A recent survey conducted by the Victims of Communism and polled by YouGov, a research and data firm, found that 70% of millennials are likely to vote socialist and that one in three millennials saw communism as &#8220;favorable.&#8221;
Let examine this tragic vision in light of the Fraser Institute&#8217;s recently released annual study &#8220;Economic Freedom of the World,&#8221; prepared by Professors James Gwartney, Florida State University; Robert A. Lawson and Ryan Murphy of Southern Methodist University; and Joshua Hall, West Virginia University, in cooperation with the Economic Freedom Network.
Hong Kong and Singapore maintained their lead as the world&#8217;s most economically free countries — although China&#8217;s heavy hand threatens Hong Kong&#8217;s top ranking. Rounding out the top 10 are New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Mauritius. By the way, after having fallen to 16th in 2016, the U.S. has staged a comeback to being in the top five economically free countries in the world.
What statistics go into the Fraser Institute&#8217;s calculation of economic freedom? The report measures the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions by analyzing the policies and institutions of 162 countries and territories. These include regulation, freedom to trade internationally, size of government, sound legal system, private property rights and government spending and taxation.
Fraser Institute scholar Fred McMahon says, &#8220;Where people are free to pursue their own opportunities and make their own choices, they lead more prosperous, happier and healthier lives.&#8221; The evidence for his assessment is: Countries in the top quartile of economic freedom had an average per-capita GDP of $36,770 in 2017 compared with $6,140 for bottom quartile countries. Poverty rates are lower. In the top quartile, 1.8% of the population experienced extreme poverty ($1.90 a day) compared with 27.2% in the lowest quartile. Life expectancy is 79.5 years in the top quartile of economically free countries compared with 64.4 years in the bottom quartile.
The Fraser Institute&#8217;s rankings of other major countries include Japan (17th), Germany (20th), Italy (46th), France (50th), Mexico (76th), India (79th), Russia (85th), China (113th) and Brazil (120th). The least free countries are Venezuela, Argentina, Ukraine and nearly every African country with the most notable exception of Mauritius. By the way, Argentina and Venezuela used to be rich until they bought into socialism.
During the Cold War, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, &#8220;Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.&#8221; Walter Duranty called Stalin &#8220;the greatest living statesman &#8230; a quiet, unobtrusive man.&#8221; George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao&#8217;s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor also admired Mao and declared ecstatically that &#8220;the men and women pioneers of Yenan are truly new humans in spirit, thought and action.&#8221; Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter&#8217;s China expert, complained that &#8220;America (is) doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,&#8221; and urged us to &#8220;borrow ideas and solutions&#8221; from China.
Leftists exempted communist leaders from the harsh criticism directed toward Adolf Hitler, even though communist crimes against humanity made Hitler&#8217;s slaughter of 11 million noncombatants appear almost amateurish. According to Professor R.J. Rummel&#8217;s research in &#8220;Death by Government,&#8221; from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Mao&#8217;s Communist regime was responsible for the death of as many as 76 million Chinese citizens.
Today&#8217;s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from that of past tyrants. They should keep in mind that the origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the &#8217;20s, &#8217;30s and &#8217;40s. Those horrors were simply the result of a long evolution of ideas leading to a consolidation of power in the central government in the quest for &#8220;social justice.&#8221;
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Hammer and Sickel.

WILLIAMS: Young People Ignorant Of History

Communism

Josef Stalin

Socialism

Jews have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes in economics, 30% of those in medicine, 25% in physics, 20% in chemistry, 15% in literature and 10% of the Nobel Peace Prizes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been just over 900 Nobel Prizes awarded. Since Jews are only 2% of the world&#8217;s population, instead of having 22% of Nobel Prizes, 206, they should have won only two, according to the proportionality vision of justice. There&#8217;s an even greater domestic violation of the proportionality vision. Jews are less than 3% of the U.S. population but 35% of American Nobel Prize winners. Several questions come to mind. Does the disproportionately high number of Jewish winners explain why there are so few black or Hispanic Nobel Prize winners? Who&#8217;s to blame for ethnic disproportionality among Nobel Prize winners, and what can be done to promote social justice?
Proportionality injustice doesn&#8217;t end with the Nobel Prize. Blacks are about 13% of the U.S. population but close to 70% of the players in the National Football League. Blacks are greatly overrepresented among star players and highly paid players. While the disproportionality injustice runs in favor of black players in general, they are all but nonexistent among the league&#8217;s field goal kickers and punters. Perhaps the only reason why football team owners are not charged with hiring discrimination is that the same people who hire quarterbacks and running backs also hire field goal kickers and punters. Proportionality and diversity injustice is worse in the National Basketball Association, with blacks being over 80% of the players. Plus, it&#8217;s not uncommon to watch college basketball games and see that 90 to 100% of the starting five players are black.
Most readers know that I teach economics at George Mason University and have done so for nearly 40 years. However, that doesn&#8217;t mean the field of economics doesn&#8217;t have its problems. Many see economics as neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women or blacks. Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, in addressing a Brookings Institution audience said: &#8220;Within the economics profession, women and minorities are significantly underrepresented. And data compiled by the American Economic Association&#8217;s Committees on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and the Status of Minority Groups in the profession show that there has been little or no progress in recent decades. Women today make up only about 30 percent of Ph.D. students. Within academia, their representation drops the higher up one goes in the career ladder. The share of Ph.D.s awarded to African Americans is low; and it has declined slightly in recent decades.&#8221; Yellen says that diversity in economics is a matter of &#8220;basic justice.&#8221;
Had I been in the audience, I would have asked Yellen whether there&#8217;s basic justice in the nursing field, where less than 10% of nurses are men. What about the gross lack of proportionality in incarceration? According to 2015 figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall U.S. prison and jail population is 90.6% male and 9.4% female. The only way that I see to remedy such a gross disproportionality injustice is to either incarcerate more female prisoners or release male prisoners.
Back to Janet Yellen: It is pathetic and professionally incompetent that she can ignore decades of research — some of it by female researchers — that shoots down the idea that disparities prove discrimination. Moreover, if one carries the notion that disparities prove discrimination far enough, they&#8217;d look like true fools. According to a study conducted by Bond University in Australia, sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill men than they are women. Despite the fact that men are 50% of the population, and so are women, men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning, 82% are men. One can only wonder what social justice warriors would do about these and many other disproportionalities.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Scales of justice.

WILLIAMS: Disproportionalities: Whose Fault?

Nobel Prize

Social Justice

Gun control did not become politically acceptable until the Gun Control Act of 1968 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The law&#8217;s primary focus was to regulate commerce in firearms by prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers and importers. Today&#8217;s gun control advocates have gone much further, calling for an outright ban of what they call assault rifles such as the AR-15. By the way, AR stands for ArmaLite Rifle, which is manufactured by Colt Manufacturing Co. As for being a military assault weapon, our soldiers would be laughed off the battlefield carrying AR-15s.
Let&#8217;s look at some FBI statistics on homicide and then you can decide how many homicides would be prevented by a ban on rifles. The FBI lists murder victims by weapon from 2014 to 2018 in their 2018 report on Crime in the United States. It turns out that slightly over 2% (297) out of a total of 14,123 homicides were committed with rifles. A total of 1,515 or 11% of homicides were committed by knives. Four hundred and forty-three people were murdered with a hammer, club or some other bludgeoning instrument. Six hundred seventy-two people were murdered by a hand, foot or fist. Handguns accounted for the most murders — 6,603.
What these statistics point out clearly is that the so-called assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback plan that 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O&#8217;Rourke and others call for, will do little or nothing to bring down homicides. More homicides could be prevented by advocating for knife control, hammer control and feet and fist control.
Gun controllers&#8217; belief that &#8220;easy&#8221; gun availability is our problem ignores U.S. history. Guns were far more readily available yesteryear. One could mail order a gun from Sears or walk into a hardware store or a pawnshop to make a purchase. With truly easy gun availability throughout our history, there was nowhere near the mayhem and mass murder that we see today. Here&#8217;s my question to all those who want restrictions placed on gun sales: Were the firearms of yesteryear better behaved than those same firearms are today? That&#8217;s really a silly question; guns are inanimate objects and have no capacity to act. Our problem is a widespread decline in moral values that has nothing to do with guns. That decline includes disrespect for those in authority, disrespect for oneself, little accountability for anti-social behavior and a scuttling of religious teachings that reinforce moral values.
Let&#8217;s examine some elements of this decline.
If any American who passed away before 1960 were to return to today&#8217;s America, they would not believe the kind of personal behavior acceptable today. They wouldn&#8217;t believe that youngsters could get away with cursing at and assaulting teachers. They wouldn&#8217;t believe that cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis and Baltimore hire hundreds of school police officers and that in some schools, students must go through metal detectors. During my own primary and secondary schooling in Philadelphia, from 1942 to 1954, the only time we saw a policeman in school was during an assembly period where we had to listen to a boring lecture from Officer Friendly on safety. Our ancestors also wouldn&#8217;t believe that we&#8217;re now debating whether teachers should be armed.
Americans who call for stricter and stricter gun control know that getting rid of rifles will do little or nothing for the nation&#8217;s homicide rate. Their calls for more restrictive gun laws are part of a larger strategy to outlaw gun ownership altogether. You have to wonder what these people have in store for us when they&#8217;ve eliminated our means to defend ourselves.
Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro banned private gun ownership in 2012. The result is that Venezuelans had no way to protect themselves from criminals and government troops who preyed upon them. After Fidel Castro&#8217;s demand for gun confiscation, he said, &#8220;Armas para que?&#8221; (&#8220;Guns, for what?&#8221;) Cubans later found out.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Guns.

WILLIAMS: Gun Grabbers Misleading Us

Beto O'Rourke

Gun Control

Guns

Last week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr told a University of Notre Dame Law School audience that attacks on religious liberty have contributed to a moral decline that&#8217;s in part manifested by increases in suicides, mental illness and drug addiction. Barr said that our moral decline is not random but &#8220;organized destruction.&#8221; Namely that &#8220;Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.&#8221;
The attorney general is absolutely correct. Whether we have the stomach to own up to it or not, we have become an immoral people left with little more than the pretense of morality. The left&#8217;s attack on religion is just the tiny tip of the iceberg in our nation&#8217;s moral decline. You say: &#8220;That&#8217;s a pretty heavy charge, Williams. You&#8217;d better be prepared to back it up with evidence!&#8221; I&#8217;ll try with a few questions for you to answer.
Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another? And, if that person does not peaceably submit to such use, do you believe that there should be the initiation of force against him? Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me the answer is no to both questions. I bet that nearly every college professor, politician or even minister could not give a simple yes or no response.
A no answer, translated to public policy, would slash the federal budget by no less than two-thirds to three-quarters. After all most federal spending consist of taking the earnings of one American to give to another American in the form of farm subsidies, business bailouts, aid to higher education, welfare and food stamps. Keep in mind that Congress has no resources of its own. Plus there&#8217;s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy that gives Congress resources. Thus, the only way that Congress can give one American a dollar is to first, through intimidation and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American.
Such actions by the U.S. Congress should offend any sense of moral decency. If you&#8217;re a Christian or a Jew, you should be against the notion of one American living at the expense of some other American. When God gave Moses the Eighth Commandment — &#8220;Thou shalt not steal&#8221; — I am sure that He did not mean thou shalt not steal unless there is a majority vote in the U.S. Congress. By the way, I do not take this position because I don&#8217;t believe in helping our fellow man. I believe that helping those in need by reaching into one&#8217;s own pocket to do is praiseworthy and laudable. But helping one&#8217;s fellow man in need by reaching into somebody else&#8217;s pockets to do so is worthy of condemnation.
We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society. Morality is society&#8217;s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior. Religious teachings, one way of inculcating morality, have been under siege in our country for well over a half a century. In the name of not being judgmental and the vision that one lifestyle or set of values is just as good as another, traditional moral absolutes have been abandoned as guiding principles. We no longer hold people accountable for their behavior and we accept excuses. The moral problems Attorney General William Barr mentioned in his speech, plus murder, mayhem and other forms of anti-social behavior, will continue until we regain our moral footing.
In 1798, John Adams, a leading Founding Father and our second president said: &#8220;Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.&#8221; I am all too afraid that a historian, writing a few hundred years from now, will note that the liberty American enjoyed was simply a historical curiosity. Then it all returned to mankind&#8217;s normal state of affairs — arbitrary abuse and control by the powerful elite.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

American flag, U.S. Capitol.

WILLIAMS: U.S. In Moral Decline

Charity

Morality

Religion

William Barr

If you need an accurate update on some of the madness at the nation&#8217;s institutions of higher learning, check out Minding the Campus, a nonprofit independent organization. John Leo, its editor in chief, says that <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yxww7gth">the organization&#8217;s</a> prime mission is dedicated to the revival of intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education at America&#8217;s colleges and universities. Leo&#8217;s most recent compilation of campus madness leaves one nearly breathless.
In a USA Today op-ed, Emily Walton, a sociology professor at Dartmouth University, said that all college students should take a mandatory course on black history and white privilege. She says that by taking her class, white students &#8220;come to understand that being a good person does not make them innocent but rather they, too, are implicated in a system of racial dominance.&#8221; Walton adds, &#8220;After spending their young lives in a condition of &#8216;white blindness,&#8217; that is, the inability to see their own racial privilege, they begin to awaken to the notion that racism has systematically kept others down while benefiting them and other white people.&#8221; This is inculcating guilt based on skin color. These young white kids had nothing to do with slavery, Jim Crow or other horrible racial discriminatory acts. If one believes in individual responsibility, he should find the indoctrination by Walton offensive. To top it off, she equates the meritocratic system of hard work with white discrimination against minorities.
If you thought integration was in, check out the University of Nevada. Based on a report in the College Fix, John Leo describes how integration on that campus is actively discouraged — and at taxpayer expense. The university provides separate dorms for different identities including Howell Town for black students, Stonewall Suites for LGBTQ students, the women-only housing of Tonopah community, the Healthy Living Floor for tofu and kale lovers and study-intensive floors for those who want to graduate.
According to a New York Post report, New York City school administrators have been taught that pillars of Western Civilization such as objectivity, individualism and belief in the written word all are examples of white supremacy. All school principals, district office administrators and superintendent teams were required to attend the anti-white supremacy training put on by the city Department of Education&#8217;s Office of Equity and Access. They learn that a belief in an &#8220;ultimate truth&#8221; (objectivity) leads to a dismissal of &#8220;alternate viewpoints or emotions&#8221; as &#8220;bad&#8221; and that an emphasis on the written word overlooks the &#8220;ability to relate to others&#8221; and leads to &#8220;teaching that there is only &#8216;one right way&#8217; to do something.&#8221; Administrators learn that other &#8220;hallmarks&#8221; of white supremacy include a &#8220;sense of urgency,&#8221; &#8220;quantity over quality&#8221; and &#8220;perfectionism.&#8221; Richard Carranza, New York City school superintendent, says the workshops are just about &#8220;what are our biases and how we work with them.&#8221;
Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor, says that political rage and increasingly polarized discourse are endangering our nation. Americans used to move forward productively after elections regardless of which side won. Now, we seem paralyzed by absolute schism and intolerance. Bloomberg pointed to colleges as a prime example of a rising level of intolerance for different ideas and free speech. Steven Gerrard, a professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, serves as an example of campus intolerance. Students declared Gerrard &#8220;an enemy of the people&#8221; after he suggested that Williams College join other schools in signing onto what&#8217;s called <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y7hxrgf9">the Chicago Principles</a>. The statement, published by the Committee of Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago, calls for free speech to be central to college and university culture. Williams college students said free speech is a part of a right-wing agenda as a &#8220;cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism.&#8221; Bloomberg pointed out that fewer than 70 of America&#8217;s 4,000 colleges and universities have endorsed or adopted the Chicago statement.
State governors and legislators can learn something from their Alaskan counterparts, who slashed public spending on the University of Alaska by 41%. There&#8217;s nothing better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut to bring a bit of sanity to college administrators.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Graduation cap.

WILLIAMS: Intolerance In Academia

Education

Free Speech

Racism

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has published a new paper, &#8220;Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.&#8221; Keep in mind that many of the grossly wrong environmentalist predictions were made by respected scientists and government officials. My question for you is: If you were around at the time, how many government restrictions and taxes would you have urged to avoid the predicted calamity?
As reported in The New York Times (Aug. 1969) Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul Erhlich warned: &#8220;The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you&#8217;re dead. We must realize that unless we&#8217;re extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.&#8221;
In 2000, Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at University of East Anglia&#8217;s climate research unit, predicted that in a few years winter snowfall would become &#8220;a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren&#8217;t going to know what snow is.&#8221; In 2004, the U.S. Pentagon warned President George W. Bush that major European cities would be beneath rising seas. Britain will be plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. In 2008, Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap would be gone in a mere 10 years. A U.S. Department of Energy study led by the U.S. Navy predicted the Arctic Ocean would experience an ice-free summer by 2016.
In May 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared during a joint appearance with Secretary of State John Kerry that &#8220;we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.&#8221;
Peter Gunter, professor at North Texas State University, predicted in the spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness: &#8220;Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. &#8230; By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.&#8221;
Ecologist Kenneth Watt&#8217;s 1970 prediction was, &#8220;If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000.&#8221; He added, &#8220;This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.&#8221;
Mark J. Perry, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan&#8217;s Flint campus, cites 18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day in 1970. This time it&#8217;s not about weather. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver would be gone before 1990. Kenneth Watt said, &#8220;By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate &#8230; that there won&#8217;t be any more crude oil.&#8221;
There were grossly wild predictions well before the first Earth Day, too. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior predicted that American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous energy claims, in 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that as of Jan. 1, 2017, there were about 2,459 trillion cubic feet of dry natural gas in the United States. That&#8217;s enough to last us for nearly a century. The United States is the largest producer of natural gas worldwide.
Today&#8217;s wild predictions about climate doom are likely to be just as true as yesteryear&#8217;s. The major difference is today&#8217;s Americans are far more gullible and more likely to spend trillions fighting global warming. And the only result is that we&#8217;ll be much poorer and less free.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Smoking earth.

WILLIAMS: Idiotic Environmental Predictions

Al Gore

Climate Change

Environmentalism

Global Warming

During my student days at a UCLA economics department faculty/graduate student coffee hour in the 1960s, I was chatting with Professor Armen Alchian, probably the greatest microeconomic theory economist of the 20th century. I was trying to impress Alchian with my knowledge of statistical type I and type II errors. I explained that unlike my wife, who assumed that everyone was her friend until they prove differently, my assumption was everyone was an enemy until they proved otherwise. The result: My wife&#8217;s vision maximized the number of her friends but maximized her chances of betrayal. My vision minimized my chances of betrayal at a cost of minimizing the number of my friends.
Alchian, donning a mischievous smile asked, &#8220;Williams, have you considered a third alternative, namely, that people don&#8217;t give a damn about you one way or another?&#8221; Initially, I felt a bit insulted, and our conversation didn&#8217;t go much further, but that was typical of Alchian — saying something profound, perhaps controversial, without much comment and letting you think it out.
Years later, I gave Alchian&#8217;s third alternative considerable thought and concluded that he was right. The most reliable assumption, in terms of the conduct of one&#8217;s life, is to assume that people don&#8217;t care about you one way or another. It&#8217;s an error to generalize that people are friends or enemies, or that people are out to either help you or hurt you. To put it more crudely, as Alchian did, people don&#8217;t give a damn about you one way or another.
Let&#8217;s apply this argument to issues of race. Listening to some people, one might think that white people are engaged in an ongoing secret conspiracy to undermine the achievement and well-being of black people. Their evidence is low black academic achievement and high rates of black poverty, unemployment and incarceration. For some, racism is the root cause of most black problems including the unprecedentedly high black illegitimacy rate and family breakdown.
Are white people obsessed with and engaged in a conspiracy against black people? Here&#8217;s an experiment. Walk up to the average white person and ask, &#8220;How many minutes today have you been thinking about black people?&#8221; If the person isn&#8217;t a Klansman or a gushing do-gooder liberal, his answer would probably be zero minutes. If you asked him whether he&#8217;s a part of a conspiracy to undermine the achievement and well-being of black people, he&#8217;d probably look at you as if you were crazy. By the same token, if a person asked me: &#8220;Williams, how many minutes today have you been thinking about white people?&#8221; My answer would probably be, &#8220;Not even a nanosecond.&#8221; Because people don&#8217;t care about you one way or another doesn&#8217;t mean they wish you good will, ill will or no will. They just don&#8217;t give a damn.
What are the implications of the people-don&#8217;t-care vision of how the world works? A major implication is that one&#8217;s destiny, for the most part, is in one&#8217;s hands. How you make it in this world depends more on what you do as opposed to whether people like or dislike you. Black politicians, civil rights leaders and white liberals have peddled victimhood to black people, teaching them that racism is pervasive and no amount of individual effort can overcome racist barriers. Peddling victimhood is not new. Booker T. Washington said: &#8220;There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.&#8221; In an 1865 speech to the Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that people ask: &#8220;&#8216;What shall we do with the Negro?&#8217; I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!&#8221; Or as Patrick Moynihan urged a century later in a 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon, &#8220;The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of &#8216;benign neglect.'&#8221;
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com .

Question mark sculpture.

WILLIAMS: Who Cares About You?

Progressivism

Race

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who&#8217;d restrict free speech. She&#8217;s a libertarian. As to modern ideas that include &#8220;gender-inclusive pronouns&#8221; such as zie, sie and zim, Paglia says it is lunacy. In a 2017 interview, Paglia was especially irritated by the thought police running college campuses today. In defending University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has become a pariah for his refusal to cave in to nonsensical gender-inclusive pronouns, Paglia said that the English language was created by great artists such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Joyce. She added: &#8220;How dare you, you sniveling little maniac, tell us how we&#8217;re gonna use pronouns! Go take a hike.&#8221;
On feminism, Paglia criticizes what she calls the &#8220;antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism.&#8221; She calls it &#8220;victim feminism&#8221; and complains that &#8220;everything we&#8217;d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.&#8221; Everyone must yield to it &#8220;in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.&#8221; Paglia adds, &#8220;What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life.&#8221;
Paglia&#8217;s bold statements got her in a bit of hot water last April. University of the Arts students demanded that she be fired over public comments she&#8217;d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called &#8220;transphobic.&#8221; That latter denunciation is particularly slapstick, since Paglia describes herself as &#8220;transgender,&#8221; writes Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover Institution&#8217;s institutional editor, in his Aug. 30 Wall Street Journal article &#8220;A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire.&#8221;
The students&#8217; demand that Paglia be fired fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, there are a few college presidents with guts and common sense. President David Yager is one of them. He wrote in an open letter to students: &#8220;Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.&#8221;
There&#8217;s another part of this story that&#8217;s particularly interesting considering today&#8217;s young peoples&#8217; love of socialism. Paglia says that children now &#8220;are raised in a far more affluent period. Even people without much money have cellphones, televisions, and access to cars. They&#8217;re raised in an air-conditioned environment. I can still remember when there was no air-conditioning.&#8221;
Paglia says: &#8220;Everything is so easy now. The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.&#8221; Young people ignorant of history and economics &#8220;have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they&#8217;ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.&#8221; Young people led by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fail to realize that capitalism has &#8220;produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.&#8221; For the feminists, Paglia says, &#8220;I insist that capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.&#8221; Today, they can &#8220;support themselves and live on their own, and no longer must humiliatingly depend on father or husband.&#8221;
Reading Varadarajan&#8217;s article made my day knowing that there&#8217;s at least one intelligent radical feminist. But what else is to be expected from anyone who&#8217;s a libertarian capitalist?
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Camille Paglia.

WILLIAMS: Youth And Ignorance

Camille Paglia

Feminism

Transgender

The U.S. Department of Justice has recently sued the Baltimore County government alleging that its written test for police officer recruits was unfairly biased against black applicants. It turns out that black applicants failed the written test at a rate much greater than white applicants. That results in fewer blacks being trained and hired as police officers. John A. Olszewski Jr., Baltimore County Executive said: &#8220;A law enforcement agency should look like the community it serves. As I have said repeatedly since taking office, I am committed to increasing diversity in the county&#8217;s Police Department.&#8221;
Baltimore City uses Municipal Police Selection Test. You can examine some sample questions at its website. I&#8217;d like to know which of the questions are either unrelated to police work or racist. Many jurisdictions use The National Police Officer Selection Test. You can examine some of the sample questions at its website. Again, I&#8217;d like to know which of the questions are unrelated to police work or are racially biased questions. In addition, it has been found that MPST and POST are successful predictors of law enforcement training success and job performance.
Black performance on police exams is simply the tip of the iceberg of a truly tragic cruelty. That cruelty stands front and center when one examines the education that most blacks in Baltimore receive. Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore&#8217;s school system. What they found was an utter disgrace. In 19 of Baltimore&#8217;s high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math. In 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math. In five Baltimore City high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math or reading. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma. A high school diploma attests that the holder can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level. Obviously, the diplomas conferred on students who have not mastered reading, writing and computing are fraudulent.
When a person who cannot read, write and compute very well takes a written employment exam, including that to become a police officer, he is going to encounter difficulties. His difficulties are not caused by any racially discriminatory aspect of the test. His difficulties are a result of not having acquired what he should have acquired by the time he finished high school. But that is not how such a person sees it. He sees that he has a high school diploma just as a white applicant has a high school diploma. To him, any difference in treatment and outcomes must be the result of racial discrimination. Thus, the U.S. Department of Justice sued, claiming that the written test for police officer recruits was unfairly biased against black applicants.
The conclusion that Baltimore County&#8217;s written test for police officer recruits was unfairly biased against black applicants is tragic. It allows Baltimore public schools to continue to produce fraudulent education. You say: &#8220;Hold it, Williams! You can&#8217;t blame everything on schools.&#8221; You&#8217;re right. One cannot blame schools and teachers for students who are hostile to the education process. One cannot blame schools and teachers for a rotten home environment or derelict parents. But there is one thing entirely within the control of educators. That&#8217;s their power to issue diplomas. When they confer high school diplomas on youngsters who cannot read, write and compute at or near a 12th-grade level, they are engaging in fraudulent conduct.
Dr. Thomas Sowell&#8217;s research in &#8220;Education: Assumptions Versus History&#8221; documents academic excellence at Baltimore&#8217;s Frederick Douglass High School and others. This academic excellence occurred during an era when blacks were much poorer and faced gross racial discrimination. It&#8217;s worthwhile reading for black people to learn the capabilities of other blacks facing so many challenging circumstances. I&#8217;m wondering when the black community will demand an end to an educational environment that condemns so many youngsters to mediocrity.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Police Tape

WILLIAMS: Racist Exam Questions?

Baltimore

Department of Justice

Police

Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American University. They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade students based on their &#8220;labor&#8221; rather than their writing ability. The professor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is Asao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and sciences. He is also the director of the university&#8217;s writing center. Inoue believes that a person&#8217;s writing ability should not be assessed, in order to promote &#8220;anti-racist&#8221; objectives. Inoue taught American University&#8217;s faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy. Inoue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project.
The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and students fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charges, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic community. Instead, it was probably the result of deep thinking by the university&#8217;s diversity and campus life officials. Inoue&#8217;s views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students&#8217; writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students&#8217; speaking and writing would be judged against the King&#8217;s English, defined as standard, pure or correct English grammar.
Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language. According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language. Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.
Not holding students accountable to proper grammar does a disservice to those students who overall show poor writing abilities. When or if these students graduate from college, they are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue&#8217;s tailored standards. They will be judged according to their objective abilities, and it probably follows that if they fail to meet those objective standards, the standards themselves will be labeled as racist.
There&#8217;s another very dangerous bit of academic nonsense happening, this time at the K-12 level of education. One America News Network anchor interviewed Mary Clare Amselem, education specialist at the Heritage Foundation, about the California Department of Education&#8217;s proposed ethnic studies curriculum. The proposed ethnic studies curriculum would teach children that capitalism and father figures are racist.
The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum also includes gross anti-Israel bias and teaches about a Palestinian-led anti-Israel initiative called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The curriculum also has students study issues of police brutality and asks teachers to find incidents of bias by police in their own communities. According to an article by Shelby Talcott in The Stream, California&#8217;s proposed curriculum called for students to study lawmakers such as Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have supported the BDS movement and have been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The proposed ethnic studies proposal has been removed from the California Department of Education website. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said, &#8220;While I am relieved that California made the obvious decision to revisit this wholly misguided proposal, we need to know why and how a blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, factually inaccurate curriculum made its way through the ranks of California&#8217;s Department of Education.&#8221; He added, &#8220;This was not simply an oversight — the California Department of Education&#8217;s attempt to institutionalize anti-Semitism is not only discriminatory and intolerant, it&#8217;s dangerous.&#8221;
Brainwashing our youngsters is a serious matter. The people responsible for the California Department of Education&#8217;s proposal ought to be summarily fired.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Graduation.jpeg

WILLIAMS: Academic Stupidity And Brainwashing

John Paul Wright, professor at University of Cincinnati, and Matthew DeLisi professor at Iowa State University have penned a powerful article titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-criminologists-dont-say-and-why-15328.html">What Criminologists Don&#8217;t Say, and Why</a>,&#8221; in City Journal, Summer 2017. There is significant bias among criminologists. The reason for that bias is that political leanings of academic criminologists are liberal. Liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 30-to-1. Ideology almost perfectly predicts the position of criminologists on issues from gun control to capital punishment to harsh sentencing. Liberal criminologists march in step for gun control, oppose punitive prison sentences, and are vehemently against the death penalty.
In 2012, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study on the growth of incarceration. It showed that from 1928 until 1960, crime rates rose slowly each year. After the 1960s, crime rates exploded to unprecedented levels of violence until the 1990s. Prior to 1980, only 40% of individuals arrested for murder were sentenced to prison and those that were served an average of five years. In 1981, less than 10% of those arrested for sexual assault were sentenced to prison. Those who were sentenced served an average of 3.4 years. Liberal criminologists probably believe that light sentencing for murderers and rapists is just.
If criminologists have the guts to even talk about a race-crime connection, it&#8217;s behind closed doors and in guarded language. Any discussion about race and crime sets one up for accusations of racism and that can mean the destruction of one&#8217;s professional career. Wright and DeLisi say that liberal criminologists avoid discussing even explicit racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults, &#8220;polar bear hunting&#8221; and the &#8220;knockout game.&#8221; These are cases where <a href="https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=knockout+game&amp;view=detail&amp;mid=E3F42C0405548004A753E3F42C0405548004A753&amp;FORM=VIRE">black youth seek out white people to physically attack</a>.
According to Wright and DeLisi: &#8220;Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks.&#8221; That means the primary victims of black crime are other black people. In more than 90% of homicides, for example, both the victim and the perpetrator are black.
Between 1991 and 2017, the nationwide violent crime rate fell from 758 cases to 382 cases per 100,000 people. Despite the evidence that higher incarceration reduces crime rates, many criminologists argue that &#8220;mass incarceration&#8221; has actually &#8220;took minority men out of their neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities.&#8221; Wright and DeLisi say that &#8220;Such claims could seem plausible only if one believes — contrary to evidence and common sense — that career criminals contribute positively to their neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors.&#8221;
Crime is a major problem for the black community. But in addition to incarcerating those who prey on the black community, what can be done? The answer is easy, though implementation poses a challenge. We should re-adopt the values and practices of our ancestors. Black families of yesteryear were mainly two-parent and stable, even during slavery. Black people didn&#8217;t tolerate property destruction. There were few school fights. Disrespect and assaults on teachers were virtually unknown. These are now all too common. The strong character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from emancipation to today. Find a 70-, 80- or 90-year-old black person and ask him whether today&#8217;s conduct among black youth would have been tolerated yesteryear. I guarantee you that no will be their answer.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: Criminologists Mislead Us

Crime

Prison

The New York Times has begun a major initiative, the &#8220;1619 Project,&#8221; to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe American history so that slavery and the contributions of black Americans explain who we are as a nation. Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine wrote the lead article, &#8220;America Wasn&#8217;t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One.&#8221; She writes, &#8220;Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.&#8221;
There are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones&#8217; article, but I&#8217;m going to focus on the article&#8217;s most serious error, namely that the nation&#8217;s founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is shared by too many Americans. The word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution&#8217;s Article IV, Section 4, declares, &#8220;The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.&#8221; Think about it and ask yourself whether our Pledge of Allegiance says to &#8220;the democracy for which it stands&#8221; or to &#8220;the republic for which it stands.&#8221; Is Julia Ward Howe&#8217;s popular Civil War song titled &#8220;The Battle Hymn of the Democracy&#8221; or &#8220;The Battle Hymn of the Republic&#8221;?
The founders had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, that in a pure democracy &#8220;there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.&#8221; At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegate Edmund Randolph said, &#8220;that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.&#8221; John Adams said: &#8220;Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.&#8221; U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall observed, &#8220;Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.&#8221;
The U.S. Constitution is replete with anti-majority rule, undemocratic provisions. One provision, heavily criticized, is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College so that in presidential elections, heavily populated states could not run roughshod over sparsely populated states. In order to amend the Constitution, it requires a two-thirds vote of both Houses, or two-thirds of state legislatures, to propose an amendment, and requires three-fourths of state legislatures for ratification. Part of the reason for having a bicameral Congress is that it places another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The president, with a veto, can thwart the will of all 535 members of Congress. It takes a two-thirds vote, not just a majority, of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.
In addition to not understanding our Constitution, Hannah-Jones&#8217; article, like in most discussions of black history, fails to acknowledge that black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind&#8217;s history. The evidence: If black Americans were thought of as a nation with our own gross domestic product, we&#8217;d rank among the 20 wealthiest nations. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who headed the world&#8217;s mightiest military. A few black Americans are among the world&#8217;s wealthiest. Black Americans are among the world&#8217;s most famous personalities.
The significance of this is that in 1865, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed that such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half, if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as importantly, it speaks to the greatness of a nation within which such progress was possible, progress that would have been impossible anywhere else. The challenge before us is how those gains can be extended to a large percentage of black people for whom they appear elusive.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Constitution

WILLIAMS: Beginning Of U.S. Slavery

New York Times

Slavery

For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it&#8217;s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there&#8217;s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That&#8217;s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA&#8217;s findings were published in their report &#8220;What Will They Learn? 2018-19.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t look good.
The ACTA assigned grades tell some of the story. Just 23 (2%) of the over 1,100 colleges earn an A grade; 343 colleges (31%) earn a B grade; 347 (31%) get a C grade; 273 (24%) earn a D; and 134 (12%) colleges earn an F. If you&#8217;re thinking that your youngster will get a truly liberal arts education, you are sadly mistaken. It turns out that less than half of the schools studied require courses in traditional literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history and economics. At some colleges, students can fulfill their humanities requirement with a course titled &#8220;Global X: Zombies!&#8221; A U.S. cultural pluralism requirement can be fulfilled with &#8220;The Economics of &#8216;Star Trek.'&#8221; And an arts and Literature requirement can be fulfilled with either the &#8220;History of Comics&#8221; or &#8220;Game Design for Non-Majors.&#8221;
Colleges often do not live up to their own promises. In college mission statements, as well as their course catalogs, they frequently exalt the virtues of a &#8220;well-rounded&#8221; liberal arts education. The reality is something different with only 68% of the schools ACTA surveyed requiring three or fewer of the seven core subjects. Their curricula poorly represent critical subjects such as U.S. history, economics and foreign languages.
The list of schools that received ACTA&#8217;s &#8220;A&#8221; grades includes Pepperdine and Baylor, known for their commitment to the liberal arts and academic excellence. But there are some lesser-known colleges such as Christopher Newport University, Colorado Christian University, Kennesaw State University, Bluefield College and Regent University that deserve accolades.
ACTA&#8217;s &#8220;F&#8221; list includes prestigious names such as University of California, Berkeley, Bowdoin, Hamilton and Vassar colleges. Ivy League colleges received ACTA&#8217;s two &#8220;Bs,&#8221; four &#8220;Cs,&#8221; one &#8220;D&#8221; and one &#8220;F.&#8221; These grades reflect significant overall curricular weaknesses. For example, Yale doesn&#8217;t require college-level math courses; Harvard accepts an elementary-level foreign language study; and Brown has an &#8220;open curriculum,&#8221; which means students may take whatever classes they want, without strict requirements. Even though some of the best-known colleges earn poor marks for their general education curricula, it doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean they do all things poorly. A student can get an excellent education at these schools if classes are chosen wisely.
There&#8217;s another college-related issue not given much voice and that&#8217;s how important is a college education in the first place. That&#8217;s an issue raised by a Market Watch article, &#8220;Half of young Americans say their degree is irrelevant to their work.&#8221;
Parents think a college education is necessary for success. Their youngsters think differently. According to the TD Ameritrade study, 49% of young millennials said their degree was &#8220;very or somewhat unimportant&#8221; to their current job. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, found that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen.
The bottom line for parents and their youngsters is that spending four or more years in college and accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt is not the only road to a successful life.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Student Graduation

WILLIAMS: What Will They Learn At College?

There is discrimination of all sorts, and that includes racial discrimination. Thus, it&#8217;s somewhat foolhardy to debate the existence of racial discrimination yesteryear or today. From a policy point of view, a far more useful question to ask is, How much of the plight of many blacks can be explained by current racial discrimination? Let&#8217;s examine some of today&#8217;s most devastating problems of many black people with an eye toward addressing discrimination of the past and present.
At the root of most of the problems black people face is the breakdown of the family structure. Slightly over 70% of black children are raised in female-headed households. According to statistics regarding fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes, 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure, 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes, 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes, and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail.
One might say, &#8220;Williams, one cannot ignore the legacy of slavery and the gross racism and denial of civil rights in yesteryear!&#8221; Let&#8217;s look at whether black fatherless homes are a result of a &#8220;legacy of slavery&#8221; and racial discrimination. In the late 1800s, depending on the city, 70% to 80% of black households were two-parent households. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, &#8220;The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.&#8221;
As late as 1950, only 18% of black households were single parent. From 1890 to 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. In 1938, black illegitimacy was about 11% instead of today&#8217;s 75%. In 1925, 85% of black households in New York City were two-parent households. Today, the black family is a mere shadow of its past.
Let&#8217;s ask a couple of questions about crime and education and racial discrimination. It turns out that each year more than 7,000 blacks are victims of homicide. That&#8217;s slightly over 50% of U.S. homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of the time, the perpetrator is another black person. Blacks are also most of the victims of violent personal crimes such as assault and robbery. At many predominantly black schools, chaos is the order of the day. There is a high rate of assaults on students and teachers. Youngsters who are hostile to the educational process are permitted to make education impossible for those who are prepared to learn. As a result, overall black educational achievement is a disaster.
Here are my questions to those who blame racial discrimination for the problems of black people: Is it necessary for us to await some kind of moral rejuvenation among white people before measures can be taken to end or at least reduce the kind of behavior that spells socioeconomic disaster in so many black communities? Is it a requirement that we await moral rejuvenation among white people before we stop permitting some black youngsters from making education impossible for other black youngsters? Blacks were not the only people discriminated against in America. While Jews and Asians were not enslaved, they encountered gross discrimination. Nonetheless, neither Jews nor Asians felt that they had to await the end of discrimination before they took measures to gain upward mobility.
Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, racial discrimination and the &#8220;legacy of slavery&#8221; are complicit in the socioeconomic and moral decay. Black people must ignore the liberal agenda that suggests that we must await government money before measures can be taken to improve the tragic living conditions in so many of our urban communities. Black and white intellectuals and politicians suggesting that black people await government solutions wouldn&#8217;t begin to live in the same high-crime, dangerous communities and send their children to the dangerous schools that so many black children attend.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Students Praying

WILLIAMS: How Important Is Today&#8217;s Racial Discrimination?

Discrimination

Here&#8217;s what President Donald Trump tweeted about Baltimore&#8217;s congressman and his city: &#8220;Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men &amp; women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is far worse and more dangerous. His district is considered the worst in the USA.&#8221;
&#8220;As proven last week during a congressional tour, the border is clean, efficient and well run, just very crowded,&#8221; Trump added. Cummings&#8217; &#8220;district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous &amp; filthy place.&#8221;
President Donald Trump&#8217;s claims suggesting that Rep. Elijah Cummings&#8217; Baltimore-area district is &#8220;considered the worst run and most dangerous&#8221; has been called racist. But whether Trump&#8217;s claims have any merit is an empirical matter settled by appealing to facts. Let&#8217;s look at a few.
In 2018, Baltimore was rated one of the &#8220;Rattiest Cities&#8221; in the nation by pest control company Orkin. According to Patch Media, although there has been progress in the last few years, Baltimore ranks ninth in rat infestation, down from its sixth position two years ago on Orkin&#8217;s list.
What about safety? In 2017, St. Louis had the nation&#8217;s highest murder rate, at 66.1 homicides per 100,000 residents. Baltimore came in second, with 55.8 murders per 100,000 people. The unpleasant fact is that predominantly black and Democratic-run cities have the worst records of public safety. The Trace, an independent nonprofit news organization, using 2017 data from the FBI&#8217;s Uniform Crime Reporting program, listed the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates. After St. Louis and Baltimore, Detroit was third, with 39.8 murders per 100,000 people. Other cities with high murder rates included New Orleans; Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland; Memphis, Tennessee; and Newark, New Jersey. With 24.1 murders per 100,000 residents, Chicago ranked ninth in the nation, followed by Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Washington, D.C., was 17th.
What about education in Baltimore? In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state&#8217;s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. In raw numbers, 3,804 Baltimore students took the state&#8217;s math test and 14 tested proficient. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state&#8217;s English test. Money is not the problem. Of the nation&#8217;s 100 largest school systems, Baltimore schools rank third in spending per pupil.
Baltimore&#8217;s black students receive diplomas that attest that they can function at a 12th-grade level when in fact they may not be able to do so at a sixth-, seventh- or eighth-grade level. These students and their families have little reason to suspect that their diplomas are fraudulent. Thus, if they cannot pass a civil service exam, they will accuse the exam of being racist. When they get poor grades in college and flunk out, they will attribute their plight to racism. The information that these black students have is that they, just as white students, have a high school diploma and the only explanation they see for unequal outcomes is racism. The same story of poor education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations.
The problems that black people confront are immune to who is the president of the U.S. Those problems were not ameliorated when Barack Obama was president. Those problems are not going to be ameliorated by Trump&#8217;s presidency, though the black unemployment rate is considerably lower. The lesson for black people is that politicians and government handouts are not solutions. If they were, at a public expenditure that tops $22 trillion over the past half-century, black people would not be confronted with today&#8217;s problems.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

School Classroom

WILLIAMS: Was Trump Right About Baltimore?

Donald Trump

Elijah Cummings

Years ago, it was hard to be a racist. You had to be fitted for and spend money on a white gown and don a pointy hat. You celebrated racism by getting some burlap, wrapping it around a cross, setting it ablaze and dancing around it carrying torches. Sometimes, as did Lester Maddox, you had to buy axe handles for yourself and your supporters to wield to forcibly turn away black customers from your restaurant. Or, as in the case of Theophilus &#8220;Bull&#8221; Connor, you had to learn to direct fire hoses and vicious police attack dogs against civil rights demonstrators.
Younger racists, along with their parents, had to memorize poems for whenever a black student showed up for admission to their high school or college. For example, &#8220;Two, four, six, eight, we don&#8217;t want to integrate!&#8221; Of course, there were a host of racial slurs and epithets that could be hurled, with impunity, at any black person in your presence. In earlier times, you didn&#8217;t have to be sophisticated, but it took a bit of work, to be a racist.
Today, all that has changed. To be a racist today takes little effort. For example, one can sit back in his easy chair and declare that he&#8217;s for across-the-board tax cuts. That makes you a racist. If you don&#8217;t believe me, think back to 1994 when the Republican-led Congress pushed for a tax-cut measure. Former U.S. House of Representatives member Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., denouncing the Republicans&#8217; plan before a Manhattan audience as a form of modern-day racism said: &#8220;It&#8217;s not &#8216;spic&#8217; or &#8216;n——-&#8216; anymore. (Instead,) they say, &#8216;Let&#8217;s cut taxes.'&#8221; A few months later, he compared the GOP&#8217;s &#8220;Contract with America&#8221; to measures in Nazi Germany saying, &#8220;Hitler wasn&#8217;t even talking about doing these things.&#8221;
One can be labeled a racist through a set of &#8220;microaggressions&#8221; listed in &#8220;Diversity in the Classroom, UCLA Diversity &amp; Faculty Development&#8221; from 2014.
Here are a few statements one should avoid: &#8220;You are a credit to your race.&#8221; &#8220;Wow! How did you become so good in math?&#8221; &#8220;There is only one race, the human race.&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;m not racist. I have several Black friends.&#8221; &#8220;As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority.&#8221;
But most instances of microaggressions are less overt. There are college microaggressions such as a male student rolling his eyes when a female student speaks, or people not wanting to be in study groups with those of different races.
Perhaps the easiest way to be labeled a racist is to suggest that a wall be built on our border with Mexico in order to keep people from Mexico and points south from entering our nation illegally. Also, a slam-dunk charge of racism is to say that the standard practice of separating children from parents is Nazi-like. But imagine you are stopped with your child in the car and charged with a DUI in any of our 50 states. You&#8217;re going to be arrested and your child taken to protective child services. The identical practice on our southern border becomes racism.
As veteran journalist Brit Hume said about the uproar over President Donald Trump&#8217;s latest bomb-throwing: &#8220;Trump&#8217;s &#8216;go back&#8217; comments were nativist, xenophobic, counterfactual and politically stupid. But they simply do not meet the standard definition of racist, a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost.&#8221; The president cleaned up his remarks a few days later saying: &#8220;These are people that hate our country. If you&#8217;re not happy in the U.S., if you&#8217;re complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave.&#8221; By the way, leaving isn&#8217;t Trump&#8217;s idea. Many leftists pledged to flee America altogether if Trump were elected president.
The bottom line is that when leftists have no other winning argument, they falsely accuse others of racism. Republicans cower at the charge and often give the leftists what they want. Black Americans who are octogenarians, or nearly so, need to explain what true racism is, not to correct white liberals but to inform young black people.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: Being A Racist Is Easy Today

Let&#8217;s think about priorities. Say that you live in one of the dangerous high crime and poor schooling neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis. Which is most important to you: doing something about public safety and raising the quality of education or, as most black politicians do, focusing energies upon President Donald Trump and who among the 20 presidential contenders will lead the Democratic Party? The average American has no inkling about the horrible conditions in which many blacks live. Moreover, they wouldn&#8217;t begin to tolerate living under those conditions themselves.
In Chicago, one person is shot every four hours and murdered every 18 hours. Similar crime statistics can be found in many predominantly black neighborhoods in Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and many other large cities. It&#8217;s not just an issue of public safety, for high crime has other devastating consequences.
Crime lowers the value of property. We can see some of this when housing prices skyrocket in formerly high crime areas when large numbers of middle- and upper-income people purchase formerly run-down properties and fix them up. This is called gentrification — wealthier, predominantly white, people move in to renovate and restore slum housing in inner cities, causing higher rental prices and forcing low-income residents out. Also, as a result of gentrification, crime falls and neighborhood amenities increase.
The high crime rates in many black neighborhoods have the full effect of outlawing economic growth and opportunities. Here&#8217;s a tiny example of the impact of crime on businesses. In low crime communities, supermarket managers may leave plants, fertilizer and other home and garden items outdoors, unattended and often overnight. If one even finds a supermarket in a high crime neighborhood, then that store must hire guards, and the manager cannot place items outside unguarded or near exits. They cannot use all the space that they lease, and hence they are less profitable. Who bears the ultimate cost of crime? If you said black people, you&#8217;re right. Black people must bear the expense to go to suburban shopping malls if they are to avoid the higher prices charged by mom and pop shops.
In low crime neighborhoods, FedEx, UPS and other delivery companies routinely leave packages that contain valuable merchandise on a doorstep if no one is at home. That saves the expense of redelivery and saves recipients the expense of having to go pick up the packages. In high crime neighborhoods, delivery companies leaving packages at the door and supermarkets leaving goods outside unattended would be equivalent to economic suicide.
Today&#8217;s level of lawlessness and insecurity in many black communities is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1950s, &#8217;40s, &#8217;30s and earlier times, people didn&#8217;t bar their windows. Doors were often left unlocked. People didn&#8217;t go to bed to the sounds of gunshots. And black people didn&#8217;t experience anything like what&#8217;s experienced in Chicago and other cities such as one person being shot every four hours and murdered every 18 hours. The uninformed blame today&#8217;s chaos on discrimination and poverty. That doesn&#8217;t even pass the smell test, unless one wants to argue that historically there was less racial discrimination and poverty than today.
Politicians who call for law and order are often viewed negatively, but poor people are more dependent on law and order than anyone else. In the face of high crime or social disorder, wealthier people can afford to purchase alarm systems, buy guard dogs, hire guards and, if things get completely out of hand, move to a gated community. These options are not available to poor people. The only protection poor people have is an orderly society.
Ultimately, the solution to high crime rests with black people. Given the current political environment, it doesn&#8217;t benefit a black or white politician to take those steps necessary to crack down on lawlessness in black communities. That means black people must become intolerant of criminals making their lives living hell, even if it requires taking the law into their own hands.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: What&#8217;s Most Important?

Economy

Here&#8217;s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: &#8220;Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can to keep guns out of the hands of kids.&#8221;
There&#8217;s a problem with this reasoning. Prior to the 1960s, many public high schools had shooting clubs. In New York City, shooting clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway and turned them over to their homeroom or gym teacher. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice. In some rural areas across the nation, there was a long tradition of high school students hunting before classes and storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars, parked on school grounds, during the school day.
Today, any school principal permitting rifle clubs or allowing rifles on school grounds would be fired, possibly imprisoned. Here&#8217;s my question: Have .30-30 caliber Winchesters and .22 caliber rifles changed to become more violent? If indeed rifles have become more violent, what can be done to pacify them? Will rifle psychiatric counseling help to stop these weapons from committing gun violence? You say: &#8220;Williams, that&#8217;s lunacy! Guns are inanimate objects and as such cannot act.&#8221; You&#8217;re right. Only people can act. That means that we ought to abandon the phrase &#8220;gun violence&#8221; because guns cannot act and hence cannot be violent.
If guns haven&#8217;t changed, it must be that people, and what&#8217;s considered acceptable behavior, have changed. Violence with guns is just a tiny example. What explains a lot of what we see today is growing cultural deviancy. Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53% of Hispanic children and 73% of black children are born to unmarried women. The absence of a husband and father in the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data shows that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11% of black children and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers.
In 1954, I graduated from Philadelphia&#8217;s Benjamin Franklin High School, the city&#8217;s poorest school. During those days, there were no school policemen. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. According to federal education data, in the 2015-16 school year, 5.8% of the nation&#8217;s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student. Almost 10% were threatened with injury.
Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the music accepted today that advocates murder, rape and other vile acts. In previous generations, people were held responsible for their behavior. Today, society at large pays for irresponsible behavior. Years ago, there was little tolerance for the crude behavior and language that are accepted today. To see men sitting while a woman was standing on a public conveyance was once unthinkable. Children addressing adults by their first name, and their use of foul language in the presence of, and often to, teachers and other adults was unacceptable.
A society&#8217;s first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today&#8217;s true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today&#8217;s Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: Things Haven’t Always Been This Way

The First Amendment to our Constitution was proposed by the 1788 Virginia ratification convention during its narrow 89 to 79 vote to ratify the Constitution. Virginia&#8217;s resolution held that the free exercise of religion, right to assembly and free speech could not be canceled, abridged or restrained. These Madisonian principles were eventually ratified by the states on March 1, 1792.
Gettysburg College professor Allen C. Guelzo, in his article &#8220;Free Speech and Its Present Crisis,&#8221; appearing in the autumn 2018 edition of City Journal, explores the trials and tribulations associated with the First Amendment. The early attempts to suppress free speech were signed into law by President John Adams and became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Later attempts to suppress free speech came during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln and his generals attacked newspapers and suspended habeas corpus. It wasn&#8217;t until 1919, in the case of Abrams v. United States, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally and unambiguously prohibited any kind of censorship.
Today, there is growing contempt for free speech, most of which is found on the nation&#8217;s college and university campuses. Guelzo cites the free speech vision of Princeton University professor Carolyn Rouse, who is chairperson of the department of Anthropology. Rouse shared her vision on speech during last year&#8217;s Constitution Day lecture. She called free speech a political illusion, a baseless ruse to enable people to &#8220;say whatever they want, in any context, with no social, economic, legal or political repercussions.&#8221; As an example, she says that a climate change skeptic has no right to make &#8220;claims about climate change, as if all the science discovered over the last X-number of centuries were irrelevant.&#8221;
Rouse is by no means unique in her contempt for our First Amendment rights. Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racist microagressions: &#8220;America is a melting pot&#8221;; &#8220;America is the land of opportunity&#8221;; &#8220;Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough&#8221;; and &#8220;There is only one race, the human race.&#8221; The latter statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. Then there&#8217;s &#8220;I believe the most qualified person should get the job.&#8221; That&#8217;s &#8220;racist&#8221; speech because it gives the impression that &#8220;people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.&#8221; Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: &#8220;When I look at you, I don&#8217;t see color,&#8221; or &#8220;Affirmative action is racist.&#8221; Perhaps worst of all is, &#8220;Where are you from, or where were you born?&#8221;
We should reject any restriction on free speech. We might ask ourselves, &#8220;What&#8217;s the true test of one&#8217;s commitment to free speech?&#8221; It does not come when people permit others to say or publish ideas with which they agree. The true test of one&#8217;s commitment to free speech comes when others are permitted to say and publish ideas they deem offensive.
The test for one&#8217;s commitment to freedom of association is similar. Christian Americans have been hounded for their refusal to cater same-sex weddings. For those who support such attacks, we might ask them whether they would seek prosecution of the owner of a Jewish delicatessen who refused to provide services for a neo-Nazi affair. Should a black catering company be forced to cater a Ku Klux Klan affair? Should the NAACP be forced to open its membership to racist skinheads? Should the Congressional Black Caucus be forced to open its membership to white members of Congress? The true test of a person&#8217;s commitment to freedom of association does not come when he permits people to associate in ways he finds acceptable. It comes when he permits people to voluntarily associate in ways he deems offensive.
I am afraid that too many of my fellow Americans are hostile to the principles of liberty. Most people want liberty for themselves. I differ. I want liberty for me and liberty for my fellow man.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: Our Free Speech Crisis

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was &#8220;to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.&#8221;
Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it&#8217;s a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.
Let&#8217;s pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There&#8217;s the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites — who were a majority of Southern whites — should their descendants be made to pay reparations?
Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That&#8217;s utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn&#8217;t have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state&#8217;s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I&#8217;d like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.
The nation&#8217;s most dangerous big cities are Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Stockton, Birmingham, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago and Milwaukee. The common characteristic of most of these cities is that they have predominantly black populations and blacks have considerable political power as mayors, city councilmen and chiefs of police. Energy spent on reparations should be used to solve those problems.
As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson&#8217;s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that&#8217;s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.
There&#8217;s another possible reparations issue completely ignored: Blacks as well as whites live on land taken, sometimes brutally, from American Indians. Do blacks and whites owe American Indians anything?
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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Walter E. Williams

Articles by Walter E. Williams