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July 5, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
July 5, 2012, Thursday, Hour #2
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That's a 10-4 on that.
Yes, it's Walter E. Williams sitting in for the vacationing Rush Limbaugh who will be back with us on Monday.
And you can be on the show by calling 800-282-2882.
And by the way, before I get to my good friend and colleague, I'd just like to alert the audience to the very fact that if you go to rushlimbaugh.com, you will see that they're in the process of putting up a page to celebrate me.
And what are they celebrating, ladies and gentlemen?
This year marks the 20th year that I've been sitting in and hosting the show for Rush Limbaugh.
20 years.
It's amazing a time has gone by that fast.
And Snerdley's been here for, what is it, 25 years?
Yeah, and Mike's been here for 25 or so.
That's right.
Yeah, the senior guest host.
That's right.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Anyway, well, look, ladies and gentlemen, we have Dr. Thomas Sowell on the phone with us from Stanford, and he's at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
He's the Rose and Milton Friedman fellow.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
Good being here.
Hey, that was really a great piece that you wrote in your syndicated column, Judicial Betrayal.
And why don't you just, you give, you give so many very, very important points, but one of the things you point out in the column that, well, in the legislate, well, right now they're calling it a tax.
That's what Justice Roberts said.
But in the legislation, it made no mention of it.
I know.
He reached out.
What he did by calling it a tax was give the administration some semblance of an excuse for exercising this power other than the Commerce Clause, since there's been some holding back on the vast scope of the Commerce Clause in recent Supreme Court decisions.
But in reality, the question is, does the government, even whether they call it a tax a penalty or the Commerce Clause, where do they get this power in the Constitution to tell individuals what to do in matters that are not specifically enumerated there as the powers of the federal government?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And I think one of the, I guess, tragedies, Tom, is that it's laying the groundwork for what else can they tell us to do?
Pretty much anything they feel like telling us to do as long as Chief Justice Roberts is on the court.
Or worse yet, if Obama gets it re-elected and starts appointing his own Supreme Court justices who will then rubber stamp virtually anything he wants to do.
Yeah, and I think that it seems to me, and I don't know this, I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but the United States Congress has the spending power.
It can appropriate and authorize spending.
Now, why wouldn't, well, can I get you a guess why the Republican-controlled Congress just will not say to HSS, we will not authorize any funding for any part of the program?
Wow, that's a great question.
I don't have an equally great answer.
I suppose they could do that if they had the guts.
Yeah, you know.
which is a very big if in the case of congressional Republicans.
Or whether it's a Republican president or congressman or senator.
They just lack the will.
And sometimes I feel kind of some sympathy for their lack of will because it would be my impression that any congressman who would follow the Constitution, the strict interpretation of the Constitution, he would be run out of town by his constituents.
Maybe so, but there's no empirical test of that since none of them tried it.
That's absolutely right.
But ladies and gentlemen, this was really a great column that Tom Sowell wrote.
And I want to switch a little bit, unless you have something to add about the judicial betrayal, but I'd like to switch focus a little bit.
And you've put out an expanded version of your very, very excellent book, Intellectuals and Society.
And we talked about when we had it on a show some time back about the intellectuals of society.
What was the expanded part?
Oh, my heavens.
I must confess it expanded far beyond what I thought I was doing.
It's pretty difficult to hold the book in one hand.
Listen, go to e-books so you can avoid getting turned here.
But I added four new chapters, a whole section titled Intellectuals and Race.
And my assistant urged me to publish that as a separate book, which I, in retrospect, wish I had done.
But yet I wanted this book to really cover the major areas of controversy, intellectual and political.
And so I put this in the book.
And I advanced various theses in these chapters that I've not advanced before and that I haven't seen anywhere else.
For example, I have a long discussion of the whole question of disparities between groups.
Well, groups have had disparities as long as there have been groups.
That's right.
And the disparities, they don't necessarily mean that there's any kind of injustice or discrimination.
More importantly, and the other thing that's in the first of these chapters on intellectuals and race is about the role of intellectuals in promoting racism.
I mean, the intellectuals today are ready to cry racism at the drop of a hat.
But if you go back 100 years ago, 1912, for example, you will find that nobody was pushing the idea that some races were capable only of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, like the intellectuals.
I mean, Keynes helped found the eugenics society at Cambridge University.
And Woodrow Wilson.
Oh, Woodrow Wilson, oh, my gosh, yes.
Woodrow Wilson was showing the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, in the White House to various leaders that he called in to view it with him.
And these and Woodrow Wilson and people around that time, they were called progressives, weren't they?
Well, this was one of the hallmarks of progressivism.
People don't understand that.
That the progressives were pushing the idea that not only were there inferior races, and they went beyond blacks and Native Americans.
They included the Jews.
They included the Italians.
They included the peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe in general.
And it was they who pushed for laws outlawing intermarriage and restrictions on immigration based upon the race of the people coming in and so on.
So it's ironic because, of course, by the last decades of the 20th century, the intellectuals were on the other side.
But in both eras, they did not take any criticism seriously.
They dismissed all attempts to say that they might, that there were other things to consider.
And so that dogmatism was there in both times, even though they were saying the opposite things in one period compared to what they said.
And it was both nerdless was Margaret Sanger, part of that group.
Oh, absolutely.
Margaret Sanger took her message to the Ku Klux Klan, which was a very appropriate place for it.
But there were lots of very people who were respectable.
You may be familiar with the I've forgotten the name of the lecture now.
The American Economic Association.
Oh, yeah, yeah, right.
Yes, I forget the and he was the president of the American Economic Association.
Oh, he was.
Yes, and any number of heads of any number of international scholarly organizations, these were not the village idiots.
These were not a bunch of ignorant rednecks.
These were people with PhDs from the leading universities in the country and who were professors at the leading universities in the country.
And you know, something interesting that you said in your book that, well, the term progressives fell out of favor and the people who were called progressives, who were calling themselves progressives, soon call themselves liberals.
Yes, it's just like bankruptcy.
That is when you build up a whole body of a whole record that is looking bad, then you simply change your name and escape the record.
It was, I believe, FDR was the first one to start calling himself liberal.
He'd been part of the progressives, part of the progressive Woodrow Wilson administration.
That's right.
And then actually, liberals a little bit later on started falling out of favor, and now they're back to progressives.
For the same reason.
Now that liberals had disgraced themselves, they introduced so many disastrous programs.
They now started calling themselves progressives.
And they started demonizing anyone who called them liberals, saying we shouldn't have labels.
Well, labels are very wonderful.
It's like brand names with commodities.
Those brand names force you to live with the consequences of what you've done in the past.
Yeah.
And in terms of some of the impact of some of these ideas, it turns out that black Americans have suffered the most as a group for some of these half-baked ideas of the progressives.
Oh, absolutely.
And I would include in that the great society under Lyndon Johnson.
That when I think about it, that the black family survived through centuries of slavery, generations of Jim Crow, and then began to fall apart under the liberal welfare state.
That's right.
And a lot of people don't know the series, the statistics.
And you've pointed them out, and I've pointed out in my book, Race and Economics, that in the 1800s, 1880s, that 75% of black kids lived in two-parent families, where it's hard put to find 30% now.
And in places like this, Herbert Gutmann, I believe.
Oh, yes.
And he points out in Harlem in 1925, 85% of black kids lived in two-parent families.
And he also said that it was rare, very rare, to see a black single woman, a teenager, a younger woman, raising a child by herself.
That's right.
At one period, most of the black female-headed households were headed by widows who were older than teenagers.
Yeah.
Can you hold on for a while for a few questions?
Oh, sure.
Okay, we'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen.
This is Walter Williams sitting in for Rush, who will be in on Monday.
And I have my good friend and colleague, Dr. Thomas Soule.
He is a scholar at the Hoover Institution in California.
And we're talking about intellectuals and society, his expanded book.
And one of the chapters, expanded chapters, is Intellectuals and Race.
Tom, your book can be purchased just about everywhere, can't it?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Amazon.com.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And there's not just a chapter.
There's a whole section consisting of four long chapters.
Oh, yeah.
Which could have been published as a book, but which is included in the revised and expanded edition of Intellectuals.
But getting back to the intellectuals and race, I think one of the rather tragic things for young people, whether they're black or white, but particularly for black youngsters, is the teaching of victimhood.
Oh, God, yes.
And that they're victims and they can't do anything about it no matter how hard they try.
And you kind of think back, well, heck, back in the 40s and the 30s, if young blacks were taught that same lesson back then, well, hell, the civil rights movement would have never started.
That's right.
And of course, there were far more restrictions on blacks then than today.
But I never had this sense of futility.
I remember giving a talk at Marquette University, and some black young man got up in the audience, and he said, I'm about to graduate from Marquette.
But what hope is there for me?
And I said, you know, twice the hope that was for your parents and four times the hope there was for your grandparents.
But the grievances and navel gazing and all kinds of stuff.
Unfortunately, although blacks are the biggest victims of this in the United States, the very same thing goes on in England among whites.
And people who haven't read Theodore Dahlrymple's book, Life at the Bottom, you can see, he says, you know, there are teenagers from this housing project near where he works as a doctor that come to see him.
And he finds, you know, they can't multiply six times nine.
I wrote about this week's column, but we don't want no education.
Oh, yes, yes.
And you realize that this is a race of people that produced Newton and Shakespeare and so forth.
And now they're turning out a whole generation.
They can't do simple arithmetic and have no conception of reading or even spelling.
And so it's not a racial thing.
It's the underclass and what has been done by the education establishment and the welfare state.
Absolutely.
And the two things go together.
That is, in order to have the welfare state, you have to promote a welfare state ideology that will justify it in a democracy.
And so therefore, you get all these people thinking they can't do anything.
And what's the point of learning?
Because the system is against you anyhow.
And it's a deadly ideology.
You're absolutely right.
We have, let's see, is it Kevin?
Kevin from Rockford, Illinois.
He's read a lot of your books, Tom, and welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Dr. Soule.
It's a great honor.
I've read your books, and they're fabulous.
I was raised poor, single parent, south side of Chicago, went to all public schools, and I did very well.
I have four well-educated kids from good schools, and I'm a retired school teacher.
And I'd like to ask the question of: how can we have an honest and open discussion and conversation about race when the elite within the civil rights community and organizations silence us by labeling us like they have done to you and to Dr. Williams?
Oh, the answer is you can't.
Unless you're prepared to say, I don't care what labels these people throw around, it's more important the truth be told.
And Tom, you don't care about being invited to parties, do you?
No, because if they invite me, I only have to have the problem of declining.
But this is very hard to take sometimes, but it has to be done.
Wherever blacks or anybody else wants to go in life, they can only get there from where they are, which means they have to know where they are, not where they wish they were, not where they want other people to think they are, but where they are in fact.
And so the truth is absolutely the key to any hope of advancement.
Yeah, and I think I've always said, Tom, that if I were the grand dragon of the Klu Klux Klan and I wanted to sabotage any opportunity for black academic excellence, I could not think of a better means for doing so than the public education establishment in most of our cities.
Absolutely true.
I mean, we've reached the point where groups like the Klu Klux Klan can't do very much to stop us, but our friends can do a lot to stop us.
That's right.
But however, in terms of education, you've done marvelous work pointing out at a time black education was not what it is today.
Oh, absolutely.
And that was in my lifetime.
People say, isn't it wonderful that I came through the Harlem schools and went on to these big universities?
Well, the Harlem schools in those days were different from the Harlem schools today.
If you wanted an education, you could get it in the middle of Harlem.
That is not true today when we have so much utter nonsense taking up time and we have so many judicial rulings making it impossible to maintain discipline.
That's right.
And you've published many very good works on black education, how it was excellent at one time, and the big problems that we have today.
But, Tom, look, thanks a lot for being on the show with us today and discussing your column and discussing the expanded version of intellectuals and society that's available anywhere in our country.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
Okay, Tom.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dr. Thomas Sowell, and he was talking about intellectuals and society.
And you definitely ought to pick up the book.
It's a long read.
It'll keep you busy all summer, but it's just exciting just to go from page to page.
Pick it up.
We'll be back.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen.
Walter Williams sitting in for Rush.
And that was just Dr. Thomas Sowell we had on talking about his expanded version of intellectuals and society.
But I'd like to bring your attention to the ladies and gentlemen in the audience that the EIB people have just put up a banner celebrating my 20th.
Actually, it says celebrating two, go to rushlimball.com.
Okay.
Celebrating two decades of pushing back the frontiers of ignorance on EIB.
Now, what's remarkable about this banner is that I'm looking at it very, very carefully, and I'm going to concentrate on it more when I get home.
Is that they show a photo of me in 1992 and a photo of me in 2012.
And the only difference I can see is that I have a brown tie on in 1992.
Mike, can you see any difference there?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, yes, I still have that tie.
But anyway, just check it out, ladies and gentlemen.
The very, very nice banner that they put on there.
Anyway, before we got to Dr. Thomas, so I might have made an error, which is, I guess, maybe one or two errors I've made since 1965.
But I failed to mention that I think it was 30% of the land mass in the United States is owned by government.
And in some states, like Nevada, I think the government owns something like 90% of the land in Nevada, 50% in California, and 50% in roughly 50% in Alaska.
And so the significance of this is that these are wasting assets.
They're not being used for anything.
And so in terms of being able to take care of some of our problems, financial problems, or let's say with Social Security, is that tell the people, look, if you will say, forget about my Social Security payments, and the government will just give them 40, 50 acres of land.
And then I would bet if we got the land out of the government hands, people would find some verb or good use for it.
Now, kind of going back to some of my other statements on Social Security, now, I thought about this on the train up today to the northern command of EIB.
And I was purchasing a ticket on the local train that I use.
And the person asked me, do I want a senior citizen fare or a regular fare?
And so I said a regular fare.
And what bothers me, I do not do any senior citizen discounts, even though I'm eligible for them.
And the reason why, and I used to argue with Mrs. Williams, who's now departed, but she used to go down and see my daughter in Richmond, and she used to take a train and she got senior citizen discount.
And I said to her, I said to Mrs. Williams, here you are in the top 2 or 3% of income earners in the country, and you're taking a reduced fare, and when somebody is 25 years old or 30 years old, they're paying full fare.
What's the justice in that?
Where's the justice?
I don't see any whatsoever.
And then also, the very fact that we have close to 50% of the federal budget is spent on people 65 years old and older.
What's the justice in that?
You might say, well, Williams, what are you talking about?
Well, it turns out that more than 80% of those persons that are 65 years old and older are homeowners.
66% have no mortgage.
That is, their house is free and clear.
The average, the homeownership for somebody who's younger than 35 is only 40%.
And only 12% own their homes free and clear of a mortgage.
The average net worth of people older than 65 is about $230,000, much of it consisting of a home that's paid off.
Whereas the net worth of people younger than 35 is $10,000.
Now, there's nothing complicated about this, but just that older people have been around longer, so they accumulate more.
But the more important issue in my mind is by what standard of fairness justify taxing the earnings of workers who are less wealthy in order to pass them on to retirees who are far wealthier.
I can't find any justification.
I would like somebody to call up and tell me what is the justification.
What standard of fairness justify this?
Now, of course, there's no justification, but there's an explanation.
That is, those people who are older than 65 vote in very large numbers and have the ear of congressmen.
So, but, and congressmen love the idea that people think that Medicare, Social Security, and all these other programs belong to them because they can use these people to gain greater control over our lives.
They can use the votes of these people, the political support of these people, to gain greater control over our lives.
Let's go to Ron in Mira Loma, California.
Welcome to the show.
Good morning, Dr. Williams.
How are you today?
Okay.
Good.
I have an issue.
It's a race issue.
I'd like to discuss with you, and I'm amazed this happened.
Back in, I guess it was the end of May, first part of June, I was looking at the local papers here in Southern California, and they were talking about the graduating class, I believe it was from San Bernardino.
I might be wrong.
It was the UC system, I think it was San Bernardino.
They were talking about a big article praising the fact that the school, not public people, not private people, but the school put on a separate graduating program for the black students only.
In this day and age of race relations, laws, feelings, pro and against, why would a public college put something like this for black students only?
Well, that's how I understand.
They've been doing it for 10 years.
That's how college presidents keep their jobs.
That is by promoting what they call diversity and celebrating differences and things.
No, they're not talking about unity.
They're talking about they keep their jobs by celebrating diversity.
And it's not only at the colleges that you mentioned.
It happens at UCLA.
It happens, it happens at many, many colleges.
And matter of fact, they have racially separated, I guess, orientation sessions.
And where people just kind of accept this.
And people who are against it don't say much because they're afraid of being accused of racism.
And this is one of the reasons why if you go to my website, waltewilliams.com, you'll see, click all the way on the top right-hand corner and you'll see gift.
And what I've done, this has been up there for years and years.
It's a gift.
It's a certificate of amnesty and pardon that I, Walter Williams, have granted to all Americans of European ancestry, both for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people.
And the reason why I do this, why I grant this amnesty, is so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like damn fools by tolerating this kind of mess.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're pushing back the frontiers of ignorance, and you can be on to help us do it by calling 800-282-2882.
By the way, ladies and gentlemen, I'm getting some people are looking at the RushLimball.com, and they're sending me an email, and one fellow just sent me an email.
He says, well, there's something else different from your tie or the same about the pictures, and he's noticing that I'm carrying the same fountain pen.
But people can't tell any other difference between those two photos.
Anyway, let's go to, you know, I'm getting all kinds of very, very envious comments from these people here.
They're just very jealous because – and Ali, how do I look?
Yes, yes.
See, Allie just said that I look like eye candy.
You know what eye candy?
Anyway, let's get serious.
Let's get serious about pushing back the frontiers of ignorance.
Let's go to Gail in Texas, Port of Texas.
Welcome to the show, Gail.
Hi, she wanted me to get right to the point, so I will.
About Social Security.
Yes.
Juan, oh, and I'm a tax preparer, so that's why I kind of know this.
Juan, you'll never get back what you paid into Social Security.
Never.
Well, no, no, no.
I think you might be wrong, and I'll let you respond.
That is, the person who retired in 1980 drew out all that he ever put into Social Security in 2.8 years.
And the person entering the labor force in 1980, as you're suggesting, he'll have to live until he's 92 years old to break even with what he put in.
Exactly.
That's what I was saying.
The way the system is set up now.
And second, those individuals, no matter how you make the money, it doesn't matter.
But those individuals that make in excess of $106,000 a year, case in point, our president, he pays no Social Security tax on $294,000.
Well, see, that's okay with me.
And what a lot of people want to say, look, you mess with me, you mess with me, also mess with him.
Well, see, I don't begrudge anybody being rich because I don't want your money.
If I can't work for it, I don't want your money.
That's right.
But everybody talks about how Social Security and everything.
Well, if you knew the big picture, if you knew everything, you can make a more informed, we the people can make a more informed decision about who we put in office.
But not the average layperson knows the tax laws because they don't want to go read them.
And I'm guilty of it too because I've done my own taxes for almost 50 years.
Well, I'm using now almost 34 years.
I'm sorry.
And I never read this until I decided to become a taxpayer.
Tax preparer.
Well, see, I think here's the problem.
Here's one of the big problems.
That is, As I was talking to my telling my colleague Tom Soule, that is, politicians, as I was suggesting to him, politicians represent what the American people want.
And too often we blame politicians for our problem, but our problems lie with the American people because politicians are doing precisely what the American people want them to do.
And what do they want the politician to do?
They want them to take what belongs to one American and bring it back to them.
Whether you're going to call it Social Security, whether you're going to call it food stamps, whether they're going to farm subsidies, business bailouts, that's what they want.
And any politician not doing that, he's going to be run out of town on the rail.
The government didn't put me into it.
I put myself.
Well, you know, but.
And I'm getting out of it.
And I didn't get out, and I didn't get out of it, and we didn't get out of it on government assistance.
Well, good folks.
We got out of it through, well, we didn't, you know, through cutting back on expenses.
Yeah, hard work.
And that's the way to be successful.
As my stepfather used to always say, you got to come early and stay late.
Let's go to Ed in St. Charles, Illinois.
Welcome to the show.
Hello.
Well, my question is: do we need to start pushing politicians for a constitutional amendment forbidding the government from requiring purchase of any products, be it health care or whatever, since it seems that this recent decision has kind of put us in a bind constitutionally?
Well, I think what we have to do, we have to get the Congress to obey the United States Constitution.
That is, we shouldn't have something written in the Constitution saying that they can't do what they're not supposed to be doing in the first place.
Well, I kind of thought it was almost like the Equal Rights Amendment, where those rights were already guaranteed, but people were pushing for it, and I was always critical of that.
But now I'm looking and seeing that people are on this side, they're trying to take away Constitution.
They have the full force of the United States Supreme Court.
It's really helping.
What they have to do, what we have to do is to keep Congress within the limited bounds that the founders envision.
The founders did not trust the United States Congress at all.
They were very distrustful.
And just read the language of the Constitution.
Well, start off with the Bill of Rights.
What is the language of the Bill of Rights?
It says, Congress shall not prohibit, Congress shall not infringe.
Congress shall not disparage.
Does that sound like they had much trust for Congress?
They had a great, deep, unabiding distrust, abiding distrust for Congress.
And matter of fact, I've suggested to people that when we die and at our next destination, if we see anything like the Bill of Rights, we know we're in hell.
Because a Bill of Rights in heaven would be an insult to God.
That's saying God can't be trusted.
And so what the founders did, they recognized that Congress, the essence of Congress, the essence of government, is evil.
And we have to somehow restrain it.
But what you people have done, you say, no, let Congress do things that are good for us.
Forget this stuff.
Forget this distrust that our founders had for the United States government.
And that's our big mistake.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Let's go back to the phones, as I promised.
Let's talk to Jim in Georgia.
Welcome to the show, Joe.
Hi, Dr. Williams.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you.
Well, I was listening to the beginning of your show today, and I heard you make the rationale for America being in a position to nullify the recent Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.
And you made a number of great points as to why we should maybe even do this.
But you used as one of your further points that you did not believe that the military would respond with arms against the American people.
Now, I agree with your rationale, and I agree that even today, the military, which is comprised of our friends and neighbors, would not turn on its own citizenry.
But I believe that the time for that being true is growing shorter because I believe that the military that's being crafted by this administration is not going to be comprised of our friends and neighbors, but it will be overrun with criminals and with the morally devious.
Yeah, you're kidding.
I doubt whether you can find an active duty soldier or a captain that would say that I would lead my troops into, let's say, a city like New York to round up and if they resist, shoot people who refuse to buy health care.
I don't believe that we've sunk that low in our country yet, and I hope we never do.
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