Checking It Out

Recommended Readings -- Works of Thomas Sowell

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:54:44 GMT

In a recent discussion with my oldest daughter about economics, I found that she has little understanding of the economy. This despite the fact that she participated in a Business Management Program for Engineers while at the University of Texas and graduated from it with Highest Distinction, she reads BusinessWeek, she is a supply chain consultant, and she is intending to return to school to get an MBA. Now, she is a bright young lady, but almost no one with a university education today does understand the basics of the economy. It is not in the interest of the socialists who control the universities to teach the basic realities of an economy. I bought her a copy of Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics knowing that he would write an excellent book on the subject and be readable and interesting. She dismissed it as a Conservative's book. So, I am reading it and enjoying it. It is clearly written and well thought out. When I finish it, I hope to be able to convince my daughter to read it so she will understand the basic principles of the free market economy and what happens when governments choose to constrain freedom of choice by dictating prices, confiscating property, offering subsidies, and generally manipulating the market when in ignorance of the knowledge held by individual producers, investors, middlemen, and consumers.

A short while ago, I finished reading Thomas Sowell's book Black Rednecks and White Liberals. It was thoroughly enjoyable and insightful. The book title principally refers to a long chapter on the history of present day black inner city culture, tracing it back to that of the poor whites of the South, largely Scotch-Irish, who brought many similar value patterns with them from Scotland and Ireland. He notes that these poor social values did not work well there and continued to be unproductive in the South for these whites. The freed slave population largely adopted their unworkable values and, surprise, they did not work well for the blacks who adopted them either! In other chapters, Thomas Sowell discusses how amazingly successful some all-black schools were in educating poor blacks in the past. One amazing example was the Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. His point is that the modern day liberal education establishment has excuse after excuse for failing to properly educate modern day inner city blacks and yet history tells us both that they can be given an effective education and they can use it to compete on an equal basis with anyone. There is also an interesting chapter on slavery, which puts it into an historical perspective that most modern people do not understand. When the United Kingdom started a campaign to end slavery in the early 1800s, it was very widespread. Today, people seem to think it was only in the United States South and in Latin America. There were far more slaves in Brazil than in the South, but there were also far more people put into slavery in Africa, China, India, and the Muslem world than were ever enslaved in the South. In fact, Britain worked very hard to limit slavery, including a great commitment to stationing ships off Africa to free slaves on slave ships. It was Europeans and Americans who finally joined in a worldwide effort to stop slavery. Of course, it still goes on today in much of the world, but it is generally now hidden from view and a much smaller part of the world population is enslaved.

He also has an interesting chapter on middleman ethnic groups, such as the Jews in Europe and the Americas, Indians in East Africa and the islands of the South Pacific, Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in East Africa. In every case, these groups brought critical skills and very hard work commitment to societies that desperately needed them, but still resented them. In another chapter he examines the role of Germans in modern history and notes that they have often been the cutting edge of civilization. They are not uniquely and not thoroughly despicable people. Before the rise of the Nazis, half of the Jews who wed in the 1920s wed non-Jews. Hitler and the Nazis had to work hard to keep their policies toward the mentally disabled, the old, and the Jews largely hidden from view. Most Germans did not agree with the Nazi policies on these issues.

For each of these topics, Sowell provides a richer context for understanding an important issue. Each chapter is well thought out and full of interesting facts that our liberal media and our universities are not willing to educate us about. Yet, this information is generally available and verifiable in the works of other specialists. Why is this perspective so suppressed in America and Europe today? If you read the works of Thomas Sowell, you will be able to educate your uneducated friends and family. Please read his works. You will be richly rewarded for your effort.

The Ayn Rand 100th Anniversary Celebration at the Library of Congress

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 05:47:04 GMT

On 2 February 2005, I and my wife, Anna Palka, attended the celebration of Ayn Rand's 100th birthday at the Library of Congress. This gathering was organized by The Objectivist Center (TOC), which has offices in Washington, DC, as well as in Poughkeepsie, NY. In the next few months, TOC is moving its headquarters to Washington, DC and Ed Hudgins will relieve David Kelley, who founded TOC, as Executive Director. During the celebration, Ed Crane, who serves on the TOC board, but is better known as a founder of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, commented on how important Ayn Rand's work was to him, but also on how disappointed he had been when she condemned the libertarian movement, many of whose members were not Objectivists. Some Objectivists present were upset that such comments were made at Ayn Rand's birthday celebration. I am not.

One of the purposes of the celebration was to examine the impact that Ayn Rand has had upon our civilization. It was very substantial and her impact upon how people view Capitalism and the proper, limited role of government was among those areas in which her ideas were very important. To many libertarians, she provided a much appreciated argument in favor of their attempts to turn the ever more threatening growth of government around. Indeed, her work infused a great many talented people into the libertarian movement. When she denounced them as too willing to work in a common cause to limit government with people whose philosophy was much less than rational, she was wrong. It is true that it is important to explain why limited government is necessary on a rational basis, but in a democratic republic, one has no realistic choice but to work with people who are not entirely rational to protect the basic rights of the individual from brutalization at the hands of voracious government. One must work with Christians, socialists, and others to keep bad new laws off the books and to remove powers already given to the government. Ayn Rand made a very strategic mistake here and hurt the feelings of many of her admirers, who were betrayed. It was a great trait of Ayn Rand's that she developed a philosophy which was so rational and self-consistent. Unfortunately, she had a tendency to push Objectivism into the form of a cult in a number of important ways as well. These tendencies are not consistent with the philosophy. Objectivism is reality-based, prescribes reason as our only means of knowing reality, acknowledges that men are not infallible and must focus constantly upon the exercise of their rational faculty, maintains that reason is efficacious as a means to achieve our values on earth, and recognizes that there are no values but those of the valuer, who is an individual.

To be completely rational places a much greater burden of effort upon most people than they will readily accept, however, especially when most of their fellow man are not very strongly committed to reason beyond the means of their livelihood. If Objectivism ever becomes the accepted philosophy of most of the individuals in our civilization, it will do so only after a long process of discussion between Objectivists and others which causes large numbers of people to inch closer and closer to a belief in Objectivism. Sudden individual conversions will always be rare, since few people will depart far from the commonly held beliefs of the society in which they live. It is time for Objectivists to observe this salient fact of reality and do a more consistent job of constructively engaging those who disagree with us in discussion about the critical ideas of our time. We must not retreat into an uncritical worship of Ayn Rand and reject any disagreement as that of the defiled. If we do not rather benevolently evaluate our fellow man, who falls short in his use of his rational faculty, he will simply write us off as a cult. In fact, this is the most common tactic for dismissing Objectivism today. It is very effective in cutting off any actual discussion of ideas. If we do not overcome our tendency to be an Ayn Rand worshiping cult which spurns all who disagree with us, we will never have a society in which Objectivist principles are dominant. Indeed, we will have a cult which will become more and more isolated from reality, which will stultify the further development of Objectivism, and will soon die out. Without Ayn Rand to write more electrifying novels, there are few tools as effective for breathing new energy into Objectivism as political discussions to motivate more people to look into Objectivism. Few people I know will read the works of a philosopher. Many more will read about politics. Most people hardly read anything of substance at all.

Get real, Objectivists. You are a dying breed if you do not figure this out. That would be the greatest imaginable tragedy, since Ayn Rand left us so much of a true philosophy. We must also remember that she tasked us as individuals to evaluate reality ourselves and think for ourselves. While she appreciated our adulation, she wanted it only because she thought she deserved it. Almost always, she did. But not always. She was also fallible. As an Objectivist, one must learn to distinguish her many great works from her occasional mistakes. She would tell us that we must put reality and truth above adulation. She was not a goddess and she knew it. She was a prodigious producer, but this came from an incredible devotion to hard work. This work was necessary because she was fallible and knew it. I love her because she correctly identified these facts and many others. She helped me to understand many things, but I could never know that to be the case had I not critically evaluated everything I learned from her. I never would have done that, had not many of the things she told me agreed with my own evaluations of reality as a 17 year old. Her work did wonders in helping me to integrate my knowledge; and to correct some significant errors. This is why her 100th birthday was so very important to me.