A Tribute to Walter Williams

The world lost a great man Wednesday morning, December 2: economist Walter E. Williams. He was 84. His death was sudden and unexpected; he had taught class, as usual, the day before. He'd always hoped to go that way.

Walter Williams, March 31, 1936 – December 2, 2020
Photo: The Heritage Foundation, found here

Next to Thomas Sowell, he is the economist I read and quote most. Thomas Sowell wrote a tribute to him today, mentioning even in the title that they were best friends. Sowell is now 90. He didn’t expect Williams to go first. He said,

He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.

Since he was younger than me, I chose him to be my literary executor, to take control of my books after I was gone. But his death at age 84 is a reminder that no one really has anything to say about such things.

Sowell mentions two of the books Walter Williams wrote (he wrote ten), which will always be worth reading:

·         Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?

·         South Africa’s War Against Capitalism

Walter Williams, along with Thomas Sowell, is both black and conservative. Both grew up poor, Williams in the projects of Philadelphia, and then gained credibility through sheer genius combined with excellent research and communication skills. They have both street cred and scholastic credentials to say what their conclusions are, based on research, when it goes against the current political script. I have always thought of both of these men as great economists, great writers, and then notice they happen to be black. It’s handy that their skin color would give them the ability to challenge race assumptions that others would be called racist for stating.

I first discovered Walter Williams, I believe, when he substituted for Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and then started seeking his weekly column at Townhall or The Daily Signal.

In my tribute today, I’ll share what I’ve collected of his words. First come the quotes; I give sources where I have them. After that are the articles. There are places to find the entire archive of his weekly columns. The ones I’m listing are those I saved to my personal files because I wanted to keep them.

 

Walter Williams Quotes

I don't think that stupidity, ignorance or insanity explains the love that many Americans hold for government; it's far more sinister and perhaps hopeless.

I'll give a few examples to make my case. Many Americans want money they don't personally own to be used for what they see as good causes such as handouts to farmers, poor people, college students, senior citizens and businesses. If they privately took someone's earnings to give to a farmer, college student or senior citizen, they would be hunted down as thieves and carted off to jail. However, they get Congress to do the identical thing, through its taxing power, and they are seen as compassionate and caring. In other words, people love government because government, while having neither moral nor constitutional authority, has the legal and physical might to take the property of one American and give it to another.—"Americans Love Government” June 10, 2009

 

Political decision-making and allocation of resources is conflict enhancing while market decision-making and allocation is conflict reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict…. Interestingly enough, the very people in our society who protest the loudest against human conflict and violence are the very ones calling for increased government resource allocation.—“How Government Creates Conflict” March 31, 2010

 

If European governments and the U.S. Congress ceased the practice of giving people what they have not earned, budgets would be more than balanced. For government to guarantee a person a right to goods and services he has not earned, it must diminish someone else's right to what he has earned, simply because governments have no resources of their very own.—“Blame Government Handouts for the Financial Mess in U.S. and Europe” September 27, 2011

 

The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.—“Blacks and Obama” December 4, 2013

 

People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.—“Tyrants Trying to Subvert Free Markets” July 18, 2007

 

What goes unappreciated is just why America's leftists' movement attacks the Founders. If they can delegitimize the Founders themselves, it goes a long way toward their agenda of delegitimizing the founding principles of our nation. If the leftists can convince the nation that men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were good-for-nothing slave-owning racists, then their ideas can be more easily trashed.—“Undermining America” October 28, 2017

 

For the most part, white bigots are no longer respected among whites and I look forward to the day when black bigots are no longer respected among blacks.—“Nonsense to Think Discontent with Obama is Racist” September 30, 2009

 

One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.—“Liberals, Progressives and Socialists,” August 8, 2012

 

Let me offer you my definition of social justice. I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you—and why?

Image from Bastiat Institute, found on Facebook

 

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; Apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the Talisman of moral people.

 

Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.

 

Walter Williams Columns

·         “Why We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy” January 19, 2018 

·         “Scientists: Dishonest or Afraid?” Nov. 23, 2019 

·         “Minimum Wage Cruelty” July 12, 2017 

·         “Culture and Social Pathology” July 17, 2015 

·         “Global Warming” March 11, 2015 

·         “What Egyptians Need” July 17, 2013 

·         “True or False: Global Warming, Manufacturing Decline” January 5, 2011 

·         “Getting Beyond Race” November 12, 2008 

·         “Lessons from the Bailout” October 8, 2008 

·         “Liberty Versus Socialism” March 5, 2008 

·         “Our Irreconcilable Differences” January 2, 2014

Socialism on the Sphere

Earlier today I was listening to the STA Money Hour on radio (it comes on at noon weekdays on KPRC 950 AM), and one of the hosts mentioned he’d had a conversation with his young adult son about socialism, what it means, what’s being taught in schools and elsewhere, what the young man’s friends thought. And the answer was kind of scary. There’s so little knowledge among young people, who are being taught that socialism is about “fairness” and “sharing the wealth” so that these young people get free education, free healthcare, and other free “stuff.” So the host said it was his plan to post the video of Milton Friedman on the Phil Donohue Show, from decades ago, that so clearly explains the economics of it. I’ve shared that video before, but I’m including it again at the end of today’s post.

Later today I heard Larry Elder mention on his show, that there’s a recent poll showing that large numbers of young people in their 20s and 30s favor socialism—this in the face of Venezuela. They don’t seem to make the connection.

Last week economist Thomas Sowell was asked about the growing approval of socialism in America; would we resist it? He said he hoped so, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

Socialism, in red, overlaps with other -isms,
but they're all down into tyranny.

So today I’m doing my little part of educating the world on socialism, using what we know from the Spherical Model.

How do we know where socialism is on the sphere?

The same way you know about any government type or -ism: you see how it answers the questions for reaching north on the political, economic, and social spheres.

So let’s try it. We’ll try this one sphere at a time, but be warned that the spheres interrelate.

Political Sphere

Question 1: Is socialism something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has a right to delegate to his/her government?

Answer: Depending on how we’re defining socialism, there’s some range here. Socialism could mean that government takes over various sectors of the economy, or maybe the entire means of production for a country. It’s a matter of degree, but socialism implies that government has the right to take private property without due compensation.

Socialism defines property “rights” as “whatever the government allows you to control as if you own it,” but government is ultimately the actual owner of whatever it decides to take ownership of.

But in real life—what we call natural law—we don’t have the right to take someone else’s property, which essentially means taking the fruits of labor from someone’s life, thus enslaving them; therefore we don’t have the right to delegate that right to our government.

This means socialism doesn’t pass the freedom test on this question. Socialism is southern hemisphere. The more power that government takes that the people do not have the right to grant to government, the more tyrannical the government.

Question 2: Does socialism infringe in any way on the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights?

Answer: Let’s remind ourselves of those God-given rights—just the ones listed in the Bill of Rights. (There are, of course, others.)

·         Freedom of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, petition government for redress of grievances.

·         Right to bear arms.

·         Right to security in our homes and papers, and from illegal searches and seizures.

·         Right to a fair and speedy trial, by jury.

·         Freedom from excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments.

The final two amendments of the original Bill of Rights add that government is limited to the enumerated powers granted in the Constitution, and that any rights not enumerated are retained by the States or the individual people.

In theory, socialism wouldn’t have to infringe on all these rights; it would only need to infringe on property rights. However, in practice, in order to enforce the coercive taking of property, in all the countries that have tried it, we’ve seen many more rights infringed. The right to bear arms gets lost early on. So do free speech rights—and all the rest of the First Amendment. The judicial system gets corrupted, and “fairness” becomes whatever the government says it is, no matter how unjust.

So, socialism falls into the southern hemisphere on this question.

Question 3: Is socialism within the proper role of government, some aspect of protecting life, liberty and property? These include national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling (not controlling) international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency, and the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws?

Answer: Socialism isn’t about protecting life, liberty, or property. It purports to be about fairness, and “protecting” people from poverty. But, as we know, whenever government interferes in a way that is beyond the proper role of government, there will be unintended consequences, which are usually the exact opposite of the stated goal. So, if socialism intends to get people out of poverty, you can expect the unintended consequences to include putting people into poverty.

That’s what we’ve seen happening in Venezuela. The richest nation in South America fell into abject poverty in about a decade. In some countries the fall has taken longer, 30 to 50 years. But it has happened every time. China, Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia. Everywhere it’s been tried. As it forces the people into deprivations while taking away their ability to rebel, tyranny reigns
.

screenshot from Stuart Varney report on Venezuela August 2018

Socialism is designed to fall into tyranny.

Economic Sphere

Question: Who decides what will be done with the fruits of your labors?

Answer: There’s only that single question for the Economic Sphere. Does the person who produced something through his labors get to decide how the fruits of his labors are used? Or should someone else decide? In socialism, it’s someone else. Government. Probably a distant bureaucrat, who decides that, if someone produces quite a lot—far more than the person needs for subsistence, so that the producer accumulates wealth—then government should take a portion of that wealth and distribute to someone who was not as successful at producing surplus fruits of labor.

Socialism ignores how hard a person works, how valuable a person’s work is to society, or how careful a person is to accumulate his wealth rather than quickly spend it. Socialism is only concerned that the outcomes should be equalized.

Socialism fails to take into account that, if a person doesn’t get to keep the fruits of his labors, and the government promises to give enough to everyone regardless of effort, socialism has taken away the incentive to work. And the result, before long, is that those who would have produced more will no longer bother to do so.

Socialism, therefore, not only takes what has been produced from the producers, but it leads the producers to produce less in the future—which means there’s less to take, to redistribute. That’s how poverty results.

Another option for producers is escape. Those who want to keep more of what they’ve produced will leave a place where a government takes their earnings. Even if government were to confiscate all their wealth, those producers who escape would still have their human capital, which they would take with them to produce more wealth in a less hostile environment. That’s one reason socialist countries have historically prevented their people from leaving. And you’re hearing complaints from New York's governor about the wealth producers leaving, just when they had so many uses for the exorbitant taxes they were charging.

Socialism doesn’t lift people out of poverty; it sinks entire societies (except for a few ruling elite) into poverty.

Social Sphere

Question 1: Does socialism allow for and encourage the flourishing of religion?

Answer: There’s an essential reason for this question. Rights come, logically, from either a greater than human source or a human-given source. If rights are God-given, then a person is entitled to them simply by virtue of being human. No human can rightfully deprive you of them. But if rights are not God-given, then there is no guarantee the human giver will not take them away.

Say, as in so-called “Democratic Socialism,” a majority votes that you should be deprived of your property simply because you have more than the majority (or its appointed bureaucrat) deems that you need or qualify for. You’re deprived of your property rights because you worked harder or smarter than someone else. Put another way, the majority has enslaved you to work for the majority’s benefit, rather than your own. The majority is a human tyrant.

And since the actions of a socialist government are tyrannical—i.e., go against your God-given rights—coercion will be necessary to do the enslaving, so you’ll lose additional rights.

But here is the crux of the matter: socialism claims to be a way to alleviate the unfairness of unequal outcomes, those terrible inequalities, or disparities. Without socialism, how do you deal with the fact that some people are starving or homeless while others enjoy mansions and private jets? Socialism claims to be moral and charitable.

But is it? Is it charitable for you to go on your neighbor’s property, steal the apples he has grown and was going to pick and sell at a market, and instead take those apples and distribute them to some hungry people down the road?

If your neighbor finds out and decides—voluntarily chooses—to allow for this theft for the sake of the hungry people, that says something about the charitable (and also merciful) feelings of your neighbor. But it says nothing about you except that you disrespect your neighbor’s property. You didn’t give anything of your own to feed the hungry. So you should stop smugly calling yourself charitable.

We can’t delegate our ability to give charity to government to do for us, because we don’t have the power to give someone else’s property charitably. We only have power to give our own property.

But isn’t that what we do when we pay our tax money to government to distribute to the poor?

The simple answer is no. You give tax money to government to carry out government responsibilities, of which charity is not one. When you vote (or have your representatives vote) to take tax money for charitable purposes, you’re giving your money and your neighbors’ to government bureaucrats to make decisions about who deserves what, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for favoritism and corruption.

If you donate your charity directly, not only is that actual charitable giving, rather than coerced “giving,” there’s no portion of it going to a government bureaucrat, so more money goes to the charitable cause. If you give to an organization, you can do your research to know who they serve, how they decide who’s deserving, and how much of your donation goes directly to charitable purposes rather than overhead.

So there’s a free choice way to take care of the poor, and socialism isn’t it.

But that real way does require a righteous people—a religious people, most likely—who feel the personal obligation to help out their fellow human beings.

Earlier today, the Heritage Foundation linked a piece well worth reading by historian Lee Edwards, “What Americans Must Know about Socialism.” The piece ends with this:

This is the reality of socialism—a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny. This is the case against socialism—a god that failed, a science that never was, a political system headed for the ash heap of history

Socialism is a religious perspective, but it places government in the role of God. And instead of seeing theft and coveting as sins, it exalts them as basic principles.

Question 2: Does socialism promote the family as the basic unit of civilization?

Answer: No. Socialism tries to replace the family. It tries to be the source of rights, provider of needs, educator and inculcator of ideology, controller of messages, controller of behaviors. It assumes that people would not do what government calls “good,” left to their own devices. So it steps in, where the family used to be, to provide and teach its ways, and to coerce and punish any disagreement or disobedience. And it punishes much more severely than a loving parent would. Violence against dissent isn’t a mistake in how it has been implemented; it is an inherent practice.

Socialism is not intended to grow civilized adults, as a family is intended to do; rather, it is intended to grow submissive minions to allow the ruling elite unlimited power.

Ahead of a story on Venezuela posted on Facebook on March 8, the Heritage Foundation summarizes with this:

Socialism always promises progress, but it inevitably delivers scarcity, corruption and decay.

Rather than empower the common man, socialists believe in empowering bureaucracy. In their minds, bureaucrats will always make decisions based on science and dispassionate reason—and make sure those decisions are implemented and enforced efficiently.

It’s an elitist, intellectually arrogant belief, and it’s dangerous.

Capitalism is the economic engine of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Socialism sinks us into tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

Here is the Milton Friedman video again: 

Sampling the Spherical Model 2018

For the last post of the year, I thought maybe I ought to do another “best of” collection. When I checked, it looks like I haven’t done one since 2015. I’ve done the occasional “what is the Spherical Model?” type of post—which I’ll probably do for the first post of 2019, if you’re wondering. Anyway, I don’t think I want to go back further than just 2018 for this “best of” post.

Jordan Peterson
screen shot from here

It was January 2018 when I learned who Jordan Peterson was. My studying his speeches and book started with the interview he did with Cathy Newman, which got so much media attention, because she seemed so incapable of understanding what he was saying:

“So, what you’re saying is…”

“No, I didn’t say that at all.”

Several dozen times. Anyway, that got my attention, and I started listening to his talks on YouTube. Eventually I bought and read his recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which I think ranks as my favorite read of the year.

A quick search shows I mentioned him in 19 posts, or about 20%. That’s a lot of influence on my thinking. Thomas Sowell gets more mentions on this blog, but I started referring to him from the beginning. This year I only found seven Thomas Sowell mentions.

There were some themes—ideas that came up multiple times, sometimes with some crossover:

·         Truth, Reality, and Civilization

·         Feminism

·         LGBT Issues

Thomas Sowell
screen shot from here

Other issues pop up as well. So, what I’ll do is list the most-read pieces of the year—plus maybe a couple I thought should be. I’ll organize loosely by subject, and I’ll highlight some of the Jordan Peterson or Thomas Sowell influenced posts, and other bits of information about some of the pieces. There’s more here than you’re like to wade through. But I hope you’ll enjoy sampling some of what was going on in 2018 at the tiny think tank that is the Spherical Model.

Truth, Reality, and Civilization

Telling the Truth   May 24, 2018  (Jordan Peterson; this is also on LGBT issues) 

Who Is Telling the Truth?   September 27, 2018  (on Kavanaugh hearings/Ford accusations) 

Truth before It’s Too Late  October 4, 2018  (Jordan Peterson) 

Speak the Truth and Play Fair  February 12, 2018   (Jordan Peterson) 

Pareto Distribution  January 29, 2018  (Jordan Peterson; most read piece this year) 

Diversity Where It Matters  February 5, 2018  (Thomas Sowell) 

Malevolence   February 15, 2018  (Jordan Peterson is briefly mentioned; Florida shooting) 

Basic Building Material for Civilization   April 16, 2018  (some Spherical Model basics) 

Class, Culture, and Moving Upward   May 3, 2018   (on JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy) 

Population, Urban Thinking, and the Vote    May 14, 2018   (on the Electoral College) 

Feminism

Feminism Does Women Wrong  January 18, 2018  (Jordan Peterson) 

Long Bending Arc   January 22, 2018   (abortion) 

Feminism Turns Women into Bad Men   January 25, 2018   (Jordan Peterson)  

Mature Conversation    April 5, 2018    (Jordan Peterson) 

LGBT Issues

Reality Is Kinder    March 15, 2018    (Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally) 

The Virtue Signaling Religion    March 19, 2018    (Gordon B. Hinckley’s Standing for Something) 

Normalizing Has Already Crossed a Line  July 30, 2018   (normalization of sexual perversion)        

Normalizing Has Already Crossed a Line, Part II: Heteromorphism   August 2, 2018 

Normalizing Has Already Crossesd a Line, Part III: Change Is Possible   August 6, 2018 

Change Is Possible   September 24, 2018   (Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. on reintegrative therapy) 

Which Is It?    November 29, 2018   (Jordan Peterson; gender pronouns) 

Other Subjects

Linda Nuttall
Spherical Model writer

Scary Guns   February 19, 2018            

Where They’re Planted     February 1, 2018   (immigration) 

About Me     April 2, 2018    

Scouts and Honor    May 10, 2018   (Girls in Boy Scouts)

Self-Hatred Isn’t Virtuous     August 16, 2018   (love of country) 

Disparate Impacts     May 7, 2018    (Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities) 

Economic Schools    November 26, 2018 (Thomas Sowell is mentioned, among other economists) 

Sowell Food for Thought    December 6, 2018 (updated version of Discrimination and Disparities) 

Sowell Food for Thought

Another Uncommon Knowledge interview with economist Thomas Sowell came out this week, coinciding with the updated version of his book Discrimination and Disparities. There’s always wisdom that comes from listening to this octogenarian (I hope he lives at least another 20 years). Some of the stories I’ve heard before. I’ve read his biography. But some of it is new, or clarifying because of current data. He’s big on finding evidence from the data.

Thomas Sowell, on Uncommon Knowledge
screen shot from here

He has added a new chapter to the book, and here’s an example quoted from that:

The poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10% every year since 1994. As far back as 1969 young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards had similar incomes to those of their white counterparts. Academic outcomes show a pattern of disparities similar to the pattern of disparities in the amount of time devoted to schoolwork. Apparently, lifestyle choices have consequences.

Host Peter Robinson asks him about that:

PR: So this is the constrained vision once again. Welfare state, that’s government; we don’t rely on that. Affirmative action, government; we don’t rely on that. We rely on hard work. We rely on the institution of marriage. That’s correct?

TS: Yes. In other words, these things— I don’t think it’s the marriage as such or the library cards as such; it’s that there are lifestyle choices that have been made. And the comparison I made was between—if you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was at 22%, and among whites it was 11%, but among black married couples, it was 7.5%. So they not only do better than blacks as a whole; they do better than whites as a whole. So it’s lifestyle choices.

That’s not something we hear in the news, or from mainstream opinion commentary.

new edition, with new chapter

Thomas Sowell talks some about minimum wages. That was a particular interest of his, back when he was working on his PhD, and was still a Marxist, but was academically committed to empirical data (which, of course, is what led him in the opposite direction of Marxism so many decades ago). When he tried to get data from one department of government to another, he couldn’t. There was a sense that people’s jobs—in the government—were at stake if evidence showed, as some believed, that higher minimum wages led to greater unemployment.

Of that experience he quips:

I worked in the US Department of Labor, and I began to realize—well, a number of things—that the government is not simply the personification of the general will, like Rousseau or others would say. The government institutions have their own institutional interests.

His own life example about the minimum wage was as a 16-year-old high school dropout, when he got a job as a Western Union messenger, delivering telegrams on a bicycle. The minimum wage for the job, as set by the US Fair Labor Standards in 1938 was 40¢/hour. But by 1948, when he got the job, he started at the bottom, getting paid 60¢/hour—the going rate to get the workers, rendering the minimum wage irrelevant.

But then “compassionate” government stepped in to “help” by raising the minimum wage. The result is that 20 years later a black kid (or for that matter a white kid) can’t get a job.

Sowell and Robinson spend some time discussing the difference between the “constrained vision” and the “unconstrained vision,” from an earlier book, A Conflict of Visions. Constrained means that you pay attention to reality. Unconstrained means there’s an assumption that good things happen all by themselves, but if bad things happen there’s some institution to blame—even maybe civilization itself. 

So, when there’s disparity, there’s one side that looks for data and evidence to compare one approach to another (the constrained side). And then there’s the side that assumes there’s racism or some other social ill at fault (the unconstrained side).

Most of the time, in our country today, disparities are not racially caused. He talks about another possible effect contributing to poverty:

TS: Wherever you look around the country, around the world, you find people that live up in the mountains poor and backwards. Even in the richest country, including the United States. I believe the poorest county in the United States was in a mountain community which was almost 100% white.

PR: Somewhere in Appalachia? West Virginia? Southern Ohio?

TS: Yeah. And men in that county had a life expectancy ten years less than men in a county in Virginia.

PR: And the unconstrained vision says, “Lets fix that. Surely we can pass a law that would improve that.” And the constrained vision says, “Well, now, wait a moment. If people who live in isolated pockets in mountains are poor and backwards all around the world, and we see this pattern over, and over, and over again, maybe there’s something very deeply rooted in reality about that that is hard for us to get at.” Correct?

TS: Yes.

Robinson reminds him of a recent column in which he challenged Nicholas Kristoff, a New York Times writer who thinks whites should pay reparations for the legacy of slavery.

PR: Kristoff had ascribed the gaps between African Americans and whites in America—gaps in wealth, gaps in educational achievement, the usual gaps—to, and this is a quotation from Kristoff: “to the lingering effects of slavery.” And here’s Tom Sowell:

“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood 100 years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on the legacy of slavery with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”

And so there it is. Life is hard; you use the word hard. You use the word serious. You use evidence. Tom Sowell is a man of the constrained vision through and through and through. Correct?

TS: Yes. Part of a vanishing breed, I might add.

There are a couple of times in the conversation that charter schools come up. They’re educating better than children in privileged areas are being educated. And they’re not getting the cream of the crop; they’re allowing students in by lottery, without even looking at they’re academic history. But they do have high expectations, and they don’t tolerate nonsense.

Near the end they cover charter schools in more detail. Robinson points out that Democrats—and he can’t remain nonpartisan about it—prevent quality education for those that need it. And Dr. Sowell agrees:

TS: That really is one of the moral outrages, that for many kids who come from a very poor background, and whose parents might not have had much education, a decent education is the one thing they have to have to have a better life.

And these schools have been absolutely spectacular. The charter schools. The successful ones. Now there are some that weren’t, but— For example, a few years ago on the New York statewide math test, there was an elementary school, grade 4 I believe, in Harlem, whose students passed those tests at a higher rate than any 4^th grade kids anywhere in the state of New York. I mean, we’re talking Scarsdale, Radcliffe, places like that. The Success Academy schools as a whole, their students pass both the math and the English statewide tests at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state of New York.

The vast majority of the kids in the Success Academy schools are either black or Hispanic. If you look at the five highest scoring school districts in the state, in terms of the percentage of students who pass the math or the English tests, their average family income ranges from four times that of the kids in the Success Academy schools to more than nine times the family income of the kids in the Success Academy schools. And yet, the Mayor of New York is doing his darndest to put a stop to the expansion of these schools in general, but his special ire is aimed at the Success Academy schools. And this is happening all across the country.

PR: Because they make the teachers unions look bad, in the public schools? What’s the political motivation? Why would Mayor de Blasio have it out for the charter schools such as Success Academy?

TS: Well, the teachers unions are the major reason. And we talk about the money they contribute, the votes they contribute. What’s happening, again, not just in New York, but other parts of the country, including California, is there’s all kinds of chicanery to prevent the charter schools from expanding. That’s why you have tens of thousands on the waiting list. It’s not that the charter schools aren’t willing to expand, but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way. Because, if you let that go at the natural pace, it would be very hard for public schools to compete.

There it is again: something about that government institution having its own institutional interests—apart, and probably in conflict with the stated goal.

What’s missing is a search for—or even a valuing of—evidence, or truth. The current rise of socialism’s popularity is an example—51% approval from those in the 18-29 demographic, according to a recent Gallup poll. How can that be?

TS: Yes. Socialism is a great idea; that does not mean it’s a great reality. One of the things that disturbs me tremendously is about this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela, an oil rich country. And they’re breaking into the grocery stores to try to get food. And they’re fleeing to neighboring countries, most of which are not all that prosperous themselves, but at least you don’t starve to death in them. And none of that makes a bit of difference. I don’t think most of the people that are out there cheering for Bernie Sanders have given a thought to Venezuela.

PR: To the evidence.

TS: That’s right. To the evidence, yeah.

So that’s one theme for this conversation: get the evidence, so you know what you’re talking about.

And this is another common Sowell theme:

TS: In the government you have surrogate decision makers, and they cannot possibly know as much as the individuals whose person decisions have been preempted.

The third would be about lifestyle choices:

PR: Tom Sowell’s view is, get an education, stay married, and do your job, roughly?

TS: Yeah.

It sounds like what we’ve been saying here for years. If Thomas Sowell agrees with us, I think that means we’re on the right track.

Government by Consent or Expertise

I’ve been going through a Hillsdale online course (their newest, I think) called Congress: How It Worked and Why It Doesn’t. In his introduction, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn points out that the title refers to both past tense—“when it worked”—and present tense—“it doesn’t.” There isn’t anything in the title that says, “And how we get it to work again.” I’m halfway through, but I’m hoping there will be something hopeful like that.

Anyway, in our ongoing primer on the Constitution here, it’s appropriate to talk about what has been going awry with Congress over the past century.

According to Article I of the Constitution, legislation happens in the legislature, composed of two houses: the House of Representatives, which is based on population, and the Senate, which provides equal representation for the states. The two houses have to come into agreement on any legislation that they pass along to the president for his signature, before it becomes law.

But the self-proclaimed progressives, such as President Woodrow Wilson, and others of his time—Herbert Croly, John Dewey, both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt—thought they knew better than the founders about how things should be run.

They set out, rather matter-of-factly, to overturn the US Constitution, and replace it as they saw fit. And they and their followers, over the course of a century, have been far too successful.

The idea, they claimed, was that life in the industrialized world was too complex to be handled by anyone but experts. They liked the idea of using the legislature to express the general will of the people—a desired outcome, like clean water or safer working conditions, for example—and then turning over all the details to some expert administrative body.

They claimed that this would better do the will of the people, and do it more efficiently—and separately from politics.

Dr. Kevin Portteus
screen shot from lecture 5 of
Congress: How It Worked and Why It Doesn't

Dr. Kevin Portteus, the teacher of this Hillsdale course, in Lecture 3: “Politics and Administration,” offers this definition:

Politics is politics in what we might think of as the ordinary sense, the martialing of votes, the changing of public opinion, and the enactment of a political program. Whereas, on the contrary, administration constitutes the implementation of the broad policies laid out in the political process.

It didn’t matter to the progressives that the legislature would be giving up their lawmaking power. Their “progressive” vision was all that mattered.

So Congress would pass vague “laws” requiring a general desired outcome. And they’d turn over the authority to accomplish that to administrative bodies of bureaucrats, with practically unlimited authority to set the rules, enforce them, and adjudicate disputes—all branches of power in one.

So now, besides voters and elected officials, the process has a third party. Dr. Portteus describes these extra-constitutional lawmakers, and three basic characteristics required in order to be one. Pay attention to the second one; there’s a lot there. And then, if you understand the second, how do you square that with the third?

That’s the bureaucrat, the administrator, the official. What does he look like? Well, Croly says, “The experts charged with the administration of these laws would become the official custodians of a certain part of the accepted social program. In other words, they must implement some portion of the progressive social platform. So if you’re put in charge of EPA, your job is to implement clean air and clean water policy. That’s your corner of a just society that’s your responsibility.

But, in order to do that, we need people who have three basic characteristics.

The first one is that they’re experts. They have to be trained experts in their particular fields. And we’ve seen this.

The second attribute of a progressive bureaucrat is that he be independent of the partisan political process. And this was the driving force throughout the Twentieth Century behind the creation of entities like independent regulatory commissions. Get the policymakers out of the electoral process, and get them out from under the control of elected officials, so that the people—public opinion—and the people’s elected representatives don’t get in the way of the application of expertise to solve these social problems.

It’s kind of interesting, when you think about it, because, in the progressive mindset, we’re going to have bureaucrats who are pretty far removed from the political process. And if you follow the logic of this argument, the end result of restricting the people’s ability to control government officials—the end result of that is going to be greater implementation of democracy. That is to say, the goals stated in the people’s legislation are going to be less likely to be subverted, because the people who are implementing them are going to have no interest except serving the public interests.

It sounds kind of naïve to us, but they really believed this. They really believed that you were going to have these people who were not gripped by self-interest in the way that the rest of us were, that somehow they would be outside of the ordinary limitations or foibles of human nature. And they would be responsive only to the public good.

And they really believed this. This was not cynical on their part. They were serious.

But, there was one other characteristic that you could not get around. And that is that these people must be committed progressives. They cannot be anti-progressives. Because, if they’re not committed progressives, then they will not zealously enforce the mission of the agency of the program over which they were put in charge.

Because, the danger in that circumstance is that, if such a person is put in charge of a program or of an agency, he would use that position as a vehicle for circumventing the will of the people as stated in legislation.

To give an example, a while ago, about ’99 or 2000, Bill Clinton had to fill a spot on the Federal Elections Commission, and he chose to fill that spot with a man named Bradley Smith. Now, Brad Smith is the expert in federal campaign finance law. And, so, there’s no doubt that he knows his stuff. And by putting him on the commission, he would be independent of the partisan political process. Now, Smith recounts in his book on free speech that his chief opponent, when he was nominated, was Clinton’s own vice-president, Al Gore. And, as Smith recounts in his book, he says, “The reason that Gore opposed me was not because I didn’t know my stuff, and it’s not because I was going to be a captive tool of special interests, because I had my position on the committee. What he objected to was the fact that I questioned the wisdom and the constitutionality of current and proposed campaign finance restrictions. In other words, that I was not committed to zealous enforcement of federal campaign finance programs and the implementation of new and ever more restrictive programs.”

So, you can’t have someone who doesn’t believe, for instance, in greater restrictions on pollution at the head of the EPA. That person is, by definition, because of ideology, ineligible for the position. He must accept—the progressive administrator must accept the basic progressive impulse of society and of the program he is supposed to run. And, as Croly says, “He qualifies for his work as an administrator quite as much by his general good faith as by his specific competence.” So, in other words, as important as his technical ability is his commitment to progressivism.

So, non-progressives, if you want to call them conservatives, are by definition ineligible to hold any of these administrative positions.

You saw similar dismay over various Trump appointees, but in particular Betsy DeVos over Education. The Department of Education still exists at the federal level after almost two years—which is disappointing to some of us. But the fear from the other party is that she might “gasp!” find something to cut. And the very nature of a federal agency is that it must keep growing. Reagan found similar pushback on his policies as well, even failing to end the then-new Department of Education.

In this and other agencies, some of the difficulty come from within the agency. Perhaps not every employee in an agency is a fully committed progressive (which means Democrat or socialist, but only very rarely a non-conservative Republican). But most are, by definition.

Thomas Sowell
image from here

There’s a story, a pivot point Thomas Sowell talks about his time at the Labor Department, after finishing his PhD in Economics as a Marxist. In short, he was studying the sugar industry of Puerto Rico, and whether the Labor Department’s setting of minimum wages was leading to unemployment. There was a way to test whether this was true, or whether a competing theory about hurricanes harming the crops was the cause. Thomas Sowell figured out they could get data about crops standing in the fields before hurricanes to tell them. That data wasn’t in the Labor Department; it was in the Department of Agriculture. There was huge pressure not to even ask for it, but he filed a request:

That was 1960. I have yet to receive an official reply to my request.

This was more than an isolated incident. It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interests of those for whom a program has been set up. Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget and employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefited workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs. They had reasons to want to believe that it did, but no real incentive to probe too deeply to find out.[i]

Learning that the administrative state had nothing to do with helping people, but only in preserving their own jobs, or putting forward their own ideology—that’s when Thomas Sowell went from Marxist to free-market economist.

In Lecture 5, “Legislation and Regulation,” Dr. Portteus says that government by consent, which we have in the Constitution, and government by expertise, as in the administrative state, are mutually exclusive.

What’s more, any intention of insulating the administrative lawmaker from politics is an abject failure. As Dr. Portteus concludes: 

It does not insulate rule makers from legislative politics. Regulatory agencies are buffeted by all of the political forces that affect legislators and sometimes more so.

It does not base rules on expertise, or even reason. And the CAFE[i] standards example is a wonderful case in point in this regard. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t serve the public interest. That is to say, this process gives undue weight to organized special interests, who influence the regulators and key politicians.

This is why, for instance, it has become so critically important, if you own a business of even modest size, that you have a lobbying operation….

So the regulatory process is something very different from the legislative process…. Over the course of the 20th Century, the regulatory process developed and established in the Administrative Procedure Act is a very different way of making policy from the process established in the Constitution for making laws. The modern one attempts to substitute for, and posit itself as, the parallel legislative process. But it really leads to a transformation of the regime, because it yields a transformation in the way legislation is made.

Another day we can talk about what Congress is doing with its time, if it isn’t making laws. But for now, let’s just remind ourselves of this Spherical Model axiom:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

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[i] Thomas Sowell, A Person Odyssey, © 2000, pp. 130-131.

[ii] CAFE is Corporate Average Fuel Economy