Thomas Sowell

otama soul is the closest thing this century has come to on the order of an emancipation proclamation he is a scholar who has devoted his Labor's to looking behind the cliches of abjection to sing out not that there is no such thing as racial discrimination on the contrary not that there is an instantaneous route to affluence but that the color of an American skin is not a birthmark that commits him to substantive life what is extraordinary is that the labors of a soul far from exciting the kind of enthusiastic reception one would expect have met in some cases with me hysterical denunciations even from some black leaders it is as if the head of the anti-slavery League had denounced Abraham Lincoln for signing the Emancipation Proclamation indeed that Proclamation met that they would no longer be slavery but it also meant that they would no longer be an anti-slavery league Thomas Oh was born in the south became North with his families boy added Stuyvesant High from which he graduated going on Marines and then matriculating in Harvard there he received a degree in economics going on to Columbia for his master's and the University of Chicago for his doctorate he has taught at Rutgers at Howard Cornell Brandeis Amherst was professor of economics at UCLA he is now a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford William F Buckley Jr on November 12 1981 almost exactly 30 years ago introducing Thomas Sol as best I can tell the only thing that's changed is the kind of glasses you're wearing but as bill said you have spent your career looking behind the cliches of objection there was no one like him was there welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson as you heard today's guest is dr. Thomas Sol who's newest book is the Thomas Sol reader and Tom I begin by pointing out something the copy editor missed you wrote in your introduction that you are summarizing the work of a lifetime which of course should read summarizing the work of a lifetime so far on the other hand when you're 81 years old I think that the different distinction is not very great all right segment one equality a quotation and another clip the quotation from the Thomas soul reader quote if one confused word can gum up social policies the legal system and innumerable institutions throughout society that word is equality the video clip from the presidential campaign of 2008 my attitude is that if the economy is good for folks from the bottom up is going to be good for everybody if you've got a plumbing business you're going to be better off if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire and right now everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody and and I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for it spread the wealth around in the name of greater equality for bus drivers and plumbers and construction workers what's wrong with that what's wrong is the track record of spreading the wealth around what has happened around the world and what is happening under the Obama administration is it attempt to spread attempts to spread their wealth or in fact spreading poverty why because you attack the people who are creating the most wealth not only for themselves but society don't think if people don't get wealth just because they're greedy they get wealth because other people voluntarily pay them their money and they voluntarily part with their money only because they're getting something that they consider worth it so when President Obama says he wants to spread the wealth around what he's saying is he wants to insert the government into voluntary transactions actions which doesn't work and it doesn't work for very simple reasons right the people of the people at the high end of the income scale don't just stand still to be shared like sheep they send their money overseas as they're doing now I was reading the other day about some company you know that needs the money for expansion or whatever and they have overseas branches now they're making that money overseas but they're borrowing money here instead of bringing it home and they don't bring it home because it'll be taxed to death if they bring it home now you keep raising the taxes and they'll do more and more their businesses overseas and the job is to the created will be created overseas so this this is not whether they have high or low taxes on the rich it's going to affect the rich a lot less that is going to affect people who are looking for jobs and and people who have small businesses like hardware stores and whatnot who can't move overseas how come you see that and Barack Obama doesn't oh my goodness well yeah his whole life has been spent among people who have an entirely different vision of the world different from from ordinary Americans different from you both all right and their vision well the one thing it tends to be a one step vision they don't they don't say what are going to be the repercussions of this if I do this uh and so that they think that you know we shouldn't have tax cuts for the rich you say because the rich don't don't need it don't deserve it and so forth and so their analysis ends there it is they're right when if you look back through history you find it we had very high taxes on upper income people you didn't collect as much revenues in many cases as you did with lower tax rates the Thomas solo reader although differences in choices and performances are ignored or dismissed in politically correct quarters such differences obviously affect differences in outcomes and you then in the Thomas ol reader compare the different economic records this is fascinating but I mean there's a lot fascinating in here but this struck me especially you'd compare the difference in economic performance not between whites and blacks in this country but between whites and whites in Europe yeah tell us about the difference between Danes and Greeks oh well if you look at Eastern Europe and Western Europe the economic differences between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans is greater than that between blacks and whites in America and people ask how why is there such a gap here why is there such a gap there I say well well ever ever since the Civil Rights Act why hasn't that gap closed completely I say look at Eastern and Western Europe they've been on the same kind of Europeans they've been on the same continent for four centuries and the gap hasn't closed so you know gaps don't close that fast so we need to be the underlying message here is be realistic about what actually causes growth be realistic about the durability of culture even of economic costs or work habits oh yes all right and don't worry about income inequality let the rich get rich as long as the poor are getting in other words you don't care too much about the gap do you or do you well much of the gap is fictitious in the sense that the same person is in the bottom 20% today at 20 years later he's not it very few of them will still be in that bottom 20% there'll be far more of them in the top 20% who started in the bottom 20 than there are who remained in the bottom 20 so one of the problems with our statistics is that they're of out abstractions they're not about flesh-and-blood people the people move through these brackets over a lifetime almost everybody started out at the bottom and got as high as they got that doesn't mean when they get high up that they are the rich you know there's someone who's arrived there at the end of 20 or 30 years one more video clip Tom if you don't mind it's hard to argue against that Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett it is wrong that in the United States of America a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in 50 million dollars explained by somebody who's making 50 million dollars a year in the financial markets should be paying 15% on their taxes when a teacher making $50,000 years is paying more than that paying a higher rate they ought to have to answer for that and if they're pledge to keep that kind of unfairness in place they should remember the last time I checked the only pledge that really matters is the pledge we take to uphold the Constitution so by the way I have to make a brief factual correction he referred to Warren Buffett's having made fifty million dollars Warren Buffett later announced that last year he made sixty-two million dollars well that's not under it all right so but he kept the President of the United States kept talking about the prima facie unfairness of a Secretary of What did he say a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker paying a lower a higher rate than a hedge fund manager or one of the richest men in the world Warren Buffett no there's something to that isn't there one of those what a Barack Obama's great gifts is the ability to say things that are absolutely absurd and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring first of all the vast majority of taxes are paid by people in the upper 10% of the in company so the whole picture that he's painting there has no relationship to reality it may well be that if someone has capital gains that they will pay a lower rate of Taxation in a given year of course capital gains are not there in a given year that you may have stock options accumulating over five or ten years and then in one year when you when you catch them in that year you have a spike in your income right and so the capital gains tax takes into account the fact that this wasn't all or that particular year you know you got it that year right so you know it's ludicrous but it but it's very clever ludicrousness mmm segment two Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan the Thomas soul reader is of course a book of analysis and opinion not long ago I asked you Tom what opinion what view do you regret having held and you replied that for more than a decade more than a decade you had been a serious Marxist yes explain that well as I decade began I was in living in poverty how old 19 years old 19 so you're in your starting college at that stage or the heavens no no all right I mean I was out there working in unskilled jobs and trying to make ends meet living in a rooming house up in Hart you're living in Harlan Harlem right and I'd heard about moths but I finally someplace found that old secondhand set of encyclopedias for a dollar nineteen cents which I bought and there was a lot of Karl Marx that seemed to me that he explained these situations so well that and the situation was what that you took the train from Harlem down to the lower ninth man hello other way around coming home from work I would sometimes take the bus and it would go right up Fifth Avenue pass all these glitzy places like cross 57th Street where all the fancy stores were at Carnegie Hall and the rest of it and then finally it was I got near home way which kind of turned off this viaduct into 135th Street and it was that sudden change in the whole scene at that point and the question was why was that and the problem was up to two problems one was that no one else had given any explanation there was no competing explanation that sounded plausible in your life so far yes right yes and the other was that no one had caution to me that it takes an awful lot more knowledge before you can make these kinds of sweeping judgments in any case but fortunately I'd been taught earlier to respect facts and so on and so even during my years as a Marxist I would read things by people who weren't Marxist that would read facts and so forth but you you I have heard you say many times that you got a good education in the New York City public school in Harlem yes so they did they taught you to think they may not have taught you Adam Smith and the offense of free markets but they taught you to think yes all right now but keep continue the story if you would you're a Marxist at the age of 19 taking the bus home right from the southern third of Manhattan all right all the way up to Harlem you remain a Marxist at the University of Chicago under the instruction of Milton Friedman Milton Friedman yes how did that if Milton couldn't crack you you were a tough nut well but what but one summer working for the government as an economist was enough to show me that the government was really not the answer the government that they level of understanding among the people I and I was in a program for interns where we saw the top officials of the labor department and so forth and I ride these guys are not going to save us they in other words they had no they were not the priestly caste no you might have been led to expect they were ordinary chomps bashing their way through life as best they could like anybody else yes I see all right and so but intellectually all right you spend a summer working for the federal government and that cures you of Marxism yes but intellectually when do you pick up the thread of free markets oh I guess well I always then you thought back to what Milton is right it is not just Milton Berle but Hayek and the rest of them okay so I had read all those people while I was still a Marxist a couple of you have a an essay in here entitled Marx the man oh well Marx's angry apocalyptic visions existed before he discovered capitalism as the focus of such fish yes explain that well the poems he wrote in his teen years one of them in particular I remember what so this is the effect that then will I walk walk godlike and triumphant through the ruins of the world so he has these uh apocalyptic visions early on before he's ever even thought about capitalism and what the subtext is I take it of your it's entitled Marx not the Marx the political philosopher not Marx the economist but Marx the man yes and what your what I felt reading that essay is you're in effect it's like the scene in The Wizard of Oz where they pull back the car yes that's right Great and Powerful oz turns out to be an ordinary cranky human being yes and what you're saying is Marx is in seize it fascinating in some highly intelligent in some cases in some ways kind of a nut yes just a man yes all right another quotation from that essay the members of the Communist League we're talking now about the mid 19th century marks and angles form or they participate in the Communist League the members of the communist League were overwhelmingly intellectuals and professionals it had the same kind of social composition that would in later years characterized many radical groups in which the youthful offspring of privilege called themselves the proletariat Marxism is the conceit of rich kids with fancy education yes you see that in these what is this thing call of the occupying Wall Street group all these middle-class accents and so on I mean how many working-class people can afford to take a month off to sit around in parks and carry on and rather have all their electronic equipment wither but all the rest of it I mean come looking at sleeping bags with the first-rate down feathers oh yes so but at what stage was there a moment when you said wait a moment these putative Marxists and leftists and liberals to use the term the way it's used in this country as a leftist they have no can stay have no knowledge of nor concern for what life is like up in one hundred and thirtieth story that's right there was a moment was there a moment or an incident when that just struck you or the best kind of a progressive realization present real realization all right Ronald Reagan the Thomas soul like juxtapositions here from Karl Marx to Ronald Reagan but you do it yourself one old-fashioned way to judge a president is by results a more popular way is by how well he fits the preconception of the intelligentsia or the media by the first test Ronald Reagan was the most successful president of the United States in the 20th century by the second test he was a complete failure yes the Marxists are rich kids with fancy education 'he's you've got the intelligentsia miss reading ronald reagan and you've got tom soul from a very early age to the present when he remains a fellow at Stanford the Hoover Institution at Stanford making his career in academia all the same how is it that you're able to swim against the current I don't know oh please don't be quite so truthful this is television we are top oh I guess partly luck but what up but I know I don't know it's uh there are there are places over there like the Hoover Institution so it's no great the handicap to have the views that I have here and there are a few other places here and there do you feel as I mentioned to you before we started shooting we put up a notice on our Facebook page on common knowledge is Facebook page saying that you'd be a guest inviting people to submit questions hundreds of questions you are unambiguously the most requested guest on our little program and if you read some of these comments it's clear they come overwhelmingly from young people many many from college students do you feel a sea-change well I think they've always been people who have been no sort of at the outposts you know sort of I think of Beau Geste but but no they're always there always then some people like that and I'm glad they watched watch your program alright segment three love and marriage the Thomas soul reader quote it may be a sign of our times that everyone seems to be talking openly about sex but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love yes explain that one for me well I can't quite explain why that situation exists Bryce I do I have some ideas about the consequences of that that people greatly underestimate the importance of love the human race could not survive without love not even physically because when a newborn baby enters the world there's an awful a lot of things demanded and what the baby is in no position to compensate anybody and so the only thing is that the love of babies is what keeps them alive and if the parents are so so bad that they don't have that then the society has backup systems whereby the baby will still be kept alive mmm again the town of Seoul reader love is one of those bonds which enable people to function and societies to flourish without being directed from above yes love is one of the many ways we influence each other and work out our integrated interrelated lives without the help of the anointed yes now that of course the theme that runs all the way through this book as we've already established is the anointed the Intelligencia and what you're saying here is in fact a kind of brutal analysis you are saying that their drive to power yes is so extreme that in some way it leads them to smother their own natural instinct toward love and to disregard it in other people well they're well know love is one of the things that makes it possible for us to live without the annoyed at telling us what to do but there are other things too that create independence that they anointed up very much annoyed by ranging from guns to automobiles that the whole thing you know the bird you know I think I see an answer to Occupy Wall Street it's Tom soul and we're going to call it love guns and automobiles but but go ahead explain that that ordinary people leading their own lives without any need to seek seek direction from from above from the anointed that annoys them otherwise they would be cut out of this loop entirely all right marriage again the Thomas auld reader despite attempts to equate married couples with people who are living together as domestic partners married couples genuinely married couples not domestic partners are in fact better off by almost any standard you can think of close quote income people who are married have higher incomes domestic violence the rate of domestic violence in marriage is a fraction of what it is among people who are simply living together the abuse of children and married couples families as a fraction of what me what the abuse of children is among people who are simply living together so if you put it to an empirical test it's just very clear that marriage makes a difference among blacks black married couples have had a poverty rate in single digits every year since 1994 so there is a difference now no-fault divorce making divorces here this begins and what the 60s I guess is when it really picks up steam there a few states earlier than that no-fault divorce is now a commonplace throughout across the country most recently we have gay marriage New York what New York is I guess the third largest state by population these days New York enacted to gay marriage is there am I reading too much into would you see a continuum of a kind of animus against this fundamental institution oh yeah you would yes the first draft of the communist manifesto which Engels wrote specifically wanted to dismember the family and Marx decided that that wasn't going to fly and so when he rewrote it he left that out but that but that's been there if you follow the left back over the past two centuries you see in there one way or another where they try to undermine the decision-making autonomy of the family Hillary sense it is an enemy from the variable absolutely the Hiller and Hillary Clinton said you know takes a village to raise a child and someone said it takes a village idiot to believe that what this thing is they want to come in there and tell them you see it's part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price when they win them when they're wrong you see when win win win that when the parent raises the child the wrong way the parent pays a price when the child goes down the tubes but these third parties can sit back in their era where wherever they are in Washington whatever and if the things they tell us turn out to be wrong it doesn't hurt them for example before we introduced sex education into the schools in the 60s the rate of venereal disease had been going down every single year teenage pregnancy had been going down every single year I think it was the rate of infection for gonorrhea in 1960 was half of what it was in 1950 so all these things were going down before the left came into the schools were their sex education and all these things reversed and shot up immediately afterwards but nobody painted and pray nobody who pushed that paid any price for it mmm the town of Seoul reader I'm going to quote you and then I'm going to quote John Kennedy okay all right the Thomas ol reader four-letter words like love duty work and save are hallmarks of people who make their own way through life without being part of some grandiose scheme of the anointed or of government bureaucracies that administer such schemes close quote ask not John Kennedy said what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country and I thought to myself I believe Tom's soul would answer John Kennedy and say no don't ask what you can do for your country that's already presumption and arrogance ask what you can do for your family yes that's what you can do to take care of yourself ask what you can do for your neighbors is that true oh absolutely absolutely now you mentioned one of the four-letter words work you also mentioned that you're now 81 years old as I understand it from talking to your assistant this is one of two books that you intend to bring out this academic year Tom you haven't had anything to prove to anybody for well you heard the way Bill Buckley introduced you thirty years ago you were already an esteemed why do you work so hard well what I keep at it takes up go up gardening what do you you you missed the most important thing I checked my pension with TIAA is virtually identical with my salary so I'm essentially working for nothing but why why there are things that I want to do and things I want to say and I haven't finished saying him yet the work has value in itself yes alright segment for national pastimes I check the index in the Thomas Ola reader Ronald Reagan whom you called the most successful president of the 20th century appears on five pages Babe Ruth appears on seven tell me about the dead-ball controversy oh my goodness this is the argument that that the ucq for the first two decades of the 20th century nobody hit as many as 30 home runs of the season those who not by Cobb none of the none of the people we Revere is the great sluggers of that era nobody came to twenty right okay the kid who came to thirty thirty sorry all right uh of those who got as far as 20 home runs nobody did it twice in the entire decade and then glide an entire two to three days two decades of the twentieth century now the 1920s come along and there are all sorts of people were hitting 40 or more home runs doing it more than one time and so the argument has been made they changed the ball the problem is that if you if you look at the people who were the big sluggers pride in 1920s many of whom play the played during the 1920s had big seasons during the 1920s and none of them hit 20 home runs during the 1920s the people get to 40 home runs and more were new people they were people who either came into the league that year like Lou Gehrig Mel OTT and Chuck Klein or else they were people whose career had begun just before the 20s and reached their peak in the 20s and what was what had happened was that they started using the batting style that Babe Ruth used we have two video clips for you to come and uh Ty Cobb ah tell me about that swing oh it's a very level swing easy hitting line drives you were you were taught not to uppercut the ball because you fly out a lot okay which brings us to take number oh yes here we go the Bambino yes all right tell me about that so we see he's he's hitting up he grasps to back down at the end of the bat which gives him more leverage and less control and some people have theorized that Babe Ruth got away with that because he started his career as a pitcher and no one cared how pictures about it so they didn't correct him it's a kind of risk return uh meaning it's a riskier way to swing yeah a little less control yes but if you connect if you have Babe Ruth shoulders that you connect so he invented it's true isn't it started with Babe Ruth oh absolutely vented that the home run early new technique yes were you a baseball fanatic before you were a Marxist do you have one yes so we have one fanaticism that remains throughout your life absolutely all right the Thomas soil reader as so often happens you're writing now the dead ball controversy where there was a strong preconception shared by many people no alternative explanation was considered much less tested empirically yes why are human beings even baseball fans such boneheads well well isn't compared to people in politics the baseball fans are geniuses uh when you look at income data and compare it with baseball data baseball data follows a given person throughout a career income data followed blocks of people and they're not the same people in these income brackets you know so it's it's it's it's a much more is they much more realistic all right so all those millions of Americans who sense somehow that when they're watching a sporting event they're watching some authentic slice of reality yeah they're right yes all right from the national pastime of baseball to the national pastime of politics and Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain a few days ago you and I happen to have a brief conversation about mr. Cain and I suggested that part of his appeal may well be that he has an authenticity as an African American he was raised in Georgia his dad was a janitor and a chauffeur his mother was a cleaning lady he goes to Morehouse which is a historically black institution he really partakes of the black experience in this country in a way that Barack Obama who's raised substantially by his white mother and his quite well-to-do oh I don't know they're not people but he's raised in well-to-do suburbs and gets a fancy education at Columbia and Harvard and you said don't count on it don't count on herman cain's authenticity cutting much ice because you were raised in a ghetto you said and nobody cut you too much slack over that no no P people believe what they want to believe and they wanted to believe that a Barack Obama represented the black American experience when she which he which he did not I mean how many black Americans go to expensive private schools prior to going to Columbia never mind Columbia and the rest of it but people believe what they want to believe and they projected their own feelings onto Obama who has such little track record in politics that they could do that and believe all kinds of things that were wholly unlikely but the Tea Party is racist we know that don't we is like so many things that have been repeated so often that they're regarded as well known facts and in this case I'm afraid it was very cynically done you may remember the story denigrating the Tea Party is racist oh absolutely people who are now rallying behind Herman Cain well but but but you see the key thing was when there was these Congress people walking up Capitol Hill it was said that that all kinds of racist things was said now the media on the scene with all Eric recording equipment nowadays everybody his brother has some kind of recording equipment iPhone or whatever that's right someone gave offered $100,000 to anybody who could bring forth one example from that episode where anything racist was said note that nobody has claimed 100 grand yeah zero yes all right segment five the present predicament Thomas soul on this program shortly before the election of 2008 this man Barack Obama really does believe that he can change the world and people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians yes you were talking about candidate Obama in what ways has President Obama surprised you none he has followed policies which have ruined the economy he has followed foreign policies that have emboldened our enemies I know I know I can't imagine Iran trying to set off a bomb in the United States the killer Saudi ambassador during the Reagan administration you may recall that Iran had all those hostages under Jimmy Carter they were released hours before Ronald Reagan took office so it matters who the president is and it matters how he comes across despite President Obama's original plan we still have troops in Iran it excuse me Iraq Thank You Iraq he actually increased the number of troops we placed in Afghanistan we still are using Guantanamo now I don't deny for a moment that all of these are reversals for him but he did reverse himself in these policies and of course we got Osama bin Laden under his on his watch don't you give him some credit for from eating yoni so he takes the credit uh you know the the special ops who went in there they did the job they learned where they had their the information that led up to this over the years from having done these enhanced interrogations of people at Guantanamo that that led to all this and the fact that he happened to be there in the White House while they were making this raid in Pakistan really doesn't tell you an awful lot all right then if President Obama has not surprised you has the rise excuse me I back up when you when we talked just before the election of 2008 I believe it was like October so it wasn't even three years ago you used the phrase the turning point that we may be approaching a point excuse appoint of no return yes with Barack Obama and since then we have the rise of the Tea Party did that surprise you does that that is black the prize me and how do you understand that oh I I think that there are there have always been people out there who had those kinds of views and they just didn't coalesce and so that does mean that we have a chance next year of changing the direction of the country restoring us of some sanity in Washington so what Richard Nixon called the silent majority has found its voice oppress that affair yes all right let me name a few names people want to know what you think of certain people I'll name a name you tell me in a sentence or two well far be it for me to delimit your answers you can tell me at any length you wish what you make of him Rick Perry what I most liked about him was just saying the Republican Party cannot be be all things to all people too many Republicans don't understand that they think that you have to go out and cater to this group in that group they ignore the fact that Ronald Reagan did not do that he was the same person to everybody and I doubt if even half the people who voted for him agreed with him on every single thing but they saw they saw him as being for real and they knew what he stood for and he thought that was I thought that was going to be better for the country and for them so you have not written off Rick Perry you fundamentally liked that guy yeah all right Mitt Romney Mitt Romney is one of those people who is uh he reminds me of a charge in a movie called the best man where there were two contestants for the party nomination and they killed each other off and then the final scene not killed literally the violin the final scene there was this man is bland looking man who gets on his escalator heading up because he's heading up there to be nominated for the presidency and you know and I and I every time I see Mitt Romney I think of that man that he's this wonderful bland fellow who hasn't offended anybody and when the people who have principles knock each other off he's the one who rises I'm hoping that doesn't happen let me push a little bit on that that you have profound respect for the markets Mitt Romney he came from a wealthy family but not a not an enormous ly rich family and through his own work in the markets Bain Capital starting a number of enterprises including nationwide operations now such as staples he has amassed a fortune of more than six hundred million dollars as I recall as the last report isn't that an index of a certain level of skill and enterprise absolutely and I wish you would go back to doing that all right and Herman Cain what do you make of Herman Cain as a candidate Oh III think it's a very good candidate he may be the best candidate the question is whether he would EBS president and someone who was not has no political experience the White House is not the place for on-the-job training as our current president has Illustrated all right you know it's a little hard from those answers to deduce your favorite candidates Rick Perry is your man at the moment at least is that fair no I'm a judge you're open-minded at this point yeah I think that it since we do have elections and with someone who can't win the election regardless of what his potential as a president the questions about his candidacy all right when he was seated where you're seated just about three weeks ago I asked Congressman Paul Ryan if he believed the country was doomed to a long period of decline contention bitter politics or if instead of reaching a point of no return we had the opportunity in the election of two 2012 to reach a turning point and here is Congressman Paul Ryan's reply so the way I see it is it's all about competence and trajectory which is are we getting get the trajectory of our debt and our deficits under control so our economy can be free and so it can grow and prosper you know we're going to go back and implement those ideas that make us that opportunity society that upward mobility Society and do we have are we putting that plan in place and are we confident that we're going to reach this trajectory we will be confident if we change the structure of government the structure of these programs that are the drivers of these debts and that means we have to win in affirming election where the country gives us the authority and the obligation to do this if we don't if we go into this election which is a personality contest muddling the differences to speeding each other up then it's going to be ugly afterwards no matter who wins and if we fail then at least we tried and so that's the way I see it that's actually hopeful if we do put forward we I say we if if conservatives if the Pope Paul Ryan's of the world put forward a forthright clear distinct plan and win the election the country can turn itself around are you more or less optimistic than Paul Ryan oh that's an if if then quiet kind of statement yes if that happens then then then then we can pull out of the nosedive and then go on if we pull out of the nosedive we can pull out of the nosedive all right so I put it to you in a tautological way what do you think the chances are I don't know all right you know I was kind of hoping for a little more optimism here Tom Laura listen you conclude the Thomas soul reader with some very sweet moving personal reflections quote my life has been a radical contrast with the lives of other black intellectuals perhaps most important this was very striking to me perhaps most important I grew up with no fear of whites why did you grow up without a fear of whites and why has that proven so important to your intellectual life I think fear makes you have all sorts of sometimes irrational reactions to people and I grew up for example obviously as a boy growing up in a school you get into fights and so forth I grew up in the era of Joe Lewis whenever I saw a white fighter fighting Joe Louis he winded up on the on the floor you know so that was one thing and when I moved out of my school in Harlem to a school in a predominantly white school obviously from having been in Harlem having had to fight and so forth I was a better fighter than most of the guys around so I had no physical fear and then when it came to intellectually I still remember sewed that didn't seem that big at the time but I think it was the first time we had a math test and I was in this class for kids with IQs 128 over it and the men and the math professor said the teacher said I didn't think this is a tough act for a class like this and yet there was only one paper that had 100 said it in his name was he starts going through this thing he says his name was and so I'm staying that says Thomas Sowell and he said yes that's the name I was I was just being a wise guy yeah but I I never had the condescension from my classmates after that you were a smart kid and you were a tough kid yeah okay again I'm quoting from the Thomas ol reader with all the vicissitudes of my life and the long years of living close to despair nevertheless in retrospect I can see that I was lucky in many ways close quote the long years of close to despair near despair I left home when I was 17 years old and I learned out there in the marketplace that there was no great demand for a high school dropouts with no skills and no experience and and there were times when when I had trouble finding the money for food and for the rent money and so on and I remember the lowest point I remember walking from my where I lived in a rooming house on 142nd Street in Harlem to where I worked just below the Brooklyn Bridge oh my goodness because I did not have enough money that's several miles or so yeah yeah to both ride the subway and buy food and I preferred the food lucky in what ways have you've been lucky because I learned things I couldn't have learned other ways for example uh there was no way I was going to live spending every dime I had thereafter you know uh I learned that people who are ordinary people knew far more than I did even though they were not intellectuals and even though I had read more books than they had and so forth and so on and I spent several years like that and so I never had this condescending attitude toward ordinary people as so many of the electricals have you know it's I realized those people know a hell of a lot and they knew a hell of a lot more than I did about things that mattered and I and and I remember from that era I finally reached the point where I had to ask the foreman to borrow some money from a person because I I determined what were you working at it to send machine shop down on the Lower East Side and to borrow some money from me because from him so I could walk it's like a ride to work on the subway and eat at the same time and he lent me five dollars and one of the most wonderful experiences I remember since then decades later when I'm in New York on a book tour I phone him and invite him to dinner with his family and we had dinner up at the top of the World Trade Center and we spent the time and when we bought it he and I were both on the verge of tears you know and that was the last time I saw him mmm tom final quotation from the Thomas Oil reader the whole point of looking back on my life is to hope that others will find something useful for their own lives young American watching this program 18 19 20 what advice do you have for a young for someone who's just the age now that you were as a Marxist living in living 130 something street young American in 2011 it depends of what if circumstances are but I would say learn all you can before you reach conclusions there are plenty of people out there who have prepackaged conclusions for you to reach you need to have build up a level of knowledge and experience so that you are no longer putty in the hands of somebody else who has his own agenda and let me alter the question just slightly this really is the last question if that young American is an African American do you alter your advice no Tom sole author of the Thomas soil reader thanks so much thank you I'm Peter Robinson at uncommon knowledge be sure to join us by the way on our Facebook page at facebook.com forward slash hunk knowledge facebook.com forward slash UNC nah and at our brand-new web address Hoover dot o-r-g /uk Hoover with two OS o RG / UK again Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge thanks for joining us

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 260,217

Rating: 4.876152 out of 5

Keywords: HooverInstitutionUK, equality, law, economics, taxes, wealth, poverty, free market, Marxism, Milton Friedman, Barack Obama, class warfare, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth

Id: 4sM5sQIZXlg

Length: 46min 52sec (2812 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Usmlucky]

I was watching this video of Thomas Sowell on YT and was shocked when he started talking about baseball and analyzing the transition from the dead ball era. Its really interesting stuff. He starts talking about it around 26:38 in the video.

[u/viper1856]

Thomas Sowell is a legend and one of the smartest minds in our country, i hope he gets on Rogan before he’s too old

[u/Xtorting]

There will never be another man like Sowell. He is so funny and accurate.