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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
25:23
Why Haven’t More Young People Heard of Thomas Sowell? | Larry Elder
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How brilliant is Thomas Sowell, the economist?
Well, he's only written 56 or 57 books.
I've lost count.
And playwright David Mamet credits Thomas Sowell with turning him from being a, quote, brain-dead liberal and calls Thomas Sowell America's greatest contemporary philosopher.
I've had the honor of interviewing Thomas Sowell several times over the years.
Here is one from an interview he had after Donald Trump won the presidency.
You know, William F. Buckley, Tom, had that show firing line for 33 years, and in 33 years he could never get Ted Kennedy to come on.
And when he was asked why, Buckley said, why does the baloney avoid the grinder?
Oh, my.
He was really one of a kind.
He was.
He was.
And that was when I first saw you.
I was just telling my audience, I saw you as a teenager, and I was amazed at your eloquence and your taking very difficult positions, unpopular positions, and defending them, often against pretty severe criticism within the very studio where Buckley would have you on.
I have a question.
You have been called a conservative.
You've been called a libertarian.
What label would you call yourself?
I don't label myself at all.
I call them as I see them.
It's like asking an umpire, what do you call balls or strikes?
What prompted you to do that?
I guess it was spending a few days in Yosemite with a couple of buddies of mine taking pictures.
And for four consecutive days, We saw no news on television.
We read no newspapers.
And I realized how wonderful that was.
As long as I'm writing a column, I felt I had an obligation to follow what was being said in the media, to listen to some of the crazy people.
And I decided I really don't need to keep doing that.
You know, when you invited me to spend the weekend with you and to take pictures, at the time, an article had come out, I believe by Derek Bach, I could be wrong about that, about the benefits of race-based preferences, of so-called affirmative action.
And you had just read it, and you shook your head and you said, and I quote, I'm going to have to deal with that, close quote.
The power to be able to deal with things that you have as a columnist in over 300 newspapers and outlets, do you think you're going to miss being able to deal with things?
No, because I've said whatever I had to say, and I'm not retiring from the rest of my work.
I gather from some people that I seem to be saying I'm retiring, period, which I... I think on the part of liberals, that may be just wishful things.
But no, I expect to publish books, and I think that's much better for me in the sense that there are things you can get across in a newspaper column, and there are other things that require something longer,
and not necessarily as long as my most recent book, It's 576 pages long, but maybe something about half that size with some essays in which we can really go into things.
And on the minimum wage?
One of the things I've been appalled by for a long time are these discussions of minimum wage laws.
There are people out there who seriously never think about what the actual consequences are, never mind what you think you're going to do.
And there are always studies being done trying to refute the myth, as they put it, that minimum wage laws cause unemployment.
Well, it is one of the most powerfully documented fact that that is exactly what it does.
And it's not just that people lose the particular low-level job that they have at the moment.
What they lose is even more important than that.
Because most of these are young people and they're at an entry-level job and they learn how to conduct yourself on a job.
They learn how to be punctual, to get along with other people, to orient yourself toward the customer or toward the person for whom you're working.
And that's like gold.
And I understand why some people take jobs that pay no money at all.
And some people have been enormously successful, including, among others, the black architect who designed that theme building at the Los Angeles International Airport.
Paul Williams.
Yes, yes.
And for that matter, F.W. Woolworth, who was a country bumpkin, and he worked from 7 in the morning to 9 at night and without any pay at all until he learned the retailing business.
And went on to become...
He was so rich that the Woolworth Building in New York, the skyscraper, was not paid for by the Woolworth Company without F.W. Woolworth's personal money.
And so the idea that third parties ought to be taking the options away from people because they don't like the options is absolutely astounding.
I mean, not since the days of the divine right of kings, Have there been people presumptuous enough to think that they should decide whether other people can take jobs or not take them?
And yet, you and other economists are not winning the argument.
We have a bunch of states that have passed minimum wage hikes.
You have written that a black teenager before the minimum wage laws really took effect were more likely to have a job than a white teenager, and still people are raising their hand for higher minimum wage.
You have a bunch of states now that have passed laws that put the minimum wage in time at $15.
Why aren't you winning the argument?
That's a very good question.
I think, for one thing, most people don't ever see the argument.
I was recently reading Walter Williams' book, Race and Economics, and I was so impressed, and I realized the things that Walter said 40 years ago.
Students today are graduating with honors from some of the most prestigious universities in the country.
Quick Injection.
Paul Williams, the man that Thomas Sow just referred to, was an architect, a black architect, who, when he got out of school, could not get a job because of racism.
So what did he do?
He applied to every single architect, offered to work for free, and said, after I've worked for a time, either hire me full-time or write me a letter of recommendation that I can use to get me a job.
That's the man that Thomas Sow referred to.
And on growing up in Harlem and the effect of the minimum wage.
Oh, heavens, it was quite different from today.
We were poor people, much poorer than the people in Harlem, almost anywhere else today.
I mean, it was my last year or two at home that we finally had a telephone.
We had a radio.
We never had a television.
I mean, I didn't have a television until I was...
Oh my gosh, 23 years old and my sister gave me one of her old ones and she got a new one.
But in another sense, in the sense of the things you need to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most black kids today.
Just getting back to the minimum wage for a moment, you know, when I left home at age 17 with no high school diploma, no Real serious job experience, no skills, no anything.
I was able to find jobs.
The unemployment rate for black 17-year-olds that year was 9.2%.
It hasn't been that low in more than half a century since then.
I mean, there have been decades in which it was triple what it was when I went out into the world.
You know, I wouldn't have a snowball chance in hell starting off the same way today because of the enormously high unemployment rate among black teenagers, which is a direct result of people putting in minimum wages which simply price blacks out of the market.
I mean, it's not a complicated thing.
Labor unions around the world are always pushing for minimum wages, even though their own members Income or wage rates are far above the minimum wage to begin with, and the reason is very simple.
They're pricing their competition out of a job.
It's the same thing that businesses do when they ask for a high tariff on imported products that compete with what they make.
They want to add an extra price, extra cost onto the imported product so they will sell for a higher price, and therefore they can undercut the price, similarly with the labor unions.
I've always found it fascinating, Tom, that the argument for minimum wage is that employers are so greedy, they'd pay you nothing if they could get away with it.
On the other hand, the argument for equal pay is that the same greedy employers are overpaying men when they could hire women at 77 cents on the dollar to do the very same work.
Logic is not in vogue.
And what about Tom's parents?
And what kind of student was he?
My parents, in fact, much of what I've learned about him, I've learned in recent years, I really knew nothing about my biological parents.
I was sent away for their death certificate.
They died at ages 29 and 31 respectively.
And then myself and my siblings were all scattered around relatives living in different parts of the country.
I alone was unaware that I wasn't orphan until I was almost grown.
And I was unaware that I had biological siblings elsewhere until I was almost grown.
And I think about it.
Had my parents lived out a normal lifespan, I would have been the sixth child in the family.
As it turns out, I was raised as an only child in a family of four adults.
That's an enormous advantage.
I mean, there have been studies done showing how well only children perform compared to others or how well the firstborn compares.
And, of course, the firstborn is an only child for some time, sometimes for years.
And so in his formative years, he's growing up as an only child.
And I think at one point, at least, all the astronauts were either only children or firstborns.
The IQs of firstborn children are higher than the IQs of their siblings, born to the same parents, raised under the same roof.
So that was a tremendous advantage that I had no clue about at the time.
Yet you were not particularly academically driven when you were younger.
No, not before I got to New York.
And again, it's the values.
The family in which I was raised, none of them was educated.
I was a high school graduate, for example.
Some did not finish elementary school.
But they understood the value of education, as I didn't.
And they found a young fellow, a little older than me, named Eddie Mapp, whom they were determined that I must meet when I got to New York.
And so they were planning this while I was still in North Carolina.
And he opened up doors for me.
I didn't know what a public library is until he took me to one and explained it to me and so on.
So these kinds of things are what you need, and the government cannot give it to you.
And if they simply take care of you on welfare, that is not doing you the least bit of good in the long run.
And why did he join the military?
I mean, the Marines!
That was a decision made by the Selective Service Board.
During the Korean War, there were a lot of people killed, a lot of American troops being killed over in Korea, and particularly the Marines.
And so I believe for the first time in its history, the Marine Corps took draftees, and I was one of them.
And I think it may well have been the last time as well, and I'd like to believe that I was not the cause of that.
But I must tell you, when I heard someone say that I'm I'm listed at Parris Island Marine Base as former Marines who've gone on to do whatever we're supposed to do.
I think, what if the people who actually knew me when I was in the Marine Corps see that?
They will crack up, because I really was not a model Marine.
I was a corporal.
No one ever questioned why I never made sergeant, but some expressed amazement that I hadn't been busted back to private.
When you say you weren't a model Marine, what did you do that made you not a model Marine?
I was not at all happy about being drafted in the first place and being set down south in the Jim Crow era in the second place.
So my attitude was not by any means that of a career Marine.
Just little things.
I was told once that in a unit that I served in, That someone who worked in the commanding officer's office told me that the commanding officer received a memo on some of my misdeeds, that he read the memo, burst out laughing, and dropped it in the wastebasket.
In other words, he had better things to do than spend his time court-martialing me.
Why go into economics?
I guess it was the first subject in college that really grabbed me because it had logic, it had evidence, It had ways of testing propositions against facts.
And that's what I wanted.
How does Mr.
Sowell feel about the future?
Pessimistic?
Optimistic?
Somewhere in the middle?
Pessimistic.
Because?
Because not simply the terrible people who have come to power in this country in recent years.
Including, of course, Barack Obama.
But the utter gullibility of the public that follows such people, believes such people, disregards all hard facts about what such people are actually doing and what the actual consequences of what they're doing are, and just go with the flow of the rhetoric and the wonderful-sounding things like hope and change.
Why are people going with the flow of the rhetoric?
What makes them do that?
One of the terrible things is that our educational institutions, I mean, my gosh, they've lost all sense that their job is to equip young people with not only the knowledge that has been gathered over the years, but also how to develop their own ability to think, to test things.
To think through issues, to see beyond rhetoric and so forth.
The schools themselves have become great dispensers of propaganda.
I was thinking, you know, the model for the role model, to use their term, for many of the teachers seems not to be Mr.
Chips, but Dr.
Goebbels.
Okay, that's academia.
How does he feel about our mainstream media?
Oh my gosh.
Well, I'll try to express it in words that can be used on the air.
But, you know, just think of it.
The New York Times, of all things, is talking about fake news.
They are the greatest dispensers of fake news.
But just one example.
In Charlotte, a black policeman confronted an armed black suspect, shot the suspect.
And, of course, the narrative is that the cops are all after blacks.
And so there are newspapers and others who will print the picture of the victim, but will not print the picture of the cop, because this would undermine their notion that whites are running around shooting blacks.
The other thing that happened was that the suspect had a gun, was told to drop it, didn't drop it, and one of these people on CNN said, yes, but he wasn't pointing it at the police.
You know, they told him to drop it ten times and he wouldn't do it and they shot him.
This man who said this, I thought, what kind of idiot is this?
If a man is holding a gun in his hand, no matter why he's holding it, within one second you can be dead.
But I mean, there are too many people who think in terms of talking points instead of thinking in terms of getting at the realities of the situation.
He quit classroom teaching years ago and I asked him why.
Well, I haven't actually taught since 1980, and I'd seen enough then to know that this was not what I wanted to do the rest of my life.
I was really quite bitter when I received my PhD in 1968, because by that time I had come to lose all confidence in the academic world.
I mean, the pandering To every noisy little group on campus, the shutting down of discussions, of issues, because some people might be upset by it.
I mean, you're artificially prolonging their adolescence, if not their childhood.
But Thomas, we've got microaggressions.
We need safe spaces.
I asked him about then-outgoing President Barack Obama.
When I first saw him, I was in Boston in 2004 when he gave that warm-up speech for John Kerry.
And I turned to my producer and I said, this guy's going to run for president someday and he's going to win.
He didn't say anything, but he said it well.
Yes.
That's why it's so scary that the public is so easily taken in by these kinds of things.
You were very, very critical about Obama from the very start.
Has he lived down to your expectations?
Absolutely.
I think of myself as one of the few people who is not the least bit disappointed in Obama because he has been just what I thought he was going to be from the very beginning, a phony and a doctrinaire and heedless of reality.
What, in your opinion, as far as his domestic policies are concerned, is the biggest damaging thing he's done, the most damaging thing he's done?
There's so many I wouldn't have time to run through them all to find out, but one that sticks out recently is he has supported those people who are pushing the narrative that the great danger to black young people consists of the police.
The number of blacks shot by police Including black police, by the way, is some tiny fraction of the number of blacks who are shot and killed by other blacks all the time.
And Obama is concerned only with those people who are shot who can be politically useful to him in advancing his agenda.
Other blacks who get shot really don't concern him.
The economy.
This has been the worst recovery since 1949, the first time a president has presided over a recovery where we haven't had a single year of 3% GDP. Again, you expected that the results of Obamanomics would be like this.
Yes, because of the things that he said.
Again, it's a doctrine.
One of the crucial things turned up in an interview where someone pointed out that if you're going to have these high taxes on high-income people, You're not going to collect any more revenue.
They're simply going to put their money either in tax-exempt securities or they're going to ship their money overseas.
And he said he understood that, but he wanted to do it, as he said, for fairness.
Well, wonderful.
When people who have a lot of money ship it overseas, creating jobs overseas that Americans can't go overseas to get, he's saying that he's for his doctrines, his ideology, And if that hurts the very people he claims to be helping, namely the poor or the working class, that doesn't concern him.
And this brings up you-know-who.
When you and I first talked about him many months ago, you were not a fan.
Do you feel any more comforted by his cabinet selections?
Oh, I think he has a cabinet that is better than most presidents have coming in.
But the question is, all those people serve at the pleasure of the president, and he does what he wants to do regardless of what the cabinet members tell him.
And so everything depends upon whether he's going to listen to these people or whether he's going to go off on his own tangent.
And we won't know that until he's actually in office.
He has been the most anti-free-trade Republican I've ever seen.
Are you worried about that?
That is a concern.
You know, my research on the Great Depression convinces me that it was not the stock market crash, but it was the international trade war that was set off by the Smoot-Hawley tariff that had much more to do with the decline in the economy and the rise in unemployment.
So this is a very dangerous thing.
And it's like so many wars, they're very easy to start and very hard to bring to a close.
Stephen Moore is one of his top economic advisors.
We recently interviewed him, and he pretty much said the same thing you said about free trade.
Does it make you feel any more comfortable that Donald Trump is listening to somebody like Stephen Moore?
I know.
It makes me feel good that Stephen Moore is there.
We'll find out whether he's going to listen to him.
How does he feel about all the flattery he's been receiving over the years, especially now?
David Mehmet, the playwright, called you America's greatest contemporary philosopher.
How do you feel about people saying things like that about you?
I don't know.
It's not something I would have thought of, but I'm grateful that they think well of me.
Heaven knows there are enough who think the opposite.
Finally, a word or two about the loyal opposition party.
You live here?
Yes.
Or maybe you know what a zombie is.
When a person dies and is buried, Seems there are certain voodoo priests who have the power to bring him back to life.
How horrible.
It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own.
You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.
You mean like Democrats?
What's that?
You haven't seen my movie Uncle Tom?
It came out on June 19th.
Here's a short trailer.
I focus on three things.
Belief in God, belief in myself, and my belief in the United States of America.
Being a black conservative is just natural.
It's what my family raises on.
Faith, family, individual responsibility, education, service to the nation, an entrepreneurial mind.
Being a business owner in America is one of the greatest privileges of being an American.
I think black Americans should believe and uphold the ideas of constitutional inherent rights.
I always felt that if I worked hard that I could overcome the circumstances of my life.
I never felt that because I was black or I was poor or a woman that I couldn't do something.
Humans are naturally conservative.
You grow up being told to work hard for what you got.
You don't grow up being told you're going to get something because you just want it.
Like, you ain't got to work for it.
But Democrats, they say, hey, we give you everything for free.
That ain't reality.
I'm Larry Elder and we've got a country to save.
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