Thomas Sowell vs. "The Anointed Rose" - Shares personal stories on Clarence Thomas & Milton Friedman

[Music] thomas oil came to fame as one of the first black intellectuals to question many of the policies advocated by the civil rights establishment today he is in the enviable position of seeing many of his ideas particularly those criticizing affirmative action gaining increasing popularity now in his latest book he criticizes self-styled elites who through a combination of wrong-headed compassion and egoism have created many of the ills of contemporary america i'm pleased to have the author of the vision of the anointed a fellow north carolinian thomas sowell welcome well thank you you still have family in charlotte let's say that don't you okay oh i have ryan relatives out in gastonia but most of them are on the east coast now up in new york and and you grew up in charlotte until you were eight yeah and then moved to harlem yes uh and then what happened i grew up there i was the age of 20 i left harlem and then i've been moving ever since you left harlem to go oh heavens i went to first down down to washington for a few months then i was drafted at the end of the marine corps and from there on i went on to college and graduate school and all the rest of it wanting to do what with your life well i had to find that out but uh early on i guess i i wanted to be an economist i simply took economics courses and i had no idea what economics was about until i took the courses and i found that i did far better than that than anything else and so there was really no the choice was made for me do you know why that was i mean what what part of your oh i could speculate but not really yeah was milton friedman a mentor for you yes um when i first went to the university of chicago he was my advisor and i took a course from him but that really was not the turning point in my intellectual career i was a marxist before i took milton friedman's course and i was a marxist after i took him so he didn't turn you from a marxist to the trainer no no but uh what did that was working for the government and uh i began to see what it means to have the government control things i was dealing with minimum wages in puerto rico as a summer intern and i began to realize that one people were losing their jobs as you kept raising the minimum wage and two that the labor department really didn't care about that because the minimum wage law was supplying about a third of their uh appropriations administering that and uh in fact i spent the summer trying to wrestle with the idea of how could we test whether the minimum wage law was really causing these jobs to be lost in puerto rico and i finally at the end of the summer i came up with something i felt very proud of myself and i could see the stunned looks on people's faces as i told them this in the office they realized oh my god this man has stumbled onto something that will ruin us all i was waiting for the congratulations you see and i could see these stunned faces instead how was it though for you and i've watched you and read you for years to be an african-american man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so against the grain of fellow african-americans well i don't know that the we can say i guess the grain of fellow african-americans you mean fellow african-american intellectuals yeah well i don't think african-american intellectuals are any more typical of african-americans than white intellectuals are of whites uh if you went by by uh intellectuals uh uh you know uh john john anderson got more votes at stanford than ronald reagan did yeah so i don't i don't know probably got more votes in cambridge too yeah i wouldn't be surprised and so uh intellectuals are not typical of anybody other than intellectuals uh what was it that bill buckley used to say i'd rather be judged by the by the first 12 people in the new york phone director but then by the faculty at heart oh absolutely my goodness yes that's a very rational choice yeah but it was not difficult for you in a sense i mean you even though let's assume that in terms of uh certainly the civil rights establishment you were in in some ways what a pariah well yes no i mean they they've had a wonderful way of handling it from a tactical point of view uh they simply keep quiet when i come out with a book and it's a two-week wonder uh and then after the two weeks it passed they resumed as if it hadn't happened and so that is so much better than engaging me in any kind of debate because they really don't have the facts on their side have you ever wanted to be after that experience dealing with minimum wage in puerto rico to be in government at any level anywhere i can't really think that i have i've probably had more opportunities to be in government since 1980 uh than anyone who has never actually been in government uh that uh yeah they wanted you badly because you would have been i mean you would have helped the cause too well well i don't know about that i i someone someone who came to me i said to him you know the president of the united states has better things to do with his time than constantly have to be saying well you know what tom really meant was [Laughter] were you a friend of reagan no no no i i barely knew my i said it on a luncheon with 10 other people with him once i i was impressed with the man that one he was not at all like the caricature in a lot of ways either intellectually or in terms of personal compassion uh one of the things he described which i thought i thought was quite moving was a man who had been condemned to death and the papers came to him of course for the appeal for the commutation and how he went through these papers looking for anything that would be justification for commuting and the man was absolute wrongo from day one you know there was absolutely nothing there and he said he wasn't going to just overrule the court on the basis of you know going to overrule the court until the execution went forward and the night of the execution he said you know there were people gathering around the governor's mansion they were out kneeling and praying outside as the hour of execution came and he said you know i don't mind telling you i was in the governor's mansion dealing and praying too that's ronald reagan yeah yeah did you turn down the job of secretary of education yes why like why not uh because you didn't believe there should be a department of education i don't believe in the department of education i really wrestle with that because education is so horrible in this country that even though i knew i had been miserable in the job uh i thought well you know a lot of people you know people have been miserable in normandy and the iwo jima and i wouldn't be here if they weren't uh but i finally had to ask the question what what do i have the political skills to accomplish that would make it worth the hassle that i would go through not kind of hassle i would give to other people and i thought really i don't have those skills and you had no ego drive to say be uh at the cabinet of the president to have that picture to show you my grandchildren no no no no to be there to be a member of the president that's you know that's a pretty impressive achievement not that you haven't had a lot of impressive achievements in your life but that's a rather oh it is it is that dialogue no i i've seen too many hangers on in my life to want to be one of them would you have liked to have served in the supreme court you don't have to be a lawyer to be honest someone raised that question you know the first time i heard that raised it was back in 1980 and i was i just given a talk on capitol hill and we were walking across i was walking across the capitol grounds with a bunch of young legislative aides and i said i pooh-poohed the whole thing and among those young legislative age was a young man named clarence thomas uh and youtube stayed friends and became friends yes you know and you you approved of his confirmation oh absolutely my god i i thought it was a truly horrible thing that happened to him uh you know i've uh he and i have talked you know alone for hours on various occasions and uh never has he ever used any language that couldn't have been repeated in sunday school so the thought that you know he did all this stuff was absolutely i mean you know sometimes that brings you to the conclusion that anita hill lied oh yes uh but i i could also analyze that in fact i wish i hadn't simply dismissed it because think about it she said um but at first she didn't even want clarence to be told that she was the source of this story now imagine two people are alone when something happens and then years later someone comes and tells you a story how hard would it be to guess who the other person was if the story really happened and what earthly point would that be and not tell you so what do you think her motivation was oh there's a there's tons of it though out there uh i mean people don't go to yale law school in order to teach at orville or roberts university yeah but she's not there now she's i know but i'm saying you know uh she had a lot to try to explain away yeah people know people don't go into a big washington law firm in order to quit and become a government employee so she was looking for an explanation that that's one possibility but but i i've read other things and learned other things from other sources about her yes and you know that she didn't get the job that she wanted uh a lot of things yeah and and you're pleased with justice uh uh uh thomas on the court oh well yes one argument with us he's one of he's one of three people that i still believe uh the constitution means what it says the other is scalia and rehnquist yes all right very good guess well okay the vision of the anointed self congratulations as a basic for social policy i mean you posit here that they're a group of self-anointed elitists who are responsible for what in america well for much much of the social policy of the past 30 years and for the disastrous consequences that have fallen from those policies and who are these people well there'll be people in the media in the academic world and in politics uh particularly those who believe that third parties can make better decisions than people can make for themselves and particularly when they are those third parties uh i i think most people who have not been in the academic world would have to see the academics in action to realize how deeply they believe this i can remember a conference at middlebury college some years ago yeah in which they were laying out these plans for how they would manipulate the poor in order to get them to do this to do that the other and i said who are we to be running these people's lives and they looked at me as if i were a man from mars speaking a language they had never heard before do you therefore believe i mean i this is almost you know university kind of debate do you therefore believe that that the government has no responsibility uh for those uh less fortunate than ourselves uh if free enterprise they cannot find a place in the market economy well there are many things the government can do i think the most important thing they can do is maintain a framework of law in which people do in fact find jobs and find progress after all this is not a hypothetical question as if this situation has never come up before i mean look at the entire history of the united states i mean the united the united states did not become a prosperous country only after the new deal i mean history didn't begin in the 1960s or even in the 1930s and you look at the history of blacks for that matter you know that the blacks have come a very long way long before the first civil rights law was passed in 1960s uh in fact in the five years prior to the civil rights act of 1964 blacks rose into professional and similar occupations to a greater extent than in the five years afterwards so you would have even if you were if you look back now as an economist and and in some ways as a historian at the civil rights legislation that was passed in 64 65 and through the great society you and in terms of voting rights as well you would say those laws those civil rights laws were unnecessary and counterproductive oh no no there and so oh you had to get rid of the jim crow system you had to have robot they had to have voting rights and so on but i remember back in 1964 writing to a friend as the civil rights act of 64 was being poured out in congress that i hope this law would pass with absolutely no crippling amendments exactly as it was written because uh among other they had some good things in it but one was one reason but the other reason was that i was convinced that it would not have the effect that they thought it would have and that one and what i assumed very incorrectly was that once people saw that yes this would break down the jim crow system it would not cause any dramatic improvement in the economic condition of black people that you know and the people would then say no now we have to turn to something else in order to do that and i was completely wrong about that when when it didn't produce that result they said well that just shows we need more of the same which is which is the old argument you know we try policy x and it absolutely does goes nowhere we need stronger policy x this argument has been i'm sure a voice to you before clarence thomas benefited from affirmative action who said so clarence thomas says so i bet no he doesn't no he does not clarence thomas does not say that that uh affirmative action programs helped him in terms of the educational opportunity do you believe he do you think he would say no to that question he might well for one thing i mean i for one thing i my understanding and i haven't researched it my understanding is that he was admitted uh to college the year before they began their affirmative action program i don't know his name what and what and and what the program did was to delegitimize what he had done yeah that he had he was a man with an outstanding academic record and he and he goes out into the job market and people and despite this and they look at him and they say you got there only because of affirmative action rather than because of your own marriage ordinarily someone with that kind of record you look at saying this guy is really a world beater but no i know i've seen that in my own life i'm old enough that i can i've gone through the whole metamorphosis and what have you seen in your own life all right when i was in the in the marine corps and then this during the korean war i was trained as a photographer and like i was assigned to camp lejeune north carolina where the great many of southerners were in the marine corps or white southerners and in that barracks whenever somebody had a photographic problem this camera wasn't working these pictures didn't come out right and so forth they would come to me i was astonished that the most biggest redneck in the barracks would come to me they asked me and there were all these white photographers that's my camera yeah you said i wan why is this and i finally figured it out they said you know if this guy is black and he's a photographer he must be some photographer you know now uh when i started teaching in the night early 1960s at the douglas college i read up on all the stuff about new teachers you're seeing how it uh it's hard to get the respect of the students particularly if you're not much older than they are and i looked younger than i was uh and so i worried about that you see and i walked in that room the first day and there was instant respect and i i you know it sort of took me back and i i realized no no they're there they're saying look this guy i was the first black male to teach there this guy must be something else you know go forward now 10 years by this time i've completed my degree i've written my books journal art all the whole thing i'm now teaching at ucla and students will come up to me at the end of the term and they'll say how much they like the course and all that uh and somewhere in the course of that yeah there'll be a slip up and they'll let it let it out that they were quite surprised that the course was as good as it was and one of the one of the things that struck me even before the end of the term one kid came to me one day and he had a passage in the book he was having trouble with and he said can you tell me what this means i explained to him what that passage meant he said are you sure and i said yes i wrote the textbook and he looked in the front he's really embarrassed but this is what affirmative action has done you see so you can't see any positive i'm sure contribute to affirmative action i don't know in fact it increased the pool as you know it's frequently used the expression of what you can do is increase the pool i don't know what that means and i i've never had anybody explain it to me i've studied affirmative action in this country in india and malaysia you know in sri lanka in nigeria uh they have they have some version of it in uh israel well i'm gonna explain as it was explained to me it is the notion of elizabeth your admissions committee at harvard and you're going to choose so many people you're going to let people in for a variety of reasons one is sheer academic merit they scored 1600 on their college boards that's a good entry they've got a brilliant uh academic and athletic background and they happen to be a virtuoso violin player you know when the violin player helps yeah or let's say they come from nevada they don't have a lot of nevada at harvard and that's also say that they are come from uh sri lanka they don't have many people from sri lanka there and let's also say that that they also are african-american and that that ought to be a factor in in choosing from that pool maybe that's one of the considerations because what uh because diversity of a student body is a healthy factor i'm i'm fascinated with the extent of which words we're conditioned to react like pavlov's dog to words i hear diversity someone was asking don't make me look bad professor someone today who was trustee of college was saying that they were going to pick a new college professor i said what you should do is have a stopwatch there and just count how long it is to to each of the uh contestants says the word diversity and the guy who says that you know he's 35 minutes into the interview and the other guy who says that you know the first sentence the guy who said it takes 35 minutes he should be at the top of the list the guy who set up the first sentence should be at the bottom because the question what's wrong with diversity i don't get the point my point is that this is a word that has become magic what does it mean if anything are you saying to me that all black people are alike therefore you've got to mix and match by race this is not diverse unless it's diverse along the way what i'm saying i'm saying that i think that would be different to have people of different kinds of experiences uh and we mentioned sri lanka didn't we and you know and it'd be interesting to have some people uh with an asian wait wait an asian background african-american uh people uh that come from uh fifth avenue and park avenue as well as from henderson north carolina all of that would make a healthy student body you mean the time i don't think everybody ought to come from uh the sons of of uh harvard graduates all right my daughters mainly partly because they're not always the best students but uh uh all right um that argument i think that that doesn't make it i i slipped my point there for for a minute well i mean you have thought long and hard about this and and much longer than i have and you bring them no way but that's the theory that's the theory unfortunately unfortunately the facts are quite different in places like harvard and stanford and cornell what you have what you have is the black son of the black doctor right who lived in the same neighborhood with the white son of the white doctor and now you're giving me diversity because these two people when that goes necessarily they have scholarships that they offer to kids but now we're getting away from the whole racial thing i'm saying the racial thing has been used as a proxy for something that is not a proxy for because the vast majority of blacks who go to places like harvard and cornell and stanford are not blacks from the ghetto those are blacks from out there you know they're from malibu uh you know they're from pacific palisades uh they're from and so forth and they're from the very same neighborhood they're from the very same neighborhoods as the whites are there and so and so now you call it diversity right because you see something with with the naked eye let me make a couple other points because i'm going to wave ahead of myself here uh do you think that the era of these uh social engineers from whatever establishment they come from media academia government is over no i wish it were i think they're going to go underground they're going to hunker down and and when then wait wait wait wait the storm to change absolutely and we have people in the region and among among the republicans for example who i said these things like this are like crabgrass you've got to root it out do not cut back on the appropriations for the national endowment if you're not going to get rid of it you don't want to gut come on i mean you clearly don't want to gut than that i do not i want to destroy it entirely i don't want to gut it you want to dismantle that's right because it's like you're at it get public television as well you got it but uh well you'll never appear on mcniel again and thank you very much [Laughter] no but it's like crabgrass these people are going to hunker down and then they'll they'll wait for their fur to change the political thing and i think these guys are like somebody who's putting a lawnmower over crabgrass but these guys you seem to be saying are everywhere but you're not talking about just bureaucrats you're the same i mean you're saying it's the new york times it's cbs absolutely absolutely it's harvard university and the yale faculty oh absolutely you got it the ucla faculty yeah the stanford faculty yes all of them oh absolutely you know what it amazes me is that you buy into these conspiracies like this it's some conspiracy no not experience at all no no no no no no these people never believe in conspiracy all these people somehow have come to of power in the establishment have come to this like-minded idea about well that's happening many times and i i don't believe for a minute i think people at harvard meet wholly independently and sealed off from people from stanford yeah and they go into those committee rooms they will come out with the same kinds of policies because they went in with the same assumptions and because their experiences you suggest are essentially the same probably well i don't know about that i don't know about that then why do they come to the same conclusion well because they operate under the same assumptions and why do they have the same assumptions for reasons which can go back into history no no no no no come on why do they have the same assumptions we may go back in history uh this has been a set of assumptions that's been very popular among intellectuals what has happened in our time is that intellectuals have been taken much more seriously since the 60s than they were before and i think we're suffering the consequences of it it's not the first time in history that intellectuals have been taken seriously uh and disasters have followed so we shouldn't have taken milton friedman seriously milton friedman uh is one is a very typical play this game and say well no we shouldn't take intellectuals seriously and then accept those that i happen to think no no no no no no but by seriously i mean in the sense i should have clarified this in the sense that they are exempted from the test of facts did it work when i hear people come on the end say these lofty things i say to myself show me where we've ever gotten better off listening to people like this right all right i i see these psychologists coming on say how did you raise your children i said how are children better today now that we've been listening to these people for 30 years are they happier are they more learned uh you know test scores go down venereal disease goes up suicide rates go up in what way are we better off for having listened to them but it seems to me that you do engage a little bit in group dismissal that you in a sense wave your hand no no anybody i don't know rather than saying that that each of these kinds of institutions or that there is not a group think in the institution you tell me that that the uh group think someone did a survey at stanford a couple years ago they found whole departments in which there was not one republican why then why is it that on the washington i mean look at the editorial people who write the editorials and and under the bylines or for the paper of the washington post you've got george will there and certainly what george will says is different from what david brodar said certainly what bill sapphire says is quite different from what tom friedman says from what absolutely uh marine dow thinks absolutely but they're all of the new york times that's that's very true yeah but the fact is that they are the exceptions they are the exceptions as milton for even is exception and the only good guys are the exceptions and meaning gender-free but you use the word dismissal that's not that's that's one of the words i i latch on to in the chapter about the vocabulary of the anointed that whenever you reach a conclusion that is different from what from what they have they say you've dismissed it you can spend three volumes analyzing it and at the end you come up and saying it's wrong oh he dismissed it all right um the vision of the anointed self congratulations [Laughter] as a basis for social powers tom as a basis for social policy um thomas saw we thank you for joining us this evening we look forward to seeing you next time see you then if you haven't already please check out and install the brave browser it is the best for speed compatibility and privacy if you're using it already go ahead and hit that triangle up in the corner and it's a great way to show your support for this channel you can also earn basic attention tokens when you use brave which you can convert to bitcoin us dollars whatever you want it's a great way for you to earn the ad revenue instead of the other guys there are lots of great referral links in the description these are at no additional cost to you and they're fantastic offers these are all services i use myself i really appreciate every way you guys support this channel take care bye bye you

Channel: BasicEconomics

Views: 112,651

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Id: HK34P3gaUgE

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021