It's Walter E. Williams sitting in for the vacationing Rush Limbaugh.
And he's going to be back on Tuesday, but we're going to have the best of on Monday.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
And we're trying to get Dr. Thomas Sowell on the phones with us right now.
Maybe some kind of mix-up in there.
Do we have okay?
Okay.
Okay.
While we're waiting for Tom, and maybe Tom can help us when he comes on the show, when we finally get him.
Let me just kind of state some findings for you.
There's a professor in the University of Hawaii, I think he's emeritus right now, called Dr. Rummel, Professor Rummel.
And he's written a book called Death by Government.
And he points out in this book that from 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, that these people, mainly Stalin, murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens.
Since 1949, China's Mao Sedong is responsible for the death of 38 million of its own citizens.
And some people say that that's a number too low.
Maybe it's 45 million.
Now here's my question.
Now, another fact.
When John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao's China, he praised Mao Sedong and the Chinese system.
Now, the reason why I bring this up is that I think last week or the week before, California Representative Diane Watson, she praised Cuba's health system, and she praised Fidel Castro, saying that you can think whatever you want about Fidel Castro, but he's one of the brightest leaders I've ever met.
Now, here's my question.
How is it or how come these people on the left praise and have sympathy for these tyrants, these monsters of human history?
That is Mao Sedong and Stalin, they made Hitler, Hitler's 18 million, estimate 18 million, made Hitler look like a Boy Scout.
But the academics, during the 1960s, 1970s, they used to march around campus with Mao's little red book and praising Mao Zedong.
That's a question that I have.
How come these people, mostly on the left, have such sympathy and admiration for some of the world's greatest barbarians?
We'll get to that question a little bit later on, but right now, we want to welcome to the show Dr. Thomas Sowell.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
Hi, Walter.
Good to get you through.
Hey, what I want to do is to talk about your, let's say, your latest book, The Housing Boom and Bust.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's Tom Sowell's 43rd book.
And by the way, before we get into housing boom and bust, do you have anything forthcoming?
Yes.
I have a book called Intellectuals in Society, which I've just finished and which should be out in January.
Oh, Intellectuals and Society.
I think.
And the thing that you were just talking about, about the intellectuals going for all these mass murderers, this was true.
This has been true throughout the 20th century.
I'll be darned.
Back in Hitler and all the rest of them.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah.
Well, Time Magazine had him down, I think, for the man of the year, didn't they?
Excuse me?
I think Time magazine had Hitler on its cover as a man of the year back in the 30s sometime.
Might well have, but the apologists for them and for Stalin are just unbelievable.
Oh, my God.
Okay, maybe we'll get to that a little bit later on.
But let's talk a little bit about housing boom and bust.
In a nutshell, can you say, what are some of the causes or some of the basic causes of this housing boom and subsequent bust in our country?
Well, I guess the key factor was the notion that the government should allow people to be able to buy a house who ordinarily didn't have the money for a down payment off of the mortgage payments.
And so the pressure was put on all sorts of lending institutions to lend to people who didn't meet the normal standards.
And we discovered the hard way, why the normal standards had been normal.
Yeah, and matter of fact, you say in the book that President Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions.
Oh, absolutely.
And more than that, banks, whose statistics didn't please the government, couldn't get government permission to make business decisions that other businesses make all the time, like mergers and acquisitions or even putting in ATMs.
And it wasn't just the Democrats responsible for this.
It was the Bush administration, too.
You're saying about it.
Oh, absolutely.
It was bipartisan.
It was bipartisan.
As I've often said, things that are bipartisan are usually twice as bad as things that are partisan.
That's a good point.
And people just in Washington just ignored warning after warning about.
Absolutely.
Any number of people, including as far away as the Economist magazine in London.
I even did a piece for the Wall Street Journal, but Alan Green's fan tried to warn them.
Nobody could warn them.
They were hell-bent for doing things the way they preconceived it.
And this is how they led us into the disaster.
Yeah, right.
And a lot of the financial meltdown is precisely a result of the subprime issue.
Oh, absolutely.
Because people then, the original lenders sold a very large part of the mortgages they wrote.
And one of the people, one of the institutions that bought them were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And so all these risks were then passed on.
And so since they could pass on the risk, they didn't have to be fussy about whether the lenders really had the money that they said they had or any of the other things.
And so there were mortgages written for people who would say, you know, I'm making $200,000 a year.
And they wouldn't check.
The guy might be unemployed for all they know.
They don't care.
And they call these loans no-doc loans or liar loans.
Absolutely.
But they'd write the mortgage, then they'd sell the mortgage to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and then the risk became the taxpayers' problem.
That's right.
And banks did not, as you point out, that banks and other lending institutions, they did not have the incentive to search because, heck, they're making money.
And so they'll make out a mortgage or they'll lend people money.
And whether it's good, whether it's a good mortgage or a bad mortgage, the bank still makes money because they sell it off to the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
Yeah, in other words, they sell a 30-year loan, but they're not going to wait 30 years for it.
They get the money, they sell it to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
They get their money right now, and they start lending it out again.
Yes, yes, yes.
Now, here's what really gets me, and I haven't found a completely satisfactory answer to it, and I believe you come very, very close to it in your book, and that is how can the politicians get away with blaming this subprime crisis and these economic problems that we're having.
How can they get away with blaming it on deregulation, the free market system?
And people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, they're just blaming it on everybody except themselves.
Well, if there's nobody to expose what they're doing, they can get away with it forever.
I suspect that Barney Frank is an odds-on favorite to get re-elected.
Chris Dodd has a few problems.
But that's one of the problems of political decision-making.
No matter what crises they may create, if the public doesn't connect the dots, they go on.
And they're great at hauling up before these congressional committees members for people from the banking industry or the Wall Street people and just denouncing them on nationwide televisions.
And that then convinces the public that that's where the problem originated.
Whereas the people who are doing the denouncing usually had far more to do with the situation than the ones they're denouncing.
That is absolutely right.
That's absolutely right.
But it seems that at least when I was going to UCLA getting my graduate education, Armin Auschen and some of the other economists, they said that people are not stupid in the long run, nor are they ignorant in the long run.
But it sure in the hell seems like many Americans are.
Well, depending on how long you define the long run, I'm sure that historians of the 22nd century look back on our times.
Well, they will have this all sorted out.
But of course, that won't do us any good.
Right.
Okay, well, I don't know.
I think that the housing boom and bus is an excellent work, and I think you got it out there in time for it to maybe make a difference with some people.
I hope so.
And they can get the book where?
They can get it on Amazon.com.
Anywhere, Amazon.com, Lazy FCI books, Barnes and Noble, wherever.
Okay, I'd like to kind of switch bases a little bit to, do we have time?
Yeah, okay.
I'd like to switch a little bit and talk about the intellectuals.
And can you come up with a reason why we have all these intellectuals that are key supporters or found or hero worshippers of some of these barbarians in our history, such as Mao Sedung and Stalin?
Wow, that's a tall order.
I think one of the reasons is that those people talk the kind of talk that the intellectuals like to hear.
And since talk is mainly what they're about, that's what they go by.
I mean, Hitler made some of the greatest peace speeches of the 1930s.
And of course, it made sense for him to do that because he's arming Germany to the teeth, but that's only going to be effective if the other countries don't arm as well.
That's right.
And so he then talks about how wonderful peace is, and he's offering all sorts of non-aggression tax and all kinds of stuff like that.
And the intellectuals in the Western democracies were just eating it up.
And then is now, they always describe, the intellectuals did, military deterrence as an arms race.
Well, if Hitler's arming and you don't arm, you're in big trouble.
That's absolutely right.
And I believe one time you point out, or somebody pointed out, that when Hitler was in the process of violating the Versailles treaties during the mid-30s, it was during the mid-30s that France alone could have taken him down, but they allowed him to accumulate weapons and France became a victim.
Oh, absolutely.
When Litler sent troops into the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler himself admitted later that if the French had acted, had sent their troops in, he said we would have to have left with our tail between our legs.
And many people have argued that had that happened, Hitler would have been so disgraced, it would have been the end of the Nazi regime.
Now, I would imagine that the Ahmadinejand in Iran, he must be saying, these people are fools.
They're letting me go to develop nuclear weapons.
Oh, no question about it.
And this is, in a sense, even worse than what happened in the case of Hitler.
Because once you have two or three nuclear weapons, you are suddenly the master of anybody who isn't willing to stand there and see two or three of their major cities blown to pieces.
If the Iranians are willing to die and we're not, then we are going to lose any connotation.
That's right.
Absolutely.
Can you hold on for come after this break?
Oh, absolutely.
Okay.
All right.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, and it's Walter Williams fitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
And right now, we're on the phone with Dr. Thomas Sowell.
And if you've missed the first part of it, we talked about his book, Housing, Boom, and Bust, which is available at Amazon.com.
And it really gives an expose of the subprime crisis.
And before we went to the break, Tom, I was talking about Iran and nuclear weapons.
But in a column that you just wrote this week, it's called Suicide of the West.
And it says in part of your second paragraph, you say, in ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.
And so I guess Iran's getting nuclear weapon would be part of that installment plan on a large scale.
Oh, absolutely.
On the small scale, it's things like turning a terrorist loose who killed all those hundreds of Americans, Bakerbi, back in 1988.
But also throughout Western Europe, more and more the Islamic extremists are getting their way.
That is, there are places in France and other countries that are de facto living under Sharia law.
Even when people are brought into courts in various countries, you know, for example, things like honor killings and so on.
People say, well, you know, that's part of their culture.
Fine.
It's not part of our culture.
You know, at one time, they used to say, win in Rome do as the Romans do.
Now, today, under multiculturalism, it's win in Rome, tell the Romans what to do.
That's right.
And matter of fact, in Great Britain, I believe one bank used to advertise savings by using a piggy bank, and that was offensive to some Muslims, and the banks had to withdraw the ad.
Oh, absolutely.
And then other things, like Miss Piggy for on the Muppets and so on.
So we no longer have freedom of speech.
In a number of countries, we're going to eventually reach the point where we can't even warn each other about the dangers because that would be regarded as spreading hatred.
Yeah, right, absolutely.
And in Western Europe, they really have a problem because in some of those countries, I believe I sent you a little study where in some of those countries, the birth rate of the European people, let's say in Italy and France and in Germany, the birth rate is far below the replacement rate.
In some countries, like 1.2, and you need 2.1, 2.3 children to replace each generation.
And in those countries, in those same countries, the Muslim birth rate is like 2, 3, and 2 children per couple.
And so it's conceivable that 20, 30, 50 years from now, many of the countries in Europe will be Muslim countries.
Oh, absolutely.
And even before you reach that point, there will be a sufficient voting population that no one dares to say anything critical because, you know, elections in most democratic countries are close.
And so if you offend any one segment of the population that's really very militant, why then just.
And so, again, it's split aside on the installment plan.
That's absolutely right.
But however, I think the prime minister of Australia, he gave a clear message to the Muslims there.
He told them that if they want Sharia law, if they want other Muslim practices, they can go back to their home countries.
Yes, he is the only leader that I know of in the Western world that has said that.
Other than that, the rest are being mealymouthed.
Yeah, right.
And including our own president.
Oh, no question about it.
And especially, I would say, especially our own president trying to make nice with Muslims and trying to make nice with other enemies, other of our enemies around the world.
Tom, can you, there are a couple of phone calls.
Can you stay on past the break and come back and we can take care of some of these phone calls?
Well, thanks a lot.
Ladies and gentlemen, you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882 to talk to Tom Soule about his book and the other issues that we've been talking about.
Walter Williams sitting in for Rush, who will be back on Tuesday and Monday will be the best of.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
And right now, we're with Dr. Thomas Soules.
And let's go to the phones.
We have, let's see, let's go to Bob.
Bob?
How you doing?
Okay, you're on with Dr. Thomas Soule.
Hey, Dr. Tom and Walter, listen, I do a lot of broker price opinions and modifications for evaluations for about 32 different banks.
And I'm just wondering, when are they going to put a program together to help these people?
Because that's my largest market out there, people who are basically losing their homes.
What are you saying?
Pardon?
Hello?
Yes.
You're on with Bob.
Yes.
All right.
I'm baffled as to why the government should be picking who should be living in what houses.
Houses are not going to lie vacant permanently.
If the people who are in there now and can't pay for it leave or forced out, then the price of the house is going to come down and somebody else will move in.
Why in the world should the government intervene with the taxpayers' money to subsidize the people who made the mistake of getting it over their head and therefore keep the house not available to people who will pay what they can afford and move into it?
Now, there's not enough buyers out there.
Most of my buyers are people that are getting foreclosed on.
And the situation is their credit gets damaged.
And all I'm saying is that they need to put something like a re-entry program together to help these people get back into a home.
Something because their credit's already ruined, but these people don't want to move into the street.
And if they got caught in a bad economy, I understand.
We have a lot of surprise.
Sir, you'd be surprised how many people who don't live in houses are not living on the street.
They're called apartments.
I lived in them for half a century, and it did me no harm.
So again, I don't know why you think politicians in Washington should be deciding who will live where.
That's absolutely right.
And many Americans believe that, Tom.
And then also, the question I would have asked to Bob is, or to anybody who feels this way, is that where's the government going to get the money to do this?
That is, they don't get it from the Tooth Fairy.
They don't get it from Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
They have to get it from some other American.
So how come you feel that you have the right to live at the expense of some other American?
That's rather strange.
And matter of fact, that's my quotation on my website for this month.
It's one by Frederick Bastiat, and he says, when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's what we have done.
Let's now go to Randy in Beaufort, Beaufort, South Carolina.
Welcome to the show, Randy.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
You guys were talking about totalitarian regimes earlier.
And I remember a month or so back, Rush said that if the House H.R. 3200 health care reform bill had gone through the House and through Senate, Barack Obama would have signed that thing.
And we would have had a massive change in our society overnight.
And he would have allowed it.
If allowed, I think that Barack Obama would become one of these totalitarian leaders that the left just loves.
And he would push for term limit changes to allow him to stay in, just like Hugo Chavez.
And he would have support for that with the left.
And the left has been, in Mark Burant's book, I can't remember the name of it, but he's got some quotes from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.
And Jane Fonda said that we should all get down on our hands and knees and pray that we could be communists.
And Tom Hayden basically said the same thing, which is probably why they got married.
But these recent oaths that were sworn, pledges that were sworn by the Hollywood celebrities out in Utah somewhere pledging to become servants of Barack Obama is just one thing.
I'll tell you another question.
What's your question, Randy?
Okay.
The question is, well, I just wanted to give one example of what I'm talking about.
The left is so infatuated with these leftist leaders and these tyrants and these revolutionaries, they invited Fidel Castro on their Ed Sullivan show many years ago.
And he got a standing ovation.
Well, I don't know.
I would not get a standing location, standing ovation for being on that Sullivan show or any of the other ones.
Can we take another call?
Yes, let's go to Mark in San Diego.
Do you have a question for Dr. Thomas Sowell?
Welcome to the show, Mark.
Yeah, hi, Dr. Williams and Saul.
I had a thought on the elite and liberals and their search for power.
I see them, just a thought I had.
It's just my own.
I'm a family doc.
But, you know, the anointed elite, they come out of a university where they get these utopian and idealistic ideas.
And they just seem like they're very narcissistic to me, where they're rather arrogant, self-centered, and they get this sense of superiority.
And then they just discount the American people where they feel like they're stupid, they're ignorant, they don't know anything unless they're in New York or San Francisco.
It just seems delusional and narcissistic to me.
Tom, have you found that to be the case?
Oh, absolutely.
Well, again, this has been the case on the left, at least, for at least 200 years, that they have only contempt for the public.
And they feel that because they have degrees from these well-known universities and other accomplishments, that that makes them somehow philosopher kings.
It's amazing because when you think about it, there are other people who are just as amazing as intellectuals within their realm.
That is chess grandmasters, musical prodigies.
But chess grandmasters and musical prodigies don't imagine that this entitles them to tell other people how to live.
You're absolutely right.
And one of the quotes in your piece this week, actually, the excellent piece is available at townhall.com.
It's called The Suicide of the West that Thomas Sowell wrote for this week's column.
He said in there that Adam Smith, who happened also to be from Scotland, where this Abel Bazard something was released, the guy who killed the people on Pan Am flight, he said that Adam Smith was also from Scotland, and it's Adam Smith who said, quote, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
But people don't think that way nowadays, Tom, do they?
No, no, they don't.
We have a tendency to have a sort of arbitrary focus on some particular group of people, and we want to do something for them in utter disregard of what the repercussions are for other people.
I mean, this whole thing about keeping people in their houses after they've gone out on a limb and bought more house than they could afford is just one small example of that.
But it's true everywhere.
You want to be compassionate to this mass murderer.
Well, yes.
Well, he has prostate cancer.
Can you say one more segment?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
We'll be back with Tom Sowell and your calls after this.
We're back.
Walt Williams talking with Dr. Thomas Sowell.
We were talking about the terrorists.
We're talking about his book, Housing Boom, and Bus.
And now I want to ask Tom another question because I know you've written a number of columns about it.
What do you see as the major danger of Congress and the White House getting involved with our health care system?
Oh, my gosh.
They will overrule what doctors say you should need as treatment.
And they will overrule it based upon their idea of what will, quote, bring down the cost of health care.
And given that most people spend far more money on medical treatment when they're old than when they're young, that means a lot of old people are going to be sacrificed.
Now, they can call it whatever they want.
They can pretty it up with calling it ethics.
This is already happening in Britain.
It's already happening in other countries.
There's not the slightest reason to doubt that when you give them that power, it will happen here in the United States.
That's right.
And matter of fact, when you speak about Britain, the health secretary, they have a particular name for it.
But she has in charge of it, I forget the name of the lady, but she said that it's okay for people to be denied medical care who have unhealthy lifestyles,
such as if you're a smoker, if you're obese, then you should not be eligible for, or there's a real chance that you might not get the kind of treatment that you need because you are guilty of maintaining a health style that affects your health, a lifestyle that affects your health.
Well, these people are closet totalitarians.
There's just no question about it.
They are so convinced that they know that what's best for us, and that we, poor dummies that we are, would never understand it, that this is the kind of stuff you can expect.
Yeah.
And this might go to something that we were saying towards the beginning now.
This might be where, why Mao Sudong might be a hero to some of these people.
Well, they might not like or they might not support all the murder, but they surely support the level of government control over people's lives.
Yeah, but once you agree to give the government this huge amount of power, it's like opening the floodgates.
When you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.
And so if you give the government enough power to, quote, create social justice, you've given them enough power to make life miserable for millions of people.
That's right.
And I think Friedrich Hayek, one of the Nobel laureates in economics, he wrote something some time ago saying that the scum tends to rise to the top.
And he was saying that it takes a particular kind of person to choose to be a master.
I think he was using the case of you might be able to tell somebody, sell somebody a slave, but it might not be as easy to get that person to whip him because he just did not have the moral fortitude to be able to do that kind of stuff.
Yeah, and then, of course, what would happen is that he would then end up selling the slave to someone who was capable of doing that.
And that's right.
You have all kinds of well-meaning people who are setting out all kinds of utopian goals.
And when they aren't prepared to do the things that are necessary to reach those goals, power will pass one way or another to people who are willing.
That's right.
Like Kerensky prepared Prepared the way for the Bolsheviks.
That Kerensky would never have murdered all the people that the Bolsheviks murdered, but it was his overthrow of the Tsar which set the stage for the Bolsheviks.
Yeah, right.
We have one more caller for you, Tom.
Tony from Edmonds, Washington.
Welcome to the show, Tony.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted Mr. Sowell could make a comment or observation regarding our birth rate.
You know, we seem to pride ourselves that we're at a 2.1 replacement rate with our population, yet we are burdening our younger generations with this heavy debt load coming through college, and it's proving that young people are putting off families, even getting married, in order to service this debt, and the implications that that will cause upon our society, you know, five, ten years from now.
Well, that's a very large question.
I'm not so sure that I think the college debt burden has been grossly exaggerated.
We're talking about an average of about $20,000, which is the price for a very modestly priced car.
Now, most Americans buy several cars during a lifetime.
They only pay off a college debt once.
I don't know why people who can buy cars can't afford to pay off one college debt that they use to get their education.
What do you think about that, Tony?
Well, my daughter just got married last year, and she and her husband just graduated from Wheaton College, and they have a debt load of $600 per month for the next 10 years to pay off.
They're just over like $30,000 cumulative.
So, I mean, that's a fairly heavy load for a young couple, in a sense.
Well, they just don't buy a house right away.
Right?
I don't know why the government should subsidize this when they don't subsidize cars.
In fact, one of the real problems with the high cost of colleges is precisely the government subsidy.
Studies have shown that for every dollar the government spends to help people pay their college bills, the bills go up by 50 cents.
I talked with the president of a college some years ago who told me, frankly, it would make no sense for him to make his tuition affordable because the government formulas kick in when their tuition is so high that most people can't afford it.
So he would lose millions of dollars if he kept his tuition affordable.
That is absolutely right.
We have to take a break.
We have to go make some money, Tom.
And there's one fellow from Los Angeles who has a very interesting question.
And can you hold on to answer that one?
Well, sure.
Yes, okay.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, and we're on the phone with Dr. Thomas Sowell, and we have been talking about his new book, Housing, Boom, and Bus.
But we have Eric from Los Angeles to talk about a book Tom wrote some time ago, The Vision of the Anointed.
Eric, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on, both doctors.
I pulled this book off my shelf when I heard Dr. Sowell talking here.
The Vision of the Anointed, the subtitle of which really crystallizes the point here.
Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy.
This was relevant in 1995 when Dr. Sowell wrote it, and it's all the more relevant right now, especially in combination with race and culture, which he wrote in 1994.
You mix these two together and maybe throw in his older book on Marxism, and you have the picture that's being laid out right in front of us.
And I would strongly advise people to read The Vision of the Anointed.
He is right on point.
Tom, that's one of your books that you like the best, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
Because it goes into the reasons why people say the kinds of things they say.
Yeah.
And the evidence against them.
And you know, my favorite is knowledge and decisions.
But the vision of the anointed is very, very good.
Thanks a lot, Eric.
Here's a question I have to ask you before you leave, Tom.
What do you think of the president calling the schools and talking to the children?
Oh, my.
It is classic.
I mean, the first thing that occurred to my mind was the Hitler use from the 1930s.
All the dictators want to get their hands on the kids.
They get them early on.
Stalin, Hitler, Castro, you name them.
They want to get the kids.
Because the kids, first of all, don't have any experience.
They live in a world of words in the schools.
And these guys are great with words.
Whereas the rest of us have lived a few decades and we realize that words really don't cut it.
But it's insidious.
But don't you think that their teachers will tell them what's right and what's wrong?
Oh, my.
Oh, my.
You know, one of the tragic things is that we have people in our schools who think their job is to indoctrinate people with political correctness.
I mean, our kids don't know as much math as the kids in other countries.
They don't know enough English and so on.
But they're busy propagandizing them.
But they know that the earth is warming and the polar bear is disappearing.
But thanks a lot, Tom.
It's been really great talking to you, and it's been a great insight for the Rush listeners.