I am of course a big fan of Thomas Sowell, for obvious reasons. It is not uncommon for me to think I’ve come up with some great argument on some topic or other, only to find out that he, or David Horowitz, or Friedrich Hayek, or even Bastiat said it better 40 or 100 or more years ago.
But Sowell fought the hard battles for half a century. He was there reliably most Sundays for most of my youth, defending common sense, and attacking lunacy.
Here is thing: Conservative–or what I call Honest Liberal–arguments win. They are the best. They stand unopposed, when articulated clearly by informed people. Nothing the Left “stands” for has been actually left standing, intellectually. It is all gone. Burned. Torched. Shown to be deficient, anti-human, destructive, morally bankrupt, and harmful to human happiness and flourishing. And all this happened at the latest by the mid-1970’s. At the LATEST. One could argue simply reading and understanding Edmund Burke and Frederic Bastiat should have been enough.
But these ghoulish ideas keep coming back, over and over and over. Why? BECAUSE WE NEED A RELIGION AND THIS CULT SERVES THAT PURPOSE. As Sowell himself notes–and he himself was a Marxist until he actually spent time in the government–the left wing visions are more attractive than right wing visions. If the world worked the way the Left claims it does–the way it assumes, in an act of empirically ungrounded faith–then the world would be a better place. Assuming it works the way honest Liberals do–the way which comes from a clear eyed reading of history and social psychology–is much less pleasant. People tend to be nasty, and tend to be nasty because it is easier and more obvious for them. They are best civilized by ideas, and in the beginning and middle those ideas have to be rooted in self interest, which is the root of “Capitalism”, so called, which in practice is nothing more or less than the erosion of systems of hereditary privileges, grotesquely curtailed personal freedoms, and compulsory religion, all in favor of generalized prosperity and freedom. Socialism, in turn, is a return to the status quo ante, merely without God, in whose stead is made to serve a perverted and chained “science”.
People who cannot use their own freedom, do not want to grant it to others.
So in the end, economic questions are religious questions. The irrefutable answers highly competent intellectuals like Dr. Sowell provide CANNOT BE HEARD by people whose main aim is a life of purpose, and whose main means to that purpose is at odds with economic truth and fact. Truth and fact will lose every time, to someone who otherwise stands to lose everything by evaluating them honestly.
Obviously, better philosophy is needed. We need better reasons for living, than the ones we were living for, if I might paraphrase a Bruce Springsteen line I’ve always liked.
And take Bruce Springsteen. He is an alert, alive, spontaneous guy. He is bright, and perhaps even a genius. I don’t know how he came up with so much great music. I know the words to most of the songs on his first seven albums or so. Why is he a Joe Biden supporter? Bruce Springsteen is the “working man’s hero”. Well, since the 1970’s his New Jersey and that region have suffered massive industrial decline. And since Barack Obama, at least, no honest efforts have been made to protect the lives and incomes of blue collar workers by the Democrats. On the contrary, they are importing by the millions Hispanics whose main job is to eventually vote Democrat. To help who? Democrat politicians, that’s who. Not Springsteen’s people. Not Americans. Democrats as a whole used to be clear on this.
But nobody is thinking clearly any more. They are not about trying to achieve concrete ends. Their world has gotten much colder. All they are doing is trying to avoid realize how wrong they have become, how wasted their faith has been on faithless people. It’s hard. I get that. But it still needs to happen. Bruce Springsteen needs to become a Trump supporter. Trump had, and will have, the working men and women’s backs. Trump, or someone like him. As I’ve said, I like Kristi Noem. She seems to be dealing quite intelligently with the lunatic idea that biological men should be allowed to destroy all the hard work and dreams of biological women. Trans ideology is inherently anti-feminist and inherently anti-LGB. This cannot be said too often.
Well, that was a nice tour of the ranch perimeter. Couple lines from Sowell worth repeating (from memory, so they are right in substance if not specific verbiage):
“Many nations in history have become prosperous. Many have raised their poor to affluence. But NONE HAVE DONE IT USING THE METHODS BEING USED TO RAISE UP BLACK FOLKS IN THIS COUNTRY.”
And I will add the comment that the rhetoric is no longer even ABOUT raising up black folks. Trump was doing that, and the Left hated it. It is not even about justice. It is about PUNISHING WHITE PEOPLE. That is it. There is nothing life affirming, generous, or good in any of the Left’s proposals and focus any more when it comes to race. It is OBVIOUS they want blacks in ghettos indefinitely, they want their schools piss poor, their graduates ignorant, their streets crime ridden (why otherwise get rid of the police and charter schools?), and blacks in general bitter, hopeless, and looking to Democrats for any relief they may get. That is the left wing vision.
“It is amazing how much panic one honest man can induce in a multitude of hypocrites”.
He no doubt said this long before Donald Trump. Sowell has had little to say about Trump, and it’s not hard to understand why.
He is an old man. He has been battling critics and the work of sifting complex information into accurate portraits of reality as it is since at least 1970. That is fifty years ago. I can understand fully why, at his age, he would just want to go out in nature and forget the news, forget the need to comment, and just focus on whatever comes next. I don’t know for sure, but I would think he must have some religious beliefs.
He has earned his rest. Most of us would be doing exceptionally well to accomplish a small fraction of what this man from North Carolina did, who was orphaned before he could write.