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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
10:57
The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Milton Friedman and Shelby Steele | Larry Elder
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It's sad how many people, especially how many black people, know nothing at all about Walter Williams, know nothing at all about Shelby Steele, know nothing at all about economist Milton Friedman.
They know nothing at all about economist Thomas Sowell.
About economist Thomas Sowell, David Mamet, the playwright, described Thomas Sowell as America's greatest contemporary philosopher.
You know David Mamet.
He's the one who did the screenplay for Glengarry Glen Ross.
Put that coffee down.
As I said, here is Mamet on Thomas Sowell from the Village Voice.
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell, our greatest contemporary philosopher, but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, end of quote.
I would say that certainly the black kids who are growing up today have a higher material standard of living than I had.
The only difference was that the schools were good when I came along.
They were especially good in New York at that time, hard as that is to believe.
But the kids who grew up in that same place where I lived, they will not get that same education.
Now that can be blamed on somebody.
But it has very little to do with what happened 100, 200 years ago.
Ebony Magazine is perhaps America's most prominent black publication.
I don't recall my house ever not having an Ebony Magazine on the coffee table.
That's how much my parents enjoyed the magazine.
And every year they have a feature called something like the 100-plus most influential black Americans.
And every year you will not find Clarence Thomas, you will not find Walter Williams, you will not find Thomas Sowell.
You won't find Thomas Sowell?
Here's what Thomas Sowell said, for example, about so-called disparities between men and women in the workplace.
When you correct for all the various factors, such as the number of hours worked, the continuous employment versus taking a few years out to have children and so on, you take all that into account, the differences between men and women become quite trivial.
If you look at the academic world, as far back as 1969, women who were never married, And who had earned higher incomes than men who had never married.
They became tenured professors at a higher rate than men who had never married.
And then later on, if you look at the general population, if you take the women who were past the childbearing years and who worked continuously, their incomes were higher than men who had worked continuously and so on.
So the difference is that, not that the employer is paying them differently, but that they have different characteristics.
How many people have never heard of Walter Williams, a nationally syndicated columnist?
He is the only black person, to my knowledge, to become the head of an economics department of a non-historically black college.
Walter Williams is unknown to so many different people?
It is morally outrageous for government to be cutting off the ambitions of those trying to climb the middle rungs of the economic ladder.
You're saying that you can solve the problems in Bangladesh.
Williams' contrarian views have had wide exposure through documentaries, public appearances, and for the past 30 years, a syndicated weekly column that appears in about 140 newspapers.
Throughout his career, Williams has used his personal experiences to illustrate his ideas.
I used to work in a store like this.
Back in those days, just about any kid who looked for a job could find one.
Today, in ghettos like I grew up in, 70% of black children who look for jobs cannot find them.
This brings up to the late Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman.
He frequently talked about the adverse effect of policies on the black community, particularly policies like the minimum wage.
The fact is, That the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.
As an example, what are you referring to?
Let me give you a very simple example.
Take the minimum wage law.
It's well-meaning sponsors.
There are always in these cases two groups of sponsors.
There are the well-meaning sponsors and there are the special interests who are using the well-meaning sponsors as front men.
You almost always, when you have bad programs, have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand and the special interests on the other.
The minimum wage law is as clear a case as you could want.
The special interests are, of course, the trade unions, the monopolistic, craft trade unions in particular.
The do-gooders believe that by passing a law saying that nobody shall get less than $2 an hour or $2.50 an hour or whatever the minimum wage is, you are helping poor people who need the money.
You are doing nothing of the kind.
What you are doing is to assure that people whose skills are not sufficient to justify that kind of a wage will be unemployed.
It is no accident that the teenage unemployment rate, the unemployment rate among teenagers in this country, is over twice as high as the overall unemployment rate.
It's no accident that that was not always the case.
Until the 1950s when the minimum wage rate was raised very drastically, very quickly, teenage unemployment was higher than ordinary unemployment because, of course, the teenagers are the ones who are just coming into the labor market.
They're searching and finding jobs, and it's understandable that on the average they would be unemployed more.
But it was nothing like the extraordinary level it has now reached.
It's close to 20 percent.
Why?
Because the minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.
That's what the law says.
The law says, here's a man who has a skill which would justify a wage rate of a dollar and a half, two dollars an hour.
You may not employ him.
It's illegal.
Because if you employ him, you have to pay him $2.50.
Well, what's the result?
To employ him at $2.50 is to engage in charity.
Now, there's nothing wrong with charity, but most employers are not in a position where they can engage in that kind of charity.
Thus, the consequences of minimum wage rates have been almost wholly bad to increase unemployment and to increase poverty.
Moreover, the effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help.
The people who have been hurt most by minimum wage laws are the blacks.
I have often said that the most anti-Negro law on the books of this land is the minimum wage rate.
And so I think the real answer to your question is that you must not judge a bottle solely by its label.
You have to look at what's inside and see what the law or the measure produces.
How many Americans, especially black Americans, know nothing about the brilliantly insightful Shelby Steele, who had this keen insight on white guilt?
White guilt is the terror of being seen as a racist.
As a bigot that now pervades American life, all our social policy, our culture, everything is touched by this anxiety.
In most of white America, understandably, given America's history, that they're vulnerable, they have this vulnerability to being disarmed of moral authority by being called a racist.
I can use it as a weapon.
I can say, you know, I went on a Levin show.
Let me tell you the way I was treated.
And it explodes.
So it constitutes, that is black power.
White guilt is black power.
Whoever said that compound interest was the mightiest force in the universe had never encountered white guilt.
Now I've introduced you to Thomas Sowell, to Walter Williams, to Shelby Steele, to Milton Friedman.
But it's very careful to make sure you're selective about who you embrace.
Because people are tired most of the time.
I love you so much.
Oh, thanks.
Can I give you a hug?
No, thanks.
Please?
No, thanks.
A little one.
Yeah, no thanks.
That was a nice moment.
I don't know who that was.
It was Kesha.
Okay.
Well, I wish you the best.
Now, remember my film, Uncle Tom?
Obama tore this country down.
No one stood up to him.
Nobody.
Because he was black.
You need to wake up!
My parents didn't teach me that I was a victim.
They can turn back voting rights.
Didn't nobody donate to us the right to vote?
You're a house nigga.
I didn't call you a nigga.
Oh, okay.
That's a big difference.
Uncle Tom.
And Uncle Tom is somebody who has sold out by embracing the white man.
Uncle Tom.
Bedwins.
Boot liquor.
Black white supremacist.
Chuckin and Jarvis.
House Negro.
Coon.
Uncle Tom.
Coon.
Coon.
I have a Kuhn award over there.
Kuhn of the Year Award.
Most black people don't believe that other blacks can be independent, free thinkers.
I believe the legacy and the ancestry of black Americans is being insulted every single day.
I will not pretend to be a victim in this country.
I know that that makes many people on the left uncomfortable.
Racist.
Racist.
Racism.
A thousand cuts of racism.
The liberal would try to control a black person through the concept of racism because they know that we are very proud emotional people.
I never felt that because I was black or I was poor or a woman that I couldn't do something.
I grew up being told of my disadvantages, that this country is unfair to black people.
The ideology is implanted into you subconsciously to believe these things.
It's like a cancerous plague in the mind of black Americans.
We're brainwashed to think, well, is it because I'm black?
America's not ours, so we got shipped here.
No, our blood is on this soil.
We own this too.
There should be a pride that we have in the fact that this country was built by many great black men and women.
Are you trying to say that this country does not specialize in racism and bigotry?
So long as black people continue to have their psyche filled by that nonsense, we won't have an awakening.
Go to UncleTom.com and be the first in your hood to get you some Uncle Tom merch.
I am Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
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