of honest intellectual, someone who is much more interested in being right than in being popular, and following the facts where they lead and reporting his findings, even if they happen to be politically incorrect.
And he feels that is the real duty of a scholar, to follow the facts and not fall for trendy thinking or fashionable thinking. … This isn’t a popularity contest. That’s not what true scholarship calls for. So I think that is one of his legacies.
Another is … I think he modeled himself after Milton Friedman, one of his mentors at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in the early 1960s.
Friedman was someone who felt that intellectuals shouldn’t spend all their time simply talking to one another, that they should seek a wider audience and speak to non-experts, explain themselves and their work to the general public.
And after Friedman left teaching in the 1970s, that’s what he did. In fact, one of the things he did was a television program that was produced by the same company that produced this one, the Free To Choose Network. And that was Friedman’s way of speaking to the general public about economics.
So when Sowell left teaching in the 1970s, I think he set about a type of public intellectualism that was very similar to Friedman’s. He wrote his popular column for general interest readers. Most of Tom’s books are written for non-academics and he takes great pride in explaining economics and these ideas to non-experts.
He’s most known for his writings on race, but his bestselling book is “Basic Economics,” which is essentially an economics textbook without any graphs or equations in it. And I think Tom, although he left the campus teaching, he still sort of continued to teach through these books and columns over the decades.
Allen: One of the things that I was most fascinated to learn about in the film is that Thomas Sowell, he actually used to be a Marxist. But what really cured him, he says of that, was working for the government, when he realized these Marxist ideas, they would never actually work.
Could you just share a little bit about Thomas Sowell’s journey out of Marxism, because I really find that so fascinating?
Riley: Yes. Well, it’s not that uncommon. If you look at a lot of leading conservatives in the 20th century, many of them started on the left.
Milton Friedman started on the left. George Stigler started on the left. Walter Williams, the late Walter Williams, who passed away last year and was a friend of Tom’s for more than 50 years, started out on the left. Clarence Thomas started out on the left. So it’s not that uncommon.
But yes, Tom was a Marxist through his 20s. And then it was working in the government and seeing how some of these ideas he had about how the capitalist system works, seeing that in practice and seeing incentives in place and the intentions of some of these policies versus the actual results, that all had an effect on Tom changing his mind about free markets and their power in shaping people’s lives for the better.
So that’s what it was, it was real-life experience and just less reliance on theories and what’s supposed to happen and paying more attention to what actually comes to pass.
Allen: You did interview Walter Williams for the documentary, which, as you mentioned, Mr. Williams did pass away this past December. So it really is a treasure to have these recorded conversations of him sharing about the work of Thomas Sowell, his relationship with Thomas Sowell.
But one of the things that Walter Williams said is that the media really, they stopped covering Thomas Sowell a long time ago because they knew that they couldn’t debate him. And this is just a sad commentary, in my mind, on really the state of our media.
Why do you think the media has chosen to so often ignore Sowell’s work?
Riley: Well, I think they’ve taken the side of the black left, broadly speaking, and the black left has ignored Tom for a long time. And the media continues to run to black intellectuals, academics, civil rights organizations, and so forth to speak on behalf of black people.
They tell the media, “Don’t pay attention to Tom. Anyone who thinks like that or says those things is a sellout or an Uncle Tom or someone who should not be taken seriously. They’re simply doing the bidding of white people.”
So they’ve responded with these sort of ad hominem attacks on Tom and the media has largely bought that argument.
And the types of people that give out economics awards and those types of things are controlled by the left, generally. And so that has worked against Tom and his exposure over the decades—one of the things I’m hoping that the book and the film will help correct.
Allen: One of the things that I was also really fascinated [by] in the film was just how far-reaching Thomas Sowell’s work really is. That despite the media not giving him the attention that he so deserves, he has impacted so many individuals in so many different areas of our world.
You all interviewed a rap musician for the film who says that Thomas Sowell has inspired many of his lyrics. What did you learn in those conversations with individuals who have been so impacted by Thomas Sowell’s work?
Riley: Well, a lot of them speak about the clarity of his writing. He breaks things down in a way that’s very understandable and digestible and witty and people admire that.
Tom, in the early part of his career, did write more academic books speaking to his peers in the academy, but he could also write for a wider audience.
And editors at newspapers love this because they had this serious rigorous thinker who could write 800-word pieces on the topics of the day for their general interest readers to understand.
So they were getting the depth, this depth of knowledge, in sort of more easily digestible bites. And they really appreciated that and fans of Sowell all seemed to come back to the clarity of his writing and his thinking, how he puts things. He’s a wonderful storyteller.
Also, one of the things he’s known for is his international perspectives. And so he likes to talk about trends, not only within the United States, but in other countries, and what’s going on over there.
I think … sometimes in America, you have people who live in a bit of a bubble, an American bubble, a U.S. bubble. And Tom says, “A lot of these policies that are being pushed here have been tried in other places at other times, and here’s what’s happened over there. And we should keep that in mind when we think about how those policies might affect life here in this country.”
So those international perspectives, which is something he specialized in in many of his books, is something people also appreciate.
Allen: Making a documentary is no small undertaking. It’s a complicated process. A lot of time, a lot of work. What, for you, was the greatest challenge of working so closely with the team of individuals who were producing this film?
Riley: I just wanted to make sure we were doing justice to Sowell. I really see him as this towering intellectual figure. I’m a journalist by training. I’m not an intellectual, I’m not an academic. I spent a life as a print journalist, basically. And I really wanted to make sure both in the book and in the documentary that we were just doing him justice.
I said before that no one else has written a biography of Tom, but I hope someone else does come along, a real scholar comes along, someone who can really grapple with Tom’s ideas at his level and lay them out for people. I hope someone comes and does that.
I hope my book can be a little placeholder until that comes along and do what I intended it to do, which is, again, wet people’s appetite about Tom.
But that’s my biggest concern. I just want to do him justice because I think he is one of the great social theorists of the 20th century of any color and his writings on political philosophy, his writings on social theory, his writings on education and law and history and culture, they are quite broad. And I think that Tom is someone people will be reading for generations to come.
Allen: I know that you said that Thomas Sowell is quite a private man, but you did have the privilege of speaking with him a little bit throughout the course of making the film. Do you know if he has seen the documentary yet and what his thoughts are on it?
Riley: I don’t know. I haven’t had any contact with Tom since it’s been out so I don’t know if he’s seen it yet. He is at Hoover, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and I know that Hoover’s aware of the film, so perhaps they’ve reached out to him. But no, I can’t say for certain whether he’s seen it.
Allen: Well, I have no doubt that he’ll feel incredibly honored by it. It really is a beautiful documentary and so informative. Would you just tell our listeners both where they can find and watch the documentary, and then also again, share with us when and where your book will be out?
Riley: Sure. The documentary information can be found at SowellFilm.com. … And it was made for public television so there you can find where it will appear on your local public television station. In addition to that, it’s being streamed on Vimeo and Amazon and YouTube, and you can find links to stream it as well at SowellFilm.com.
In terms of my book, again, it’ll be out in May, May 25 to be exact, and it can be pre-ordered on Amazon right now.
Allen: Great. We will be sure to leave links for both the documentary and to pre-order your book in the show notes today. Mr. Riley, thank you so much for your time.
Riley: Thank you.
Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World – Full Video
Despite writing more than 50 books on economics, race, and history, there’s a good chance Thomas Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of.
The past ten months have proved we live in a senseless world. There are large groups of people on both sides of the aisle who have no regard for reality, or what were once considered the normal and expected rules of polite society. One man, however, has never been swayed by the prevailing winds of the political moment over his illustrious 50-year career, keeping himself grounded in empiricism, fact, and logic: economist Thomas Sowell.
While he has published more than 50 books on subjects such as economics, race, and history, there is still a good chance that Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of. The recently released documentary, “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World,” successfully introduces Sowell both to those who’ve never heard of him and dives deep into the lesser-known aspects of his life for those who are already avid fans.
Narrated by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the documentary takes the audience through Sowell’s life from his birth in North Carolina to his time as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he still works today. For the most underappreciated public intellectual of our time, this film is a well-deserved tribute to a magnificent career.
Sowell and Education
“Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” appropriately begins with Sowell’s childhood. He was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930, and both of his parents died by the time he was only a few years old. He was adopted by his great aunt and raised by her, as well as her two adult daughters. When Sowell was eight, they moved to Harlem to gain access to greater opportunities than were available in the Jim Crow South.
While none of the women who raised Sowell ever graduated high school, he says they were “interested in education and they were interested in me.” He did not grow up with any semblance of material wealth — his family did not have a telephone in the house until he was well into his teen years, and they never had a television — but Sowell did grow up with the cultural value of education: something that was able to eventually propel him to great heights.
Education has long been a road to success in America. It is for this reason the two highest-earning religious groups in America — Hindus and Jews — also happen to have the most education out of all religious groups. Today, the tragic reality is that, for many low-income students, the chance to acquire a quality education is significantly diminished by the conditions of the failing public schools they are required to attend.
Having benefited from the option to transfer to a better school when he was young, Sowell now advocates the same policy for the disadvantaged families of today. While Sowell has been writing about education for decades, arguably his deepest dive into the subject came just last year when he wrote “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” a book that deserves to be remembered as one of his finest works.
The film spends a commendable amount of time emphasizing the role and importance of education, as well as introducing the audience to the various alternatives to the traditional public school monopoly, such as charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter School, correctly points out that the benefits of school choice are concentrated within the most vulnerable communities, despite the fact people with Sowell’s political persuasion are so often maligned as “uncaring” and “unempathetic” towards those who are disadvantaged. By correctly framing the issue in a way that highlights the communities the policy is helping, it allows conservatives and libertarians to begin reclaiming the moral high ground.
Sowell’s Intellectual Influences
Sowell was drafted into the military in 1951. Afterward, he attended Howard University as an undergraduate, then transferred to Harvard University, where he procured a degree in economics. He earned his master’s at the University of Columbia, then went on to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.
During his college years, Sowell was a Marxist, and he remained so even after taking a class taught by Milton Friedman. Yet all it took was one summer interning in the federal government for him to be exposed to government’s inefficiencies and perverse incentives.
In detailing Sowell’s journey from Marxism to capitalism, the film strikes a chord with those paying attention to the current condition of higher education. Many college students today have a similar disposition to Sowell when he was in college. They believe capitalism has proved to be corrupt at its core, as evidenced by things like climate change, increasing income inequality, and decreasing income mobility.
While people can debate about the merits of these various concerns for hours on end, the real thing these students miss is the efficacy (or lack thereof) of government control of the economy. Sowell’s personal experience in the government opened his eyes to the truth about capitalism, but that should leave all of us wondering what the wake-up call to many in my generation will be.
Sowell credits the Chicago School of Economics with teaching him the importance of gathering hard data. That lesson has stuck with him throughout the years, as his data gathering and usage remains one of his strong suits. Although empiricism and objective truth have largely been replaced by intuition among today’s college students, Sowell never argues based on feelings, but backs up his assertions with facts — and a lot of them at that.
Sowell Today
In 1980, Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where they essentially offered to “pay him to be Tom Sowell” by allowing him to choose what and when he writes. Riley explains, “thousands of students would miss out on having Professor Sowell as a teacher, but millions of intellectually curious readers would benefit from Thomas Sowell’s work here [at the Hoover Institution].”
Among the best aspects of “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” is the extent it explains Sowell’s enduring popularity. Arguably the key reason Sowell is so beloved is that he fearlessly makes his argument no matter the fashionable sentiment at the time. Whether it be on the perverse incentives attached to the welfare state, his critique of the idea that every disparity signals discrimination, or the idea of human capital as the chief necessity for group advancement, Sowell takes on the intellectual establishment.
At a time people are increasingly afraid to speak their minds for fear of being “canceled,” Sowell is a refreshing presence — a presence that lets people know that there are other people who approach the questions of the day with simple common sense. As Riley describes him, “[Sowell is] that rarest of species: an honest intellectual. He spent a career putting truth over popularity. He’s explored the answers to questions others were afraid to even ask.”
Bringing Sowell to the Next Generation
One would not be blamed for believing that a 90-year-old economist would not be particularly popular among a younger audience. Yet, make no mistake, Sowell’s work has proved to be timeless, and he’s gaining a large following among the next generation. On Instagram, the unofficial Thomas Sowell account has more than 150,000 followers, while on Twitter, Sowell’s followers number more than 650,000, and his reach continues to grow.
A documentary such as “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” helps widen that reach. Garnering more than 2.1 million views on YouTube in the first week since its release, there is no doubt that it has done its part in keeping the work of Sowell alive and in the minds of the next generation of students, thinkers, and leaders.
Without a doubt, the world has been lucky to benefit from Sowell’s insights. We can only hope that with the help of films like this, we can adequately extend those insights to those who will be next in line to influence our world.
Jack Elbaum is a freshman at George Washington University. His writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @Jack_Elbaum.
Bob Chitester Discusses Milton Friedman and ‘Free to Choose’
“There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people.”
That is how former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. But it is not for his technical work in monetary economics that Friedman is best known. Like mathematician Jacob Bronowski and astronomer Carl Sagan, Friedman had a gift for communicating complex ideas to a general audience.
It was this gift that brought him to the attention of filmmaker Bob Chitester. At Chitester’s urging, Friedman agreed to make a 10 part documentary series explaining the power of economic freedom. It was called “Free to Choose,” and became one of the most watched documentaries in history.
The series not only reached audiences in liberal democracies, but was smuggled behind the iron curtain where it played, in secret, to large audiences. Reflecting on its impact, Czech president Vaclav Klaus has said: “For us, who lived in the communist world, Milton Friedman was the greatest champion of freedom, of limited and unobtrusive government and of free markets. Because of him I became a true believer in the unrestricted market economy.”
July 31st, 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Friedman’s birth. To commemorate that occasion, we’d like to share an interview with “Free to Choose” producer Bob Chitester. Like this interview, the entire series can now be viewed on-line at no cost at http://www.freetochoose.tv/, thanks to the incredible technological progress brought about by the economic freedom that Milton Friedman celebrated.
Produced by Andrew Coulson, Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg, and Lou Richards, with help from the Free to Choose Network.
_____________
April 4, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We got to stop spending so much money on the federal level. It will bankrupt us. I remember back in 1980 when I really started getting into the material of Milton Friedman as a result of reading his articles in Newsweek and reading his book “Free to Choose,” I really did get facts and figures to back on the view that we need more freedom giving back to us and the government needs to spend less.
As a result of Friedman’s writings I was able to discuss these issues with my fellow students at the university and by the time the 1980 election came around I had been attending political rallies and went out and worked hard for Ronald Reagan’s election. In this article below Dr. Thomas Sowell (who was featured twice in the film “Free to Choose”) notes how much influence Milton Friedman had on the election outcome in 1980:
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California.
Added to cato.org on July 25, 2002
This article originally appeared on TownHall.com, July 25, 2002.
Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday on July 31st provides an occasion to think back on his role as the pre-eminent economist of the 20th century. To those of us who were privileged to be his students, he also stands out as a great teacher.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, back in 1959, one day I was waiting outside Professor Friedman’s office when another graduate student passed by. He noticed my exam paper on my lap and exclaimed: “You got a B?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is that bad?”
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California.
“There were only two B’s in the whole class,” he replied.
“How many A’s?” I asked.
“There were no A’s!”
Today, this kind of grading might be considered to represent a “tough love” philosophy of teaching. I don’t know about love, but it was certainly tough.
Professor Friedman also did not let students arrive late at his lectures and distract the class by their entrance. Once I arrived a couple of minutes late for class and had to turn around and go back to the dormitory.
All the way back, I thought about the fact that I would be held responsible for what was said in that lecture, even though I never heard it. Thereafter, I was always in my seat when Milton Friedman walked in to give his lecture.
On a term paper, I wrote that either (a) this would happen or (b) that would happen. Professor Friedman wrote in the margin: “Or (c) your analysis is wrong.”
“Where was my analysis wrong?” I asked him.
“I didn’t say your analysis was wrong,” he replied. “I just wanted you to keep that possibility in mind.”
Perhaps the best way to summarize all this is to say that Milton Friedman is a wonderful human being — especially outside the classroom. It has been a much greater pleasure to listen to his lectures in later years, after I was no longer going to be quizzed on them, and a special pleasure to appear on a couple of television programs with him and to meet him on social occasions.
Milton Friedman’s enduring legacy will long outlast the memories of his students and extends beyond the field of economics. John Maynard Keynes was the reigning demi-god among economists when Friedman’s career began, and Friedman himself was at first a follower of Keynesian doctrines and liberal politics.
Yet no one did more to dismantle both Keynesian economics and liberal welfare-state thinking. As late as the 1950s, those with the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy were still able to depict Milton Friedman as a fringe figure, clinging to an outmoded way of thinking. But the intellectual power of his ideas, the fortitude with which he persevered, and the ever more apparent failures of Keynesian analyses and policies, began to change all that, even before Professor Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.
A towering intellect seldom goes together with practical wisdom, or perhaps even common sense. However, Milton Friedman not only excelled in the scholarly journals but also on the television screen, presenting the basics of economics in a way that the general public could understand.
His mini-series “Free to Choose” was a classic that made economic principles clear to all with living examples. His good nature and good humor also came through in a way that attracted and held an audience.
Although Friedrich Hayek launched the first major challenge to the prevailing thinking behind the welfare state and socialism with his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom,” Milton Friedman became the dominant intellectual force among those who turned back the leftward tide in what had seemed to be the wave of the future.
Without Milton Friedman’s role in changing the minds of so many Americans, it is hard to imagine how Ronald Reagan could have been elected president.
Nor was Friedman’s influence confined to the United States. His ideas reached around the world, not only among economists, but also in political circles which began to understand why left-wing ideas that sounded so good produced results that were so bad.
Milton Friedman rates a 21-gun salute on his birthday. Or perhaps a 90-gun salute would be more appropriate.
________
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
Despite writing more than 50 books on economics, race, and history, there’s a good chance Thomas Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of.
The past ten months have proved we live in a senseless world. There are large groups of people on both sides of the aisle who have no regard for reality, or what were once considered the normal and expected rules of polite society. One man, however, has never been swayed by the prevailing winds of the political moment over his illustrious 50-year career, keeping himself grounded in empiricism, fact, and logic: economist Thomas Sowell.
While he has published more than 50 books on subjects such as economics, race, and history, there is still a good chance that Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of. The recently released documentary, “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World,” successfully introduces Sowell both to those who’ve never heard of him and dives deep into the lesser-known aspects of his life for those who are already avid fans.
Narrated by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the documentary takes the audience through Sowell’s life from his birth in North Carolina to his time as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he still works today. For the most underappreciated public intellectual of our time, this film is a well-deserved tribute to a magnificent career.
Sowell and Education
“Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” appropriately begins with Sowell’s childhood. He was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930, and both of his parents died by the time he was only a few years old. He was adopted by his great aunt and raised by her, as well as her two adult daughters. When Sowell was eight, they moved to Harlem to gain access to greater opportunities than were available in the Jim Crow South.
While none of the women who raised Sowell ever graduated high school, he says they were “interested in education and they were interested in me.” He did not grow up with any semblance of material wealth — his family did not have a telephone in the house until he was well into his teen years, and they never had a television — but Sowell did grow up with the cultural value of education: something that was able to eventually propel him to great heights.
Education has long been a road to success in America. It is for this reason the two highest-earning religious groups in America — Hindus and Jews — also happen to have the most education out of all religious groups. Today, the tragic reality is that, for many low-income students, the chance to acquire a quality education is significantly diminished by the conditions of the failing public schools they are required to attend.
Having benefited from the option to transfer to a better school when he was young, Sowell now advocates the same policy for the disadvantaged families of today. While Sowell has been writing about education for decades, arguably his deepest dive into the subject came just last year when he wrote “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” a book that deserves to be remembered as one of his finest works.
The film spends a commendable amount of time emphasizing the role and importance of education, as well as introducing the audience to the various alternatives to the traditional public school monopoly, such as charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter School, correctly points out that the benefits of school choice are concentrated within the most vulnerable communities, despite the fact people with Sowell’s political persuasion are so often maligned as “uncaring” and “unempathetic” towards those who are disadvantaged. By correctly framing the issue in a way that highlights the communities the policy is helping, it allows conservatives and libertarians to begin reclaiming the moral high ground.
Sowell’s Intellectual Influences
Sowell was drafted into the military in 1951. Afterward, he attended Howard University as an undergraduate, then transferred to Harvard University, where he procured a degree in economics. He earned his master’s at the University of Columbia, then went on to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.
During his college years, Sowell was a Marxist, and he remained so even after taking a class taught by Milton Friedman. Yet all it took was one summer interning in the federal government for him to be exposed to government’s inefficiencies and perverse incentives.
In detailing Sowell’s journey from Marxism to capitalism, the film strikes a chord with those paying attention to the current condition of higher education. Many college students today have a similar disposition to Sowell when he was in college. They believe capitalism has proved to be corrupt at its core, as evidenced by things like climate change, increasing income inequality, and decreasing income mobility.
While people can debate about the merits of these various concerns for hours on end, the real thing these students miss is the efficacy (or lack thereof) of government control of the economy. Sowell’s personal experience in the government opened his eyes to the truth about capitalism, but that should leave all of us wondering what the wake-up call to many in my generation will be.
Sowell credits the Chicago School of Economics with teaching him the importance of gathering hard data. That lesson has stuck with him throughout the years, as his data gathering and usage remains one of his strong suits. Although empiricism and objective truth have largely been replaced by intuition among today’s college students, Sowell never argues based on feelings, but backs up his assertions with facts — and a lot of them at that.
Sowell Today
In 1980, Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where they essentially offered to “pay him to be Tom Sowell” by allowing him to choose what and when he writes. Riley explains, “thousands of students would miss out on having Professor Sowell as a teacher, but millions of intellectually curious readers would benefit from Thomas Sowell’s work here [at the Hoover Institution].”
Among the best aspects of “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” is the extent it explains Sowell’s enduring popularity. Arguably the key reason Sowell is so beloved is that he fearlessly makes his argument no matter the fashionable sentiment at the time. Whether it be on the perverse incentives attached to the welfare state, his critique of the idea that every disparity signals discrimination, or the idea of human capital as the chief necessity for group advancement, Sowell takes on the intellectual establishment.
At a time people are increasingly afraid to speak their minds for fear of being “canceled,” Sowell is a refreshing presence — a presence that lets people know that there are other people who approach the questions of the day with simple common sense. As Riley describes him, “[Sowell is] that rarest of species: an honest intellectual. He spent a career putting truth over popularity. He’s explored the answers to questions others were afraid to even ask.”
Bringing Sowell to the Next Generation
One would not be blamed for believing that a 90-year-old economist would not be particularly popular among a younger audience. Yet, make no mistake, Sowell’s work has proved to be timeless, and he’s gaining a large following among the next generation. On Instagram, the unofficial Thomas Sowell account has more than 150,000 followers, while on Twitter, Sowell’s followers number more than 650,000, and his reach continues to grow.
A documentary such as “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” helps widen that reach. Garnering more than 2.1 million views on YouTube in the first week since its release, there is no doubt that it has done its part in keeping the work of Sowell alive and in the minds of the next generation of students, thinkers, and leaders.
Without a doubt, the world has been lucky to benefit from Sowell’s insights. We can only hope that with the help of films like this, we can adequately extend those insights to those who will be next in line to influence our world.
Jack Elbaum is a freshman at George Washington University. His writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @Jack_Elbaum.
Bob Chitester Discusses Milton Friedman and ‘Free to Choose’
“There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people.”
That is how former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. But it is not for his technical work in monetary economics that Friedman is best known. Like mathematician Jacob Bronowski and astronomer Carl Sagan, Friedman had a gift for communicating complex ideas to a general audience.
It was this gift that brought him to the attention of filmmaker Bob Chitester. At Chitester’s urging, Friedman agreed to make a 10 part documentary series explaining the power of economic freedom. It was called “Free to Choose,” and became one of the most watched documentaries in history.
The series not only reached audiences in liberal democracies, but was smuggled behind the iron curtain where it played, in secret, to large audiences. Reflecting on its impact, Czech president Vaclav Klaus has said: “For us, who lived in the communist world, Milton Friedman was the greatest champion of freedom, of limited and unobtrusive government and of free markets. Because of him I became a true believer in the unrestricted market economy.”
July 31st, 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Friedman’s birth. To commemorate that occasion, we’d like to share an interview with “Free to Choose” producer Bob Chitester. Like this interview, the entire series can now be viewed on-line at no cost at http://www.freetochoose.tv/, thanks to the incredible technological progress brought about by the economic freedom that Milton Friedman celebrated.
Produced by Andrew Coulson, Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg, and Lou Richards, with help from the Free to Choose Network.
_____________
April 4, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We got to stop spending so much money on the federal level. It will bankrupt us. I remember back in 1980 when I really started getting into the material of Milton Friedman as a result of reading his articles in Newsweek and reading his book “Free to Choose,” I really did get facts and figures to back on the view that we need more freedom giving back to us and the government needs to spend less.
As a result of Friedman’s writings I was able to discuss these issues with my fellow students at the university and by the time the 1980 election came around I had been attending political rallies and went out and worked hard for Ronald Reagan’s election. In this article below Dr. Thomas Sowell (who was featured twice in the film “Free to Choose”) notes how much influence Milton Friedman had on the election outcome in 1980:
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California.
Added to cato.org on July 25, 2002
This article originally appeared on TownHall.com, July 25, 2002.
Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday on July 31st provides an occasion to think back on his role as the pre-eminent economist of the 20th century. To those of us who were privileged to be his students, he also stands out as a great teacher.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, back in 1959, one day I was waiting outside Professor Friedman’s office when another graduate student passed by. He noticed my exam paper on my lap and exclaimed: “You got a B?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is that bad?”
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California.
“There were only two B’s in the whole class,” he replied.
“How many A’s?” I asked.
“There were no A’s!”
Today, this kind of grading might be considered to represent a “tough love” philosophy of teaching. I don’t know about love, but it was certainly tough.
Professor Friedman also did not let students arrive late at his lectures and distract the class by their entrance. Once I arrived a couple of minutes late for class and had to turn around and go back to the dormitory.
All the way back, I thought about the fact that I would be held responsible for what was said in that lecture, even though I never heard it. Thereafter, I was always in my seat when Milton Friedman walked in to give his lecture.
On a term paper, I wrote that either (a) this would happen or (b) that would happen. Professor Friedman wrote in the margin: “Or (c) your analysis is wrong.”
“Where was my analysis wrong?” I asked him.
“I didn’t say your analysis was wrong,” he replied. “I just wanted you to keep that possibility in mind.”
Perhaps the best way to summarize all this is to say that Milton Friedman is a wonderful human being — especially outside the classroom. It has been a much greater pleasure to listen to his lectures in later years, after I was no longer going to be quizzed on them, and a special pleasure to appear on a couple of television programs with him and to meet him on social occasions.
Milton Friedman’s enduring legacy will long outlast the memories of his students and extends beyond the field of economics. John Maynard Keynes was the reigning demi-god among economists when Friedman’s career began, and Friedman himself was at first a follower of Keynesian doctrines and liberal politics.
Yet no one did more to dismantle both Keynesian economics and liberal welfare-state thinking. As late as the 1950s, those with the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy were still able to depict Milton Friedman as a fringe figure, clinging to an outmoded way of thinking. But the intellectual power of his ideas, the fortitude with which he persevered, and the ever more apparent failures of Keynesian analyses and policies, began to change all that, even before Professor Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.
A towering intellect seldom goes together with practical wisdom, or perhaps even common sense. However, Milton Friedman not only excelled in the scholarly journals but also on the television screen, presenting the basics of economics in a way that the general public could understand.
His mini-series “Free to Choose” was a classic that made economic principles clear to all with living examples. His good nature and good humor also came through in a way that attracted and held an audience.
Although Friedrich Hayek launched the first major challenge to the prevailing thinking behind the welfare state and socialism with his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom,” Milton Friedman became the dominant intellectual force among those who turned back the leftward tide in what had seemed to be the wave of the future.
Without Milton Friedman’s role in changing the minds of so many Americans, it is hard to imagine how Ronald Reagan could have been elected president.
Nor was Friedman’s influence confined to the United States. His ideas reached around the world, not only among economists, but also in political circles which began to understand why left-wing ideas that sounded so good produced results that were so bad.
Milton Friedman rates a 21-gun salute on his birthday. Or perhaps a 90-gun salute would be more appropriate.
________
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
I have a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to highlight government employees who have turned sloth and overcompensation into an art form, and I have a Moocher Hall of Fame to illustrate the destructive entitlement mindset that exists when politicians pay people to do nothing.
I’m now thinking we also need another Hall of Fame to bring attention to the despicable people who oppose school choice because currying favor with teacher unions is more importantthan giving poor children an opportunityfor a good education.
And we many need to include Joe Biden on this tawdry list.
We’ll know soon enough. There’s a federally funded school choice program in Washington, DC, and time will tell whether the President intends to kill it.
In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Virginia Walden Ford expresses hope that President Biden won’t sacrifice the needs of minority children in the nation’s capital.
I hope his administration doesn’t tear down a program that has brought hope to thousands of African-American childrenin the District of Columbia. In 2004, Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. …In 2020-21, 82% of scholarship recipients identified as African-American and another 12% as Hispanic. While scholarships for poor children of color should hold bipartisan appeal, the…2020 Biden-Sanders “unity” platform went out of its way to recommend defunding the program.
Ms. Ford isn’t opposed to government schools, but she does want poor kids to have the same opportunity as Joe Biden’s kids.
I strongly support both public education and school choice. I attended public schools, and my father served as the first African-American school administratorin Little Rock, Ark.—for which my family received a burning cross on our front yard. …What really undermines public education is attempts from elites to keep good education for themselves… Mr. Biden’s children went to private schools. Why shouldn’t my former neighbors in Southeast Washington have the opportunity to do so too?
P.P.P.P.P.S. There’s also international evidence fromSweden, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands, all of which shows superior results when competition replaces government education monopolies.
The all-time, most-viewed post on this blog is this set of cartoons showing how the welfare state begins and how it eventually becomes an unsustainable mess.
The great Chuck Asay has a cartoon that takes the next step, showing what happens when the looters and moochers who ride in the wagon get pitted against those who are pulling the wagon.
Since I’m not a Romney fan (for a bunch of reasons outlined here), I would have preferred if the cartoon didn’t imply anything about the current election and instead focused on the rhetorical question of what happens to a society when those living off the government outnumber those who get stuck picking up the tab.
It also would have been more accurate to have the two slave drivers somehow identified as “politicians” and the “IRS.”
But it’s a very clever cartoon, so it’s worth sharing even if I’m nitpicking.
I must say I share your love for the LION, WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C.S. Lewis. Sadly he died on the same day as two other notable gentleman (JFK and Aldous Huxley). Just like you I have a love for books!
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Related posts:
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 4-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 3-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 1-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
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Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done. Abstract: Ronald Reagan […]
All voters nationwide should be required to validate his or her identity with a government-issued photo ID to vote in person or by absentee ballot. Pictured: Signs greet voters arriving at the Ruckersville Volunteer Fire Company polling station in Ruckersville, Va., on Election Day, Nov. 3. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research.
Election fraud is real.
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which has chronicled more than 1,300 cases of election fraud, proves that election fraud does occur in American elections.
Errors and omissions by election officials and careless, shoddy election practices and procedures or lack of training can also cause and have caused problems for voters and candidates alike.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. States can, and should, take action to restore integrity to our elections.
The Left has declared war on our culture, but we should never back down, nor compromise our principles. Learn more now >>
Here’s a list of best practices states should adopt for elections.
Verify the accuracy of voter registration lists. Computerized statewide voter-registration lists should be designed to be interoperable so that they can communicate seamlessly with other state record databases to allow frequent exchanges and comparisons of information.
For example, when an individual changes the residence address on his or her driver’s license, that information should be sent to state election officials so that the voter-registration address of the individual is also changed to his or her new Department of Motor Vehicles residence address.
2. Verify citizenship of voters. Only lawful citizens can vote in federal elections. States should, therefore, require proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as verify the citizenship of registered voters with the records of the Department of Homeland Security, including access to the E-Verify system.
3. Require voter ID. A voter should be required to validate his or her identity with government-issued photo ID to vote in-person or by absentee ballot (as states such as Alabama and Kansas require). Government-issued IDs should be free for those who cannot afford one.
4. Limit absentee ballots.Absentee ballotsshould be reserved for those individuals who are too disabled to vote in person or who will be out of town on Election Day and all early-voting days.
5. Prevent vote trafficking. Vote-trafficking (also called “vote harvesting”) by third parties should be banned. That would ensure that candidates, campaign staffers, party activists, and political consultants are prohibited from picking up and potentially mishandling or changing absentee ballots and pressuring or coercing vulnerable voters in their homes. In other words, a political group can’t offer to pick up ballots and then bring them to the polling place and/or mail them, with no third party supervising that group’s behavior in the interim.
6. Allow election observers complete access to the election process. Political parties, candidates, and third-party organizations should all be allowed to have observers in every aspect of the election process, because transparency is essential to a fair and secure system. The only limitation on such observers is that they cannot interfere with the voting and counting process.
However, a representative of the election office should be present to answer the questions of the observers. They should be legally allowed to be in a position—exactly like election officials—to observe everything going on, other than the actual voting by individuals. Election officials should be prohibited from stationing observers so far away that they cannot observe the process, including such procedures as the opening of absentee ballots and the verification process.
7. Provide voting assistance. Any individuals providing assistance to a voter in a voting booth because the voter is illiterate, disabled, or otherwise requires assistance should be required to complete a form, to be filed with poll election officials, providing their name, address, contact information, and the reason they are providing assistance. They should also be required to provide a photo ID.
8. Prohibit early vote counting. To avoid premature release of election results, the counting of ballots, including absentee and early votes, should not begin until the polls close at the end of Election Day. However, if a state insists on beginning the count before Election Day, it should ban the release of results until the evening of Election Day, subject to criminal penalties.
9. Provide state legislatures with legal standing. State legislatures must ensure that they have legal standing—either through a specific state law or through a constitutional amendment if that is required—to sue other state officials, such as governors or secretaries of state, who make or attempt to make unauthorized changes in state election laws.
For example, if a secretary of state extends the deadline set by state law for the receipt of absentee ballots, legislatures should have legal standing to contest that unilateral change that overrides state law. They should be classified as a necessary party in any lawsuit. And voters should be provided by state law with the ability to file a writ of mandamus against any state or local official who fails to abide by, or enforce, a state election-law requirement.
In 2020, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar made changes to election law unilaterally. We need to ensure that can’t happen again in other states or in future elections.
Along with these nine (and other) reforms, there are specific measures states shouldn’t take.
For instance, there should be no same-day registration for voting. Registration should be required before Election Day to give election officials sufficient time to verify the accuracy of the registration information contained on a registration form and to confirm the eligibility of the potential voter.
There also shouldn’t be automatic voter registration. States should comply with the National Voter Registration Act and provide registration opportunities at state agencies. However, all individuals should be asked at the time of the state agency transaction, such as the application for a driver’s license, whether they want to register to vote.
No one should be automatically registered without their consent or knowledge, since this can lead to multiple registrations by the same individual, as well as the registration of ineligible individuals, such as noncitizens.
As we all know, elections have consequences. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that every vote counts and isn’t diluted by election fraud and other problems. It’s time for states to implement these reforms to ensure voters will have faith in our elections.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we will consider publishing your remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature.
I must say I share your love for the LION, WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C.S. Lewis. Sadly he died on the same day as two other notable gentleman (JFK and Aldous Huxley). Just like you I have a love for books!
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Related posts:
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 4-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 3-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 1-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done. Abstract: Ronald Reagan […]
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