For Your Video Watching Enjoyment

Last night I enjoyed watching a bit of video on my computer while eating a late night snack. This one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbTgOzDvK4A starting at the 4:00 mark) is Andrew Klavan of PJTV answering this viewer question: “Liberals seem to have an underlying contempt for authority and traditional institutions, and yet their faith and trust in big government is at times fanatical. Conservatives, on the other hand, usually respect authority and traditional institutions, but have an inherent distrust of big government. Why?”—Black Templar, PJTV Member

The first thing Andrew says is, “The man who won’t bow down to God, you think he’d be free, but he’ll actually bow down to anything.” Then he points out that people who respect valid authority, authorized by the people, are actually more free. They behave themselves appropriately and work well with one another. I fairly frequently have the urge to type a transcript of Klavan’s commentaries on the culture “Klavan on the Culture.” I think this clip coincides with the Spherical Model description of how greater civilization, greater culture, happens when people choose to live according to God’s law, much more than when a powerful government coerces people into doing good.

Another bit of listening last night was the coinciding of two of my favorites: Uncommon Knowledge and Thomas Sowell: here. Peter Robinson interviews my favorite economist (one of my favorite famous people) on the new and revised edition of Economic Facts and Fallacies. Here’s a great quote from the book: “Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they are asserted repeatedly.” The book is about these over-asserted things we believe that simply aren’t true—with plenty of evidence to support his point of view.

One is that affordable housing requires government intervention. One comparison was that a house that would cost $155,000 in Houston, where there are no zoning laws, would cost over $1 million in San Francicso, where do-gooder big-government types insist on “affordable” housing.

Another myth Sowell dissolves is that slavery was because of race. He points out that slavery has been around for thousands of years, and during most of that the enslavers didn’t have the transportation to obtain their slaves from thousands of miles away; they had to enslave closer neighbors, with no regard to race. It became about race specifically in the United States because of the belief that all men are created equal. That being true, the only way to justify slavery was to claim certain people weren’t fully men but something lesser. This concept didn’t occur the same way in Brazil, which had more slavery but lacked the same freedom concept.

Some other race-related comments were that in the 1920s Blacks had a much higher percentage of two-parent intact families than today. And as late as the 1930s Blacks had a lower unemployment rate than whites. The point is that those who claim Blacks are downtrodden today and are suffering from the results of slavery and prejudice are ignoring historical conditions. Things got worse for Blacks, as far as poverty and social conditions, following the passage of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s—not that the Civil Rights laws shouldn’t have been passed, but that the passage shouldn’t have been followed with violent riots and welfare handouts.

I appreciate Thomas Sowell for saying these things—because he’s Black and grew up in poverty, so he’s allowed to say things without the race card being thrown at him. And he’s listened to because he’s wicked smart and always has the facts on his side. Brilliant good fun.