Thomas Sowell, American thinker and hero

 I watch Sowell videos whenever I can. At 94 he makes far more sense than most American "thinkers", academics and former Marxists. I think I was still a Democrat when I first read one of his columns back in the 80s. Maybe a seed was planted.

https://youtu.be/KMTWDEYsRVE?si=g1HFOIIaVZxfchSg

Thomas Sowell on Socialism

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader

True, but the universities are filled with "intellectuals" who have been passing these lies on since the 70s-80s. Their graduates have been stocking the board rooms of corporations and non-profits, getting elected to congress, appointed to judgeships and filling the pulpits. All without counting the costs to the poor and minorities whom they claim to champion. We saw the first real progress in 50 years for blacks under President Trump; it terrified both Democrat and Republican good ol' boys who'd been so comfortable letting things slide into socialism. They did what they know and used the tried and true methods of socialism and fascism to destroy him.

Slavery today

 "According to modern anti-slavery group 50 for Freedom, there are more people in slavery today than at any other time in history. Our elites seem disinterested in freeing those 40 million suffering souls but eager to condemn America for not getting rid of the “peculiar institution” sooner. Instead of focusing on 1619, they could do far more good by looking at 2022 and abolishing the scourge of slavery everywhere."  John Gabriel, Ricocet.com

Quote of the Day: Thomas Sowell on Ending Slavery | Ricochet

“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”
― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Proportionality, equity and percentages, Thomas Sowell

So many areas of research and information are being damaged by the equity and/or proportionality myth. Every minor subdivision in archeology or biophysics or cytology or even librarianship must now have its search committees focusing on gender and color instead of number of research projects completed or published articles or work record.

Every time I pass a competitive sport event on TV (because I don't sit down to watch), I don't see anyone who looks like me, either on the field, on the bench or even in the stands. I think that's as it should be. And if it's football or basketball, if I didn't know better I would suspect that black men are 90% of the population. But, at least in professional sports, equality rules, not equity.

Thomas Sowell: "According to proportionality dogma, every group in society must be equally represented at work or school according to their percentages in society. If not so represented, the cause must be discriminatory bias and the only remedy is government action in the form of quotas, now passed off as “diversity.” Those who argue this way, Sowell explains, “cannot show us any society—anywhere in the world, or at any time during thousands of years of recorded history—that had all groups represented proportionally in all endeavors.” For example, Sowell cites the National Hockey League.

More NHL players are from Canada than the United States, and more players from Sweden than California, which has nearly four times the population. Therefore, Sowell says, “Californians are more ‘under-represented’ in the NHL than women are in Silicon Valley. But no one can claim that this is due to discriminatory bias by the NHL.” The discrepancies are “far more obviously due to people growing up in cold climates being more likely to have ice-skating experience.”

Thomas Sowell on the history of slavery

This is an audio version of Chapter 3 of Sowell's  book, "Black Rednecks & White Liberals". 
He carefully lays out the world history of slavery, including Europeans enslaved, then moves on to explain how Africans were involved in the enslavement and selling of Africans to the Europeans at the ports, who couldn't survive in the interior.  Discusses the practice of castrating Africans to be sold to Muslims as guards for harems. Also notes the black slave owners in the U.S. and Caribbean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrfjUzYvPo
 

Wisdom from Thomas Sowell's book including the other essays:  https://www.conservativebookclub.com/book/black-rednecks-and-white-liberals

• Proof that the peculiar subculture of Southern whites and that of blacks did not result from slavery
• Why the low test scores of some European immigrant children cannot be automatically attributed to their being new to the United States — and hard facts about how some kinds of cultures tend to produce lower mental test scores, whether the people in those cultures are black or white, American or European
• How elements of transplanted Southern culture came to be seen as immutable features of a distinctive “black identity” — despite their mirroring very similar cultural patterns among Southern whites in times past
• Evidence that black pioneers and leaders of the early twentieth century were not just “the cream of the crop” but emerged from a culture very different from that in which most blacks were raised and educated
• How racial barriers erected by “black rednecks” prevented black cultural elites from separating themselves as much as they would have liked from lower-class blacks
• White liberals: how Leftist intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, judges, and teachers have aided and abetted the perpetuation of a counterproductive and self-destructive lifestyle among blacks
• The much-overlooked source of many of the prevailing misconceptions of the histories of both blacks and whites in America
• How white liberals have promoted a conformity of beliefs and affirmations among blacks, with those who hold different viewpoints banished from consideration intellectually and ostracized socially
• “Middleman minorities”: how certain kinds of economic activity engaged in by minority groups increases resentment against them more than their ethnicity
• How the widespread belief that Jews and other middleman minorities have made no productive contribution to the economies in which they lived has often been belied by the decline or collapse of those economies after their departure
• Proof: contrary to liberal myth, for most of history, slavery was not based on racism — and most slaves did not differ racially from their masters
• What the Western world — and the United States in particular — had that made the abolition of slavery possible, while slavery was still taken for granted in the Islamic world and other non-Western societies
• Why modern-day liberal critics are wrong, and Abraham Lincoln was wise not to have made the moral case for the abolition of slavery in the Emancipation Proclamation
• How Leftists scream for slavery reparations from the American government while saying nothing at all about non-Western slaveholding countries past and present, from which no reparations or other concessions can remotely be expected
• Bias: how scholars have long known that slavery was a worldwide institution, going back thousands of years, but this has not led them to provide adequate coverage of slavery outside of Western civilization
• A cardinal and illuminating reason for German cultural predominance in Eastern Europe
• Why the genocide of the Jews perpetrated by Hitler’s Germany is even more chilling than most people realize
• How the differences between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington have been exaggerated by modern-day liberal revisionists for political purposes
• One of the most obvious — and most overlooked and suppressed — reasons for the deficient educational performance of black students
• How putting unqualified people in charge of black colleges and universities for the sake of racial proprieties was a serious setback for the schools, and for the young people who were educated in them
• Revealing details of the decline and academic collapse of Dunbar High School, once an elite school for blacks in Washington, DC
• How the desire of predominantly white colleges to secure a demographically representative student body made lower standards of admissions for blacks virtually inevitable
• Why the magnitude of employment discrimination cannot be reliably measured by the relative numbers of blacks in particular occupations
• Prominent educational “experts” who ignore or dismiss examples of black educational success because they don’t fit in with their ideological agenda

Resentment and envy

Thomas Sowell's story (from 2000 and told in several versions through the years) about Boris and Ivan isn't about Russians, but about envy and resentment. The Democrats don't care that under the new tax plan there will be a higher deduction for children, or that the middle class will have more money to spend or invest. No. What enrages them is that the already wealthy might pay fewer taxes (they already pay the bulk of the taxes, so the cuts will obviously apply to them). So, hurt everyone is their plan, just so the rich can't get a break from onerous taxes. 

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell062300.asp

"THERE IS AN OLD STORY about two Russian peasants, Boris and Ivan. Both are poor as dirt, the only difference between them being that Boris has a goat and Ivan does not. 

One day, a good fairy appears at Ivan's hut and tells him that she can grant him just one wish -- but that it can be anything he wants. Ivan says, "I want that Boris' goat should die.""

Twenty five million still don't have health insurance

Thomas Sowell on Ferguson’s victims

"The first victims of the mob rampages in Ferguson have been people who had nothing to do with Michael Brown or the police. These include people — many of them black or members of other minorities — who have seen the businesses they worked to build destroyed, perhaps never to be revived.

But these are only the first victims. If the history of other communities ravaged by riots in years past is any indication, there are blacks yet unborn who will be paying the price of these riots for years to come.

Sometimes it is a particular neighborhood that never recovers, and sometimes it is a whole city. Detroit is a classic example. It had the worst riot of the 1960s, with 43 deaths — 33 of them black people. Businesses left Detroit, taking with them jobs and taxes that were very much needed to keep the city viable. Middle class people — both black and white — also fled." Thomas Sowell

The Real History of Slavery by Thomas Sowell

The following is a partial review of Thomas Sowell’s book, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” and appeared in the October 2005 issue of Freeman, a libertarian publication. Review is by Richard M. Ebeling.  I don’t know how successful this book was—seems to be a compilation of his columns which appeared in newspapers—and I don’t know if there were revisions.  It would be good to review the history of slavery, especially since in modern times, we now know it is a larger enterprise in the 21st century than it was in the 18th century because of selling sex, and cheap labor.  And just as Arabs sold black Africans to the Europeans from raids in the interior of Africa, so Muslims today are capturing and selling slaves in Africa and Asia.  So his conclusion (the reviewer, I assume) that ending it in the British Empire closed that chapter isn’t accurate.

“A related theme that Sowell discusses in a chapter on “The Real History of Slavery” is that the institution of human bondage is far older than the experience of black enslavement in colonial and then independent America. Indeed, slavery has burdened the human race during all of recorded history and everywhere around the globe. Its origins and practice have had nothing to do with race or racism. Ancient Greeks enslaved other Greeks; Romans enslaved other Europeans; Asians enslaved Asians; and Africans enslaved Africans, just as the Aztecs enslaved other native groups in what we now call Mexico and Central America. Among the most prominent slave traders and slave owners up to our own time have been Arabs, who enslaved Europeans, black Africans, and Asians. In fact, while officially banned, it is an open secret that such slavery still exists in a number of Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Equally ignored, Sowell reminds us, is that it was only in the West that slavery was challenged on philosophical and political grounds, and that antislavery efforts became a mass movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery was first ended in the European countries, and then Western pressure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought about its demise in most of the rest of the world. But this fact has been downplayed because it does not fit into the politically correct fashions of our time. It is significant that in 1984, on the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the British Empire, there was virtually no celebration of what was a historically profound turning point in bringing this terrible institution to a close around the world.’

No need to cut entitlements for the poor

Thomas Sowell suggests Congress start with entitlements for the rich. If you saw John Stossel's program on Fox last week, he suggested the same thing.

Sowell writes: "My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires. Many, if not most, people are probably unaware that the government is handing out the taxpayers' money to billionaires. But agricultural subsidies go to a number of billionaires. Very little goes to the ordinary farmer. Big corporations also get big bucks from the government, not only in agricultural subsidies but also in the name of "green" policies, in the name of "alternative energy" policies, and in the name of whatever else will rationalize shoveling the taxpayers' money out the door to whomever the administration designates, for its own political reasons. The usual political counterattacks against spending cuts will not work against this new kind of spending-cut approach. How many heart-rending stories can the media run about billionaires who have lost their handouts from the taxpayers? How many tears will be shed if General Motors gets dumped off the gravy train?"

To Cut Deficits, It's Best To Pick Low-Lying Fruit - Investors.com

Basic Economics--Thomas Sowell

No charts, graphs, and just plain English. New revised edition. How is wealth created? (Hint: not by government). The housing bust began the current melt down. Politicians created this by interferring and changing the rules (more home ownership, more affordable housing). Stimulus and bailouts in both the Bush and Obama administrations created boondoggles and didn't help the economy. Lending went down when money was given to banks. GM bailout? Bernanke's QE-2 (printing money)? What was he thinking? Bush tax cuts extension are an acknowledgement by Obama that his policies have failed--that cuts are superior to handing out money for stimulating the economy. All spending begins in the House--Clinton had a Republican Congress, so he can't take any credit for that era's tax policy or deficit reduction. 17% of GDP to health care. Americans chose much of that spending, so how can the government say it's wrong for us to have less waiting time, nicer hospitals, and more available drugs? We pay more and get more says Sowell--it's that simple. People buy what they want. If you're a Swede and you want more or better or faster, you can leave the country to get it, but you won't get it there. About 50% of our health care is already socialized--Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP--is this a good system or is there corruption and graft that could be reduced?

Watch the interview with Thomas Sowell.

The story of the housing meltdown from an economist

Nobody caught on--not Greenspan, Bush, or Frank. And Barney Frank is still pushing more home ownership--without standards. But Bush will continue to be blamed because it happened on his watch. Video interview June 29, 2009



Sowell asserts in his book, "The Housing Boom and Bust," that politicians in Washington were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist.

"The problem that didn't exist was a national problem of unaffordable housing," Sowell explained. [And he's quite correct--housing was quite affordable in central Ohio.]

"The housing in particular areas, particularly coastal California and some other areas around the country, were just astronomically high. It was not uncommon for people to have to pay half of their family income just to put a roof over their head. So that was a very serious problem where it existed.

"But it existed in various coastal communities primarily and a couple of other places. Unfortunately, the elites whose strongholds are on the East and West Coasts don't seem to understand that there's a whole country in between, and in most of that country housing was quite affordable by all historical standards.

"So they set out to solve the problem by setting up a federal program to bring down the mortgage requirements, the 20 percent down payment and that sort of thing, and by forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up those mortgages from the people who no longer had to meet the same requirements.

"The banks had no choice but to go along because the regulators controlled their fate. So the banks would simply sign up people, sell the mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It now became Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's problem. And that meant it became the taxpayers' problem." [quotes from Newsmax interview]

Thomas Sowell--would you have believed it a year ago?

"Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the president, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50% or 90%?" Actually, I was calling him a Marxist long before last October, so I'm not surprised with anything except the speed of the collapse. And that so many of you who voted for Obama continue to wear blinders. Read the rest of his column.

Connect the dots, says Thomas Sowell

Will you call him a racist too, or just an Uncle Tom?

"Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Moammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama’s many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America — Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, and so on — at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?"

Read his entire essay. It was in today's Columbus Dispatch.

Losing the game with a rookie

"Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other Presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been President before. He has never had any position of major executive responsibility in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome.

Other first-term Presidents have been governors, generals, cabinet members or others in positions of personal responsibility. A few have been senators, like Barack Obama, but usually for longer than Obama, and had not spent half their few years in the senate running for President."

Soft on our enemies and hard on our allies; his "change" is a throwback to a very old, and tired regime no longer taught in our schools. Read the whole article about how rookies can lose the game for you, by Thomas Sowell.