Dismantling Thomas Sowell

[alp227]

He does! He expressed that idea in an essay from his book Compassion Versus Guilt based on the outcome of Prohibition. He also used to be a Marxist. In 1987, he testified at the Senate confirmation hearings for unsuccessful hard-right Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and was questioned by then-Senator with colored hair Joe Biden. Justice Clarence Thomas cited Sowell's 1975 book Race and Economics as his biggest influence.

Anyway, I borrowed Sowell's latest book, a compilation of his columns titled Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays, from the library out of curiosity of what the libertarian economist had to say about American politics, culture, and society. There've been threads generally asking about the Hoover Institute scholar in 2005 and 2008. One poster on the 2008 thread called Sowell "a sharp guy (one of the smartest on the right)." This thread I'll start on "Bush/Conservatives" because I'm delving so deep into a conservative mind that it may be a bit much for some General Discussion participants.

The first time I heard about Sowell was when I was reading the book Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Culture by Mary C. Waters, who writes: "Authors from Ira Reid in the 1930s to Glazer and Moynihan in the 1960s to Thomas Sowell most recently have described the West Indians as more successful than American blacks and have devised a number of theories to explain why...Conservative writers such as Thomas Sowell are likely to see big differences and to stress cultural explanations. Liberal writers such as Stephen Steinberg are likely to see little to no differences and to stress cultural explanations for the differences they do find" (pp. 95-96, citing Sowell's essay "Three Black Histories").

So why am I reading this?
Now some of you may be asking, "Why oh why are you wasting time reading right-wing trash?" I'll respond that at least Sowell is conservative, and that I as a liberal may not agree with him on most issues, but at least he's more scholarly and not on the same level as talk radio/Fox News/Regnery regulars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, etc., but Sowell has admitted that Limbaugh is the only radio program that he listens to. Nor has Sowell been thoroughly debunked like other pseudo-scholars on the right like John Lott or Jerome Corsi, although his work has been criticized at times as I'll share later.

I support the left wing and prefer to be informed by left-wing sources and like to have an open mind too, because I can't feel truly informed without knowing all educated arguments around an issue. Sowell addresses this in "De-Programming Students" (pp. 198-200, 2/12/2009): "Elementary as it may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct issues today in our schools and colleges. The biggest argument of the left is that there is no argument--whether the issues is global warming, 'open space' laws or whatever." Umm, not every topic can really rationally be debated. Economics, yes, but science? I don't know. After all, debating conservative thinkers is a central tenet of Thom Hartmann's radio show, and Hartmann is an excellent commentator for the left. By the way, on the shelf next to Sowell's book was Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation by the "Whites Only Scholarship" creator and now Human Events magazine editor Jason Mattera (yes, he became editor of that magazine at age 27!), but I decided to read just Sowell's book to glimpse at the dark side.

Sowell has an interesting life story that inspires his individualist, "lift yourself by your own bootstraps" views. He was born in 1930 near Charlotte, N.C., and recalled in his autobiography A Personal Odyssey: "...white people were almost hypothetical to me as a small child," and "I had never seen anybody with yellow hair, and doubted that there were any such people" (p. 6). Sowell was raised by a great aunt and her two grown daughters, moved to Harlem at age nine, and was accepted to the selective Stuyvesant High School even though no one in his family was educated beyond sixth grade. Although he dropped out of high school at age 17, Sowell rose up the social ladder later on: he worked odd jobs, was drafted to the Marines during the Korean War, resumed his education with night classes at the historically black Howard University despite lacking a diploma, graduated from Harvard and Columbia, and finally earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.A former Marxist, Sowell's economic ideology changed after the 1950s. According to Wikipedia, sourcing a Salon 1999 interview, Sowell's "experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject Marxian economics in favor of free market economic theory. During his work, Sowell discovered a correlation between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico and the rise of unemployment in that industry. Studying the patterns led Sowell to allege that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor."

So I've been reading Sowell's essays in Dismantling America since Tuesday. I cite the page numbers so that you can read them on Google Books rather than one of the sites that syndicate Sowell e.g. Jewish World Review or Town Hall. Throughout he advcoates limited government as the best type of government. Introducing the section about government policies, he attacks ideas supporting rent control, gun control, and stimulus spending are beneficial and says "few people seem to find it necessary to check any of these assumptions against facts" (p. 3). He also accuses Obama of dismantling traditional American structures and says "his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle" (p. 9, "Dismantling America: Part II", originally published 10/30/2009).

A libertarian hawk
Despite his libertarian leanings he's also a cheerleader for more war and strong defense.
-Patriotism is better than internationalism and world peace, as Sowell discusses the rather neutral tone of history textbooks in France following WWI (p. 44, "Are We France?", 7/24/2007)
-Even as a black man, Sowell has a soft spot for airport racial profiling as he experienced in Israel (p. 47, "Notional Security", 1/12/2010).
-"Squeamishness" is what he calls the idea that terror suspects are entitled to any "rights" when arrested rather than being considered enemy combatants (pp. 53-55, "Survival Optional", 4/28/2009). Well I wonder where Sowell was when Timothy McVeigh (who bombed a federal building and killed hundreds), the shoe bomber, and the Unabomber were all successfully tried and convicted in American federal courts.
- Health care reform is "ne of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit" (p. 12, "Playing Freedom Cheap", 2/16/2010). However, this is where reason ends and fear-mongering begins. Other Sowell claims worth of criticism are at Media Matters.

Crime and justice
Regarding crime, Sowell challenges the notion that imprisonment is a bad thing and that there are "root causes of crime", as the murder rate doubled from 1961-1974 after a "de-emphasis in law enforcement and imprisonment" (p. 296, "The Left and Crime", 8/23/2006). Sowell also covers other judicial issues, preferring an originalist court (p. 300, "High-Stakes Courts", 7/1/2008) for example. I somehow liked his essays about the Duke false rape accusations case but question his motive to use it as opportunity to attack Jesse Jackson and black leadership as "race hustlers" (pp. 303-314, throughout 2007).

Race
And of course as you may predict Sowell opposes affirmative action and ANY race-based criteria in schools and considers racial balance not a compelling interest as studies show it doesn't matter in student success (p. 291, "Supreme Farce", 12/14/2006, referring to the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle case). What are "Mascot Politics"? "For people on the left...blacks are trophies or mascots, and music therefore be put on display" because of affirmative action, urban renewal, and defense attorneys (pp. 89-91, 5/27/2008).

Stupidest of all...
Even as a "limited-government" type, Sowell is bound to drink the mainstream conservative Kool-Aid. In 2006, he wrote a column defending the notion that marriage should be legally defined as only between a man and a woman because the Equal Protection Clause "applies to people, not actions," because "When the law permits automobiles to drive on highways but forbids bicycles from doing the same, that is not discrimination against people. A cyclist who gets off his bicycle and gets into a car can drive on the highway just like anyone else" (p. 324, 8/16/2006). Jeremy Hooper dismantled that! At least Sowell didn't stoop as low as to use Rick Santorum's "man on dog" argument; he managed to sound a little bit smart (and politically correct) in his bicycles on the highway analogy. But Sowell has used "Obama/Hitler" analogies in his columns and media appearances (see Media Matters).

Common ground?
For other Sowell essays, I began to think, "Gosh, I've heard some of this from DU and the left, too." Sowell considers Obama "a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance" (p. 322, "Talking Points", 5/12/2009). Similarly many on DU have been expressing more doubt and skepticism about Obama whenever he makes statements regarding issues and how his admin will approach them. But "whose whole life" goes a bit far. "Attention-Getters" criticizes how Americans would rather pay attention to people like Paris Hilton rather than inventors, scientists, or innovators because "society at large no longer has standards by which to deny or rebuke attention-seekers who have nothing to contribute to society" (pp. 201-203, 7/27/2007).

He's also tough on education equality, as "education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire" (p. 207, "The Great Escape", 8/25/2009). Similarly there was this thread from March 2010 where someone said thatsome children just can't be educated. Fairness is a fallacy to Sowell: "If by 'fair' you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair" (p. 210, "The Fallacy of 'Fairness'", 2/9/2010).

His follow-up column, "The Fallacy of 'Fairness': Part II" (pp. 213-215), criticized Berkeley High School when it eliminated science teachers because those science classes allegedly contributed to racial inequality among students...I posted about that originally, and no one on DU defended the school. He'd written four "fallacy of fairness" columns in all, with the bottom line that how much one gains from education is the student's choice, not really society's issue. We can all agree on the virtue of personal responsibility, but the difference is just how much. "Fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes" (p. 221, "Fallacy of Fairness, Pt. IV").

Sowell also opposes "guest worker" program under the concern that it'll create immigrant underclasses (pp. 119-121, "A Home Invader Program?", 6/14/2007). I've heard oppositions to the guest worker program from the left too in that such programs facilitate worker exploitation.

Conclusion
Just as that DU poster said in 2008, Sowell is one of the smarter, harder-to-debunk conservatives out there with very tight, evidence-backed arguments. There's gotta be a reason why Sowell doesn't get as much scorn as Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/other mainstream conservatives. And why he got to publish Basic Economics and his other works with university publishing houses; I'm interested in that book as well as Race and Economics. I hope that I've raised explained why he's so tough to dismiss.

Sowell in debates
Circa 1980, here are clips of him in debates on TV with Frances Fox Piven (Glenn Beck hates her; the debates begin around the 3-min mark of this video) and Helen Bohen O'Bannon (Secretary of Welfare of Pennsylvania at the time). It seems that those debates were on the PBS show Firing Line.

Publications criticizing Sowell
- The black sociologist William Julius Wilson reviewed and criticized Sowell's 1984 book Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? for The New York Times: "A plausible alternative to Mr. Sowell's hypothesis on women's pay differentials and occupational segregation is that women are virtually excluded from many desirable positions and therefore crowd into obtainable occupations."
- Mwakikagile, Godfrey. Black Conservatives in the United States. 2006.
- Roberts, Ronald Suresh. Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths. 1996. Chapter 4 is devoted to covering Sowell.
- Stewart, Robert I. Living and Acting Together: An Essay in Social Psychology. 2001. pp. 71-72, 82-83.
- Wolfe, Alan. "The Joyless Mind." (Review of Sowell's 2009 book Intellectuals and Society). The New Republic.

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. Sowell? The man is a certifiable moron who happens to be able to

string together coherent sentences.

My dog has more honesty and insight into world affairs than that dumbass Sowell!

Cheers!