Dr. Thomas Sowell has just published &#8220;Charter Schools and Their Enemies.&#8221; He presents actual test scores of students in traditional public schools and charter schools on New York State Education Department&#8217;s annual English Language Arts test and its Mathematics Test. Sowell gives the results of student tests in charter schools such as KIPP, Success Academy, Explore Schools, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First as well as the traditional New York City public schools. On the English Language Arts test, a majority of charter school students, most of whom were black or Hispanic, tested proficient or above. Their achievement ratio was nearly 5 to 1. On the Mathematics test 68% of charter schools&#8217; 161 grade levels had a majority of students testing proficient. In the traditional public schools, 177 grade levels, just 10% had a majority of their student testing proficient.
In April 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that 57% of black and 54% of Hispanic charter school students passed the statewide ELA compared to 52% of white students statewide. On the state math test, 59% of black students and 57% of Hispanics at city charter schools passed as opposed to 54% of white students statewide.
Sowell says: &#8220;In a realm where educational failure has long been the norm — schools in low income minority neighborhoods — this is success, a remarkable success. What is equally remarkable is how unwelcome this success has been in many places. What has been especially remarkable is that it has been the most educationally successful charter schools that seem to have drawn the most hostility, both in words and in deeds.&#8221; The most common form of that hostility are simple legal limits set on the number of charter schools permitted without regard to whether charter schools are producing good or bad educational outcomes.
The education establishment, having the nation&#8217;s most powerful labor union, has the ears of political leaders. They see a huge loss potential if more parents are able to opt out of poorly achieving public schools. For example, in New York City there are more than 50,000 students on waiting lists for admission to charter schools. The per-pupil expenditure tops $20,000 a year. If all the students on the waiting list were able to be admitted to charter schools, that would translate into a billion-dollar loss by the traditional public schools. A substantial decline in traditional public school attendance would mean fewer teachers employed. That would mean declining union dues since most charter school teachers are not union members. Charter schools&#8217; rate of growth since the 1990s has been significant. From 2001 to 2016, enrollment at traditional public schools rose 1% while enrollment in public charter schools rose 571%.
Sowell points out that not all charter schools are successful. Failing charter schools can have their charters revoked, cutting off access to public funds. That is in stark contrast to failing and corrupt traditional public schools that continue to dine at the public trough. Successful charter schools are the real threat to traditional unionized public schools. No charter school in Sowell&#8217;s study has been more successful than Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx — and none has been more viciously attacked in words and in deeds. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explicitly campaigned against charter schools saying: &#8220;I am angry about the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious thing we need — public education.
In another venue, Sowell said: &#8220;We keep hearing that ‘black lives matter,’ but they seem to matter only when that helps politicians to get votes, or when that slogan helps demagogues demonize the police. The other 99% of black lives destroyed by people who are not police do not seem to attract nearly as much attention in the media.&#8221;
At a 2016 meeting, the NAACP&#8217;s board of directors ratified a resolution that called for a moratorium on charter schools. Among the NAACP&#8217;s reasons for this were that it wanted charter schools to refrain from &#8220;expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate&#8221; and &#8220;cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.&#8221; That is a vision suggesting that no black children receive decent educations until all black children receive decent educations. Black people cannot afford to entertain such a vision and other attacks on educational success.
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 raise hands

WILLIAMS: Charter Schools And Their Enemies

charter schools

Education

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the great black migration northward during the 1930s and &#8217;40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps where he became a photographer. Photography remains his hobby today.
After his military tour of duty, Sowell took night classes at Howard University where he was encouraged to apply to Harvard University. He earned a bachelor&#8217;s degree in economics and graduated magna cum laude in 1958. The next year, he earned a master&#8217;s degree from Columbia University. Ten years later, Sowell earned a Ph.D. in economics, from the prestigious economics department at the University of Chicago. As Sowell explains in his autobiography, &#8220;A Personal Odyssey,&#8221; for most of his time in college, he considered himself a Marxist. After studying the effects of a variety of government regulations such as the minimum wage law, Sowell concluded that free markets are the best alternative, particularly for disadvantaged people.
Sowell taught economics at several universities including Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College and UCLA. Since 1980, he has been a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds the Rose and Milton Friedman fellowship. By the way, Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and George Stigler were two of Sowell&#8217;s tenacious mentors as a student at the University of Chicago.
Most of those familiar with Sowell&#8217;s writings do not have any idea about his early research interests in the history of economic thought. His dissertation, titled &#8220;Say&#8217;s Law and the General Glut Controversy,&#8221; analyzed the work of French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. His early research in the history of economic thought that appeared in refereed academic journals included writings on Sir Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, Samuel Bailey and Jean Charles Leonard de Sismondi. These and later writings make up his 19 scholarly publications.
Most academics do not publish that many scholarly articles in a lifetime. And, in addition, Sowell has written 56 books, among them &#8220;Say&#8217;s Law: An Historical Analysis,&#8221; &#8220;Knowledge and Decisions,&#8221; &#8220;A Conflict of Visions,&#8221; &#8220;Late-Talking Children,&#8221; &#8220;Basic Economics,&#8221; &#8220;Discrimination and Disparities&#8221; and most recently &#8220;Charter Schools and Their Enemies.&#8221; A full list of his publications can be found on his website.
Sowell&#8217;s writings do not end with scholarly publications and books. He has authored 72 essays in periodicals and books, wrote 32 book reviews and was a regular columnist for Creators Syndicate for 25 years, Forbes magazine for eight years, Scripps Howard News Service from 1984 to 1990, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner from 1978 to 1980. Sowell has had occasional columns in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Star, Newsweek, The Times (London), Newsday and The Stanford Daily. My colleague not only writes when you and I are asleep or enjoying ourselves, but he might write with two hands.
Sowell cares about people. He believes that compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis. He takes seriously the admonition given to physicians, &#8220;primum non nocere&#8221; (first, do no harm). In many respects, Sowell is an Austrian economist like the great Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, who often talked about elites and their &#8220;pretense of knowledge.&#8221; These are people who believe that they have the ability and knowledge to organize society in a way better than people left to their own devices — what Hayek called the fatal conceit. Their vision requires the use of the coercive powers of government.
In my book, Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest economist-philosophers of our age, and I am proud to say that he is one of my best friends. Sowell demonstrates something that is uniquely American; namely, just because you know where a person ended up in life, you cannot be sure about where he started. Unlike many other societies, an American need not start at the top to get to the top. That is something all Americans should be proud of and jealously guard — the socioeconomic mobility that comes from a relatively free society.
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.

Book

WILLIAMS: An Underappreciated American Scholar

Economics

Thomas Sowell

No decent person can support George Floyd&#8217;s mistreatment, or the mistreatment of anyone else, at the hands of police officers with the sworn duty to uphold the law. The Minneapolis authorities moved quickly, and Derek Chauvin was fired from the Minneapolis police department, placed under arrest and charged with second-degree murder and other charges. The three officers who were with him were also fired and charged two counts of aiding and abetting — one for second-degree murder and one for second-degree manslaughter.
Peaceful protest in any cause is as American as apple pie, but what we saw in the wake of George Floyd&#8217;s murder is as despicable as anything recently seen in our nation. What makes it worse is the silence and seemly support in many quarters for anarchists who have highjacked the protests to promote their own ends. These are the white liberals and leftists groups like Antifa who could care less about the major problems that exist in black communities and made worse by the rioting and looting.
&#8220;Black Entrepreneurs 2020 Trends: A look at African-American-owned businesses in 2020&#8221; is a survey of black-owned businesses. When blacks were asked how they view themselves in the present political climate, most were either &#8220;very confident&#8221; or &#8220;somewhat confident.&#8221; If that survey were run today, I doubt whether we would get anywhere near the same results. Part of the difference would be from the government&#8217;s economic shutdown of our nation but most of it would be the result of the recent wanton destruction within black communities. There are videos of legally armed black business owners standing outside their shops to protect them. There are other scenes of black small-business owners in tears over the destruction of businesses that they&#8217;ve put their life&#8217;s savings into. My question to the white Antifa anarchists, and their fellow black looters, is how does the destruction of black-owned business promote justice for the murder of George Floyd?
The recent looting and property destruction, as well as the high crime rates in many black neighborhoods, have the effect of a law that outlaws economic growth and opportunities. During the recent mayhem in black communities, stores of many types were looted and destroyed. CVS pharmacy has closed 60 stores in 21 states amid looting and protests. Large stores like Walmart were looted and burned. Many smaller stores and businesses were looted and burned. Who will bear the ultimate cost of the rioting? If you said black people, you are right. Black people must bear the expense and inconvenience to go to suburban shopping malls if they are to avoid the higher prices charged by smaller neighborhood stores that have survived the rioting and looting.
Even when there is not the kind of social disorder of recent weeks, lawlessness is the hallmark of many black communities. Ultimately, the solution to this lawlessness rests with black people. Given the current political environment, it does not 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 who make their lives living hell, even if it means taking the law into their own hands.
That brings me to one of the most disturbing aspects of the rioting and looting. That is the seeming impotence of people whom we elect and pay to enforce the law. That includes governors, mayors and police chiefs who refuse to use their law enforcement powers to protect citizens and their property from criminals. Unfortunately, politicians who call for law and order are often viewed negatively. But that makes little sense. 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 too bad, move to a gated community. These options are not available to poor people. Their only protection is an orderly society.
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.

Rioters

WILLIAMS: Now What?

African American community

George Floyd

Law Enforcement

Riots

While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called &#8220;systemic racism.&#8221; Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.
Some of the most dangerous big cities are: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven&#8217;t elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools.
In 1965, there were no blacks in the U.S. Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only six members of the House of Representatives were black. As of 2019, there is far greater representation in some areas — 52 House members are black. Nine black Americans have served in the Senate, including Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California. In recent times, there have been three black state governors. The bottom line is that today&#8217;s black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government. Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?
Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets. Consider Baltimore, Maryland. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state&#8217;s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state&#8217;s English test. That same year in Philadelphia only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. It&#8217;s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.
Violent crime and poor education is not the only problem for Democratic-controlled cities. Because of high crime, poor schools and a less pleasant environment, cities are losing their economic base and their most productive people in droves. When World War II ended, the population of Washington, D.C., was about 800,000; today, it&#8217;s about 700,000. In 1950, Baltimore&#8217;s population was almost 950,000; today, it&#8217;s around 590,000. Detroit&#8217;s 1950 population was close to 1.85 million; today, it&#8217;s down to 673,000. The population of Camden, New Jersey, in 1950 was nearly 125,000; today it has fallen to 74,000. St. Louis&#8217; 1950 population was more than 856,000; today, it&#8217;s less than 294,000. A similar story of population decline can be found in most of our formerly large and prosperous cities. In some cities, the population decline since 1950 is well over 50%, and that includes Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Academic liberals, civil rights advocates and others blamed the exodus on racism — &#8220;white flight&#8221; to the suburbs to avoid blacks. But blacks have been fleeing some cities at higher rates than whites. The five cities whose suburbs have the fastest-growing black populations are Miami, Dallas, Washington, Houston and Atlanta. It turns out that blacks, like whites, want better and safer schools for their kids and don&#8217;t like to be mugged or have their property vandalized. And like white people, if they have the means, black people cannot wait to leave troubled cities.
White liberals and black politicians focus most of their attention on what the police do, but how relevant is that to the overall tragedy? According to Statista, this year, 172 whites and 88 blacks have died at the hands of police. To put police shootings in a bit of perspective, in Chicago alone in 2020 there have been 1,260 shootings and 256 homicides with blacks being the primary victims. That comes to one shooting victim every three hours and one homicide victim every 15 hours. Three people in Chicago have been killed by police. If one is truly concerned about black deaths, shootings by police should figure way down on one&#8217;s list — which is not to excuse bad behavior by some police officers.
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.

BLM protest

WILLIAMS: The True Plight Of Black Americans

Crime

Democrats

Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America.
A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and noncash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, &#8220;the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world&#8217;s most affluent countries.&#8221; This includes the majority of countries that are members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, including its European members. The Just Facts study concludes that if the U.S. &#8220;poor&#8221; were a nation, then it would be one of the world&#8217;s richest.
As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles.
Most surveys on U.S. poverty are deeply flawed because poor households greatly underreport both their income and noncash benefits such as health care benefits provided by Medicaid, free clinics and the Children&#8217;s Health Insurance Program, nourishment provided by food stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, soup kitchens, food pantries, the Women, Infants &amp; Children Program and homeless shelters.
We hear and read stories such as &#8220;Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling&#8221; and &#8220;Since 2000 Wage Growth Has Barely Grown.&#8221; But we should not believe it. Ask yourself, &#8220;What is the total compensation that I receive from my employer?&#8221; If you included only your money wages, you would be off the mark anywhere between 30% and 38%. Total employee compensation includes mandated employer expenses such as Social Security and Medicare. Other employee benefits include retirement and health care benefits as well as life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, vacation leave, tuition reimbursement and bonuses. There is incentive for people to want more of their compensation in a noncash form simply because of the different tax treatment. The bottom line is that prior to the government shutdown of our economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans were becoming richer and richer. The question before us now is how to get back on that path.
Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Just Facts has a couple of interesting takes in an article by its co-founder James D. Agresti and Dr. Andrew Glen titled &#8220;Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns.&#8221;
Scientific surveys of U.S. residents have found that the mental health of about one-third to one-half of all adults has been substantially compromised by government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are deaths from non-psychological causes, such as government-mandated and personal decisions to delay medical care, which has postponed tumor removals, cancer screenings, heart surgeries and treatments for other ailments that could lead to early death if not addressed in a timely manner. Interesting and sadly enough, New York state enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. but has 22 times the death rate of Florida, which had one of the mildest lockdowns.
As I pointed out in a recent column, intelligent decision-making requires one to not only pay attention to the benefits of an action but to its costs as well.
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.

One dollar bills

WILLIAMS: Some Facts Worth Knowing

COVID-19

Poverty

Is it important to have racial or sexual diversity in our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic? Heather Mac Donald suggests that some think it might be in her City Journal article &#8220;Should Identity Politics Dictate Vaccine Research?&#8221;
The funding priorities of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control suggests that they think diversity is an important input in making headway in the fight against the coronavirus. On April 20, NIH and CDC announced the availability of grants to increase the &#8220;diversity&#8221; of biomedical research labs. For example, academic virology researchers studying respiratory failure could receive hundreds of thousands more taxpayer dollars if they could find a woman or a minority to add to their project. High school students and college students are eligible for the program even though they cannot contribute anything of value. No scientific justification for the new diversity hire is needed. The scientists must promise to mentor the new hire, which will take time away from their research with no offsetting gain.
Mac Donald has written another article on academic insanity &#8220;The Therapeutic Campus&#8221; bearing the subtitle: &#8220;Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers?&#8221; Many colleges have created safe spaces where students can be sheltered from reality and not have their feelings hurt by others exercising their free speech rights. Yale University has created a safe space that would be the envy of most other universities. They have named it the Good Life Center. Mac Donald says it has &#8220;a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops,&#8221; and that &#8220;the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy.&#8221;
George Mason University has a Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, headed by a chief well-being officer. At George Mason, well-being refers to social justice and &#8220;building a life of vitality, purpose, resilience, and engagement,&#8221; the Center&#8217;s chief well-being officer told The Chronicle of Higher Education. By the way, a George Mason University student can minor in well-being as a part of his college education.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, in justifying his draconian coronavirus measures, said during a press conference: &#8220;This is about saving lives. If everything we do saves just one life, I&#8217;ll be happy.&#8221;
Cuomo knows that many Americans buy into such a seemingly caring statement that would be easily revealed as utter nonsense if one had just a modicum of economic knowledge. If one looked at only the benefits of an action, he would do anything because everything has a benefit. Prudent decision-making requires one to compare benefits to costs. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that in 2019 36,120 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. Virtually all those lives could have been saved with a mandated 5 mph speed limit. Those saved lives are the benefit. Fortunately, when we consider the costs and inconvenience of setting a 5 mph speed limit, we rightly conclude that saving those 36,120 lives isn&#8217;t worth it.
There are other news tidbits about politicians drunk with power that we Americans have given them. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told city residents who disobeyed her stay-at-home order: &#8220;We will arrest you and we will take you to jail. Period. We&#8217;re not playing games.&#8221; Meanwhile, in violation of her own stay-at-home order, Lightfoot slipped out and got her hair done. She explained her decision, &#8220;I take my personal hygiene very seriously.&#8221;
Ventura County, California, health director Dr. Robert Levin said that his department would forcibly remove COVID-19 infected people from their own homes and put them &#8220;into other kinds of housing that we have available.&#8221; Facing stiff criticism, Levin later explained: &#8220;I either misspoke or it was misinterpreted. I&#8217;ll take the blame of having misspoke.&#8221;
The biggest casualty from the COVID-19 pandemic has nothing to do with the disease. It&#8217;s the power we&#8217;ve given to politicians and bureaucrats. The question is how we recover our freedoms.
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.

Coronavirus

WILLIAMS: Insane News Tidbits

Andrew Cuomo

Safe Spaces

Black politicians, civil rights leaders and their white liberal advocates have little or no interest in doing anything effective to deal with what&#8217;s no less than an education crisis among black students. In city after city with large black populations, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., less than 10% of students test proficient in reading and math. For example, in 2016, in 13 Baltimore high schools, not a single student tested proficient in math. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state&#8217;s English test. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma.
Ballou High School is in Washington, D.C. Five percent of its students test proficient in reading and 1% test proficient in math. In 2017, all 189 students in Ballou High School&#8217;s senior class applied to college. All 189 members of the graduating class of 2017 were accepted to universities. In November 2017, an investigation showed that half of Ballou&#8217;s 2017 graduates had more than three months of unexcused absences. One in five of the graduating class was absent more than present, therefore missing more than 90 days of school.
Examples of academic underachievement can be seen at predominantly black public schools across the nation, but that&#8217;s only part of the story. The strangest part of this is that poor academic performance is accepted and tolerated by black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals. Poor performance is often blamed on finances; however, the poorest performing schools have the highest per pupil spending. New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore rank among the nation&#8217;s highest in per pupil educational spending.
The underachievement story is compounded by the gross dishonesty of colleges that admit many of these students. I cannot imagine that students who are not proficient in reading and math can do real college work. In a futile attempt to make up for 12 years of rotten education, colleges put these students in remedial courses. They also design courses with little or no true academic content. Colleges have their own agendas. They want the money that comes from admitting these students. Also, they want to make their diversity and multiculturalism administrators happy.
Poor black education is not preordained. Dr. Thomas Sowell has examined schools in New York City and student performance on the NY State English Language Arts Test in 2016-17. Thirty percent of Brooklyn&#8217;s William Floyd elementary school third graders scored well below proficient in English and language arts, but at Success Academy charter school in the same building, only one did. At William Floyd, 36% were below proficient, with 24% being proficient and none testing above proficient. By contrast, at Success Academy, only 17% of third graders were below proficient, with 70% being proficient and 11% being above proficient. Among Success Academy&#8217;s fourth graders, 51% and 43%, respectively, scored proficient and above proficient, while their William Floyd counterparts scored 23% and 6%, respectively. Similar high performance can be found in some other Manhattan charter schools such as KIPP Infinity Middle School.
Liberals tell us that racial integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Public charter schools such as those mentioned above belie that vision. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in all New York state schools who were recently tested scored at the &#8220;proficient&#8221; level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy tested proficient where blacks and Hispanics constitute 90% of the student body.
There&#8217;s little question that many charter schools provide superior educational opportunities for black youngsters. The New York Times wrote, &#8220;Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city&#8217;s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots.&#8221; But here&#8217;s New York Mayor Bill de Blasio&#8217;s take on charter schools, expressing the interests of the education establishment: &#8220;Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.&#8221;
Black people cannot afford to buy into any attack on education alternatives. Charter schools across the nation offer a way out of the educational abyss.
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.

Kid raising hand

WILLIAMS: Rotten Education Isn’t Preordained

Former Barack Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel, during a recent interview, reminded us of his 2008 financial crisis quotation, &#8220;Never allow a crisis to go to waste.&#8221; The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a wonderful opportunity for those of us who want greater control over our lives. Sadly, too many Americans have already taken the bait. We&#8217;ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats to dictate to us what&#8217;s an essential business and what isn&#8217;t, who has access to hospitals and who hasn&#8217;t, and a host of minor and major dictates.
Leftist politicians who want to get into our pocketbooks are beginning to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is the best argument for a wealth tax. Let&#8217;s first define a wealth tax. A wealth tax is applicable to and levied on a variety of accumulated assets that include cash, money market funds, real property, trust funds, owner-occupied housing and other wealth accumulations. Assume a taxpayer earns $150,000 a year and falls in the 32% tax bracket. That individual&#8217;s income tax liability for the year will be 32% x $150,000 or $48,800. Say the taxpayer has a net worth of $500,000 consisting of a business or home and the government imposes a wealth tax of 32%, the person&#8217;s tax liability is $160,000.
The problem with most politicians is when they enact a law, they seldom ask, &#8220;Then what?&#8221; They assume a world of what economists call zero elasticity wherein people behave after a tax is imposed just as they behaved before the tax was imposed and the only difference is that more money comes into the government&#8217;s tax coffers. The long-term effect of a wealth tax is that people will try to avoid it by not accumulating as much wealth or concealing the wealth they accumulate.
A wealth tax has become increasingly attractive because it lends itself to demagoguery about the significant wealth disparity in the United States. The Federal Reserve reports that, in 2018, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 70% of the country&#8217;s wealth, and the richest 1% owned 32% of the wealth. That fact gave Democratic presidential contenders such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren incentives to propose a wealth tax as a part of their campaign rhetoric. Leftists lament that multibillionaires such as Charles Koch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Sheldon Adelson have not made charitable efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.
My questions to these political leeches are: To whom does the billionaire&#8217;s wealth belong? And how did they accumulate such wealth?
Did they accumulate their great wealth by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man, as has been the case throughout most of human history? No, they accumulated great wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man in the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery and lack of understanding has led to &#8220;profit&#8221; becoming a dirty word. Profit is a payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants in a way that economizes on society&#8217;s scarce resources.
Here&#8217;s a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I&#8217;m guessing you&#8217;ll answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people. Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments&#8217; survival are not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the ability of government to impose taxes.
Some advocates of wealth taxes and other forms of taxation might argue that they are temporary measures to get us over the COVID-19 crisis. Do not buy that argument. The great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once said, &#8220;Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.&#8221; The telephone tax was levied on wealthy Americans with telephones in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. That tax was repealed over 100 years later in 2006. One of the objectives of the World War II withholding tax was to bring faster revenues to fight the war. The withholding of taxes is still with us blinding Americans on the taxes they pay. Let us not allow a crisis to bamboozle us again.
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.

$100 bills

WILLIAMS: Let’s Not Waste A Crisis

Taxes

Wealth Tax

The Department of Education just released results of the quadrennial National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in U.S. history, civics and geography given in 2018 to thousands of American eighth-graders: &#8220;Grade 8 Students&#8217; NAEP Scores Decline in Geography and U.S. History; Results in Civics Unchanged Since 2014.&#8221;
The tests were administered from January to March 2018 to a nationally representative sample of 42,700 eighth-graders from about 780 schools. The news is not very good. Only 24% of students performed at or above the &#8220;proficient&#8221; level in civics. Worse yet, only 15% scored proficient or above in American history and 25% were proficient in geography. At least 25% of America&#8217;s eighth-graders are what NAEP defines as &#8220;below basic&#8221; in U.S. history, civics and geography. That means they have no understanding of historical and civic issues and cannot point out basic locations on a map.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos referred to the recent national report card as &#8220;stark and inexcusable.&#8221; She blamed &#8220;antiquated&#8221; education methods for low test scores among the nation&#8217;s eighth-graders. That&#8217;s nonsense. I&#8217;d bet the rent money that eighth-grade students of earlier periods, say during the 1920s, &#8217;30s and &#8217;40s who were burdened with &#8220;antiquated&#8221; education methods such as having to learn algebra and geometry, identifying parts of speech and memorizing poems like &#8220;Old Ironsides&#8221; could run circles around today&#8217;s eighth-graders, high school graduates and perhaps some college graduates. I think we need to bring back these authentically antiquated education methods.
Part of the solution to our education problem is given by Dr. Jeffrey Sikkenga, professor of political science and executive director of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. He said: &#8220;Students need to go back to America&#8217;s past and ask it questions, starting with our Founding. They need to study great documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s &#8216;Gettysburg Address,&#8217; and Martin Luther King&#8217;s &#8216;I Have a Dream&#8217; speech. Not just read about them in boring textbooks, but read the documents themselves, for themselves. Have great conversations with those great minds — discover for themselves the story of America in the words of those who lived it.&#8221;
The school climate, seldom discussed, plays a very important role in education. During the 2017-18 school year, there were an estimated 962,300 violent incidents and 476,100 nonviolent incidents U.S. public schools nationwide. Seventy-one percent of schools reported having at least one violent incident, and 65% reported having at least one nonviolent incident. Schools with 1,000 or more students had at least one sworn law enforcement officer. About 90% of those law enforcement officers carry firearms.
I bet that decades ago, one would be hard put to find either armed or unarmed police officers patrolling the building. For example, between 1950 and 1954, I attended Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia. The only time we saw a police officer in the building was during an assembly where we had to listen to a boring lecture on safety. Today, police patrol the hallways. Another school in north Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion High School, once had 94 security cameras, six school police officers and two metal detectors. Students had to walk through the metal detectors to enter the building and were often searched by police officers. It was on the list of those most persistently dangerous schools in Pennsylvania.
Aside from violence, there are many instances of outright disrespect for teachers. First- and second-graders telling teachers to &#8220;Shut the f—- up&#8221; and calling teachers &#8220;bitch.&#8221; To note the attitude of some school administrators, a New Jersey teacher was seriously assaulted by a student. When she asked her principal to permanently remove the student from her classroom, the principal told her to &#8220;put on her big girl panties and deal with it.&#8221;
Years ago, the behavior of young people that we see today would have never been tolerated. There was the vice principal&#8217;s office where corporal punishment would be administered for gross infractions. If the kid was unwise enough to tell his parents what happened, he might get more punishment at home. Today, unfortunately, we&#8217;ve replaced practices that work with practices that sound good and caring, and we&#8217;re witnessing the results.
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.

Report card

WILLIAMS: The Nation’s Report Card

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a military historian and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He has written two articles relevant to today&#8217;s society. Last October he published, &#8220;Members of Previous Generations Now Seem Like Giants,&#8221; and he recently wrote, &#8220;Is America a Roaring Giant or Crying Baby?&#8221;
In the first article, Hanson starts with some observations and questions regarding the greatness of previous generations compared with today&#8217;s Americans. He asks: &#8220;Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years? &#8230; America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today?&#8221; Hanson observes: &#8220;We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.&#8221; Keep in mind that the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) had far greater firepower than the Afghan rebels that we&#8217;ve fought. Hanson also could have asked whether today&#8217;s Americans could build a 1,700-mile road such as the ALCAN Highway, connecting the lower 48 states to Alaska, whose construction started in March 1942 and was completed in October that year.
In terms of learning, Hanson asks whether anyone believes that a 2020 college graduate knows half of what a 1950 graduate knew. In the 1940s, he says, young people read the works of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. He doubts that today&#8217;s high school graduates could even finish &#8220;The Good Earth&#8221; or &#8220;The Grapes of Wrath.&#8221; I attended Benjamin Franklin High School from 1950 to 1954, and our senior English class required reading included Geoffrey Chaucer&#8217;s &#8220;The Canterbury Tales&#8221; and William Shakespeare&#8217;s &#8220;Macbeth&#8221; and &#8220;Julius Caesar.&#8221; By the way, when I attended Benjamin Franklin High, it was ranked the lowest among Philadelphia&#8217;s high schools.
Hanson&#8217;s second article asks whether our response to the COVID-19 epidemic will be that of a &#8220;roaring giant&#8221; or &#8220;crying baby.&#8221; We can awaken, just as we did on Dec. 8, 1941, with massive amounts of fight, ready to get on a war footing. For those who were not around then or do not know our history, in 1941 our nation had seven fleet aircraft carriers and one escort carrier. By 1945, it was deploying 27 fleet and 72 escort carriers. In December 1941, we had 2.2 million service members in the U.S. military. By the war&#8217;s end, there were more than 12 million Americans in the armed services. That&#8217;s an astonishing mobilization considering our population was a little over 132 million. What&#8217;s even more amazing is that our gross domestic product for 1944 exceeded the combined economic output of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Germany.
Hanson says that our other choice regarding the epidemic is whether to continue the partisan bickering and blaming. We can ignore the importance of the crisis and instead scapegoat and play the blame game. We can talk not of an America in crisis but of the virus&#8217;s effects on particular groups. We can decide that to hold China responsible for lying about the virus is mean, racist and, at best, xenophobic.
In other words, Hanson says, &#8220;The choice is ours whether America awakens as a roaring giant or a crying baby.&#8221; My prediction is that Americans, left to their own tendencies, will roar together as giants and will ignore the political and media crybabies.
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

WILLIAMS: Today’s Americans And Yesteryear’s Americans

One of the first lessons in an economics class is everything has a cost. That&#8217;s in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians talk about free stuff. In our personal lives, decision-making involves weighing costs against benefits. Businessmen make the same calculation if they want to stay in business. It&#8217;s an entirely different story for politicians running the government where any benefit, however minuscule, is often deemed to be worth any cost, however large.
Related to decision-making is the issue of being overly safe versus not safe enough. Sometimes, being as safe as one can be is worthless. A minor example: How many of us before driving our cars inspect the hydraulic brake system for damage? We&#8217;d be safer if we did, but most of us just assume everything is OK and get into our car and drive away. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 40,000 Americans lose their lives each year because of highway fatalities. Virtually all those lives could be saved with a mandated 5 mph speed limit. Fortunately, we consider costs and rightfully conclude that saving those 40,000 lives aren&#8217;t worth the costs and inconvenience of a 5 mph mandate.
With the costs and benefits in mind, we might examine our government&#8217;s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first thing to keep in mind about any crisis, be it war, natural disasters or pandemics, is we should keep markets open and private incentives strong. Markets solve problems because they provide the right incentives to use resources effectively. Federal, state and local governments have ordered an unprecedented and disastrous shutdown of much of the U.S. economy in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
There&#8217;s a strictly health-related downside to the shutdown of the U.S. economy ignored by our leadership that has been argued by epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City. Wittkowski argues that the lockdown prolongs the development of the &#8220;herd immunity,&#8221; which is our only weapon in &#8220;exterminating&#8221; the novel coronavirus — outside of a vaccine that&#8217;s going to optimistically take 18 months or more to produce. He says we should focus on shielding the elderly and people with comorbidities while allowing the young and healthy to associate with one another in order to build up immunities. Wittkowski says, &#8220;So, it&#8217;s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated.&#8221; Herd immunity, Wittkowski argues, would stop a &#8220;second wave&#8221; headed for the United States in the fall. Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, shares Wittkowski&#8217;s vision. Writing in The New York Times, he argued that our fight against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself.
The bottom line is that costs can be concealed but not eliminated. Moreover, if people only look at the benefits from a particular course of action, they will do just about anything, because everything has a benefit. Political hustlers and demagogues love promising benefits when the costs can easily be concealed. By the way, the best time to be wrong and persist in being wrong is when the costs of being wrong are borne by others.
The absolute worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possibly its most unrecoverable damage, is the massive power that Americans have given to their federal, state and local governments to regulate our lives in the name of protecting our health. Taking back that power should be the most urgent component of our recovery efforts. It&#8217;s going to be challenging; once a politician, and his bureaucracy, gains power, he will fight tooth and nail to keep it.
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.

Coronavirus shoppers

WILLIAMS: Benefits VS. Costs And COVID-19

Economy

America&#8217;s colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let&#8217;s first let&#8217;s examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, &#8220;Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.&#8221; The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by John Milton in defense of free speech.
Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities. They call these fields &#8220;grievance studies,&#8221; where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview. The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, queer, sexuality and critical race studies.
In 2017 and 2018, authors Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian started submitting bogus academic papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass peer review and be accepted for publication. Acceptance of dubious research that journal editors found sympathetic to their intersectional or postmodern leftist vision of the world proves the problem of low academic standards.
Several of the fake research papers were accepted for publication. The Fat Studies journal published a hoax paper that argued the term bodybuilding was exclusionary and should be replaced with &#8220;fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.&#8221; One reviewer said, &#8220;I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article and believe it has an important contribution to make to the field and this journal.&#8221; &#8220;Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,&#8221; was accepted for publication by Affilia, a feminist journal for social workers. The paper consisted in part of a rewritten passage from Mein Kampf. Two other hoax papers were published, including &#8220;Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks.&#8221; This paper&#8217;s subject was dog-on-dog rape. But the dog rape paper eventually forced Boghossian, Pluckrose and Lindsay to prematurely out themselves. A Wall Street Journal writer had figured out what they were doing.
Some papers accepted for publication in academic journals advocated training men like dogs and punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort. Other papers celebrated morbid obesity as a healthy life choice and advocated treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women. Typically, academic journal editors send submitted papers out to referees for review. In recommending acceptance for publication, many reviewers gave these papers glowing praise.
Political scientist Zach Goldberg ran certain grievance studies concepts through the Lexis/Nexis database, to see how often they appeared in our press over the years. He found huge increases in the usages of &#8220;white privilege,&#8221; &#8220;unconscious bias,&#8221; &#8220;critical race theory&#8221; and &#8220;whiteness.&#8221; All of this is being taught to college students, many of whom become primary and secondary school teachers who then indoctrinate our young people.
I doubt whether the coronavirus-caused financial crunch will give college and university administrators, who are a crossbreed between a parrot and jellyfish, the guts and backbone to restore academic respectability. Far too often, they get much of their political support from campus grievance people who are members of the faculty and diversity and multicultural administrative offices. The best hope lies with boards of trustees, though many serve as yes men for the university president. I think that a good start would be to find 1950s or 1960s catalogs. Look at the course offerings at a time when college graduates knew how to read, write and compute, and make them today&#8217;s curricula. Another helpful tool would be to give careful consideration to eliminating all classes/majors/minors containing the word &#8220;studies,&#8221; such as women, Asian, black or queer studies. I&#8217;d bet that by restoring the traditional academic mission to colleges, they would put a serious dent into the COVID-19 budget shortfall.
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.

WILLIAMS: Fixing College Corruption

We black people are so convenient and useful to America&#8217;s leftists. Whenever there&#8217;s a bit of silencing to be done, just accuse a detractor or critic of racism. A recent, particularly stupid, example is CNN&#8217;s Brandon Tensley&#8217;s complaint that the &#8220;Coronavirus task force is another example of Trump administration&#8217;s lack of diversity.&#8221; Tensley said the virus experts are &#8220;largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who&#8217;ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.&#8221; I&#8217;d like for Tensley to tell us just what racial or sex diversity contribute to finding a cure or treatment for the coronavirus.
Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people &#8220;eating raw bats and snakes.&#8221; He added that &#8220;They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that&#8217;s where it originated from.&#8221; Watter&#8217;s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.
It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they&#8217;re brazenly inventing it.
Jussie Smollett charged that two masked Trump supporters, wearing MAGA hats, using racial and homophobic insults attacked him. The anti-Trump media gobbled up Smollett&#8217;s story hook, line and sinker, but it turned out to be a hoax.
A large percentage of hate-crime hoaxes occur on college campuses. Andy Ngo writes about this in his City Journal article &#8220;Inventing Victimhood: Universities too often serve as &#8216;hate-crime hoax&#8217; mills.&#8221; St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass &#8220;anti-racism&#8221; protests that caused classes to be canceled. It turned out that a black student activist was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. Five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
Andy Ngo writes that there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as &#8220;hate-hoax mills,&#8221; encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators. These are diversity-crazed administrators, along with professors of race and gender studies, who nationwide spend billions of dollars on diversity and a multiculturalist agenda. Racial discord and other kinds of strife are their meal tickets to greater influence and bigger budgets.
There&#8217;s another set of beneficiaries to racial hoaxes and racial strife. These alleged incidents are invariably seized upon by politicians and activists looking to feed a sacrosanct belief among liberals that discrimination and oppression are the main drivers of inequality. Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal says &#8220;In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: &#8216;white privilege,&#8217; &#8216;cultural appropriation,&#8217; and &#8216;subtle bigotry.'&#8221; Riley mentions the work of Dr. Wilfred Reilly who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of a new book, &#8220;Hate Crime Hoax,&#8221; that states &#8220;a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.&#8221; Reilly put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He says that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said &#8220;with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large. We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.&#8221; But Reilly has a larger point to make, writing, &#8220;The Smollett case isn&#8217;t an outlier. Increasingly, it&#8217;s the norm. And the media&#8217;s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don&#8217;t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem.&#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.

Jussie Smollett

WILLIAMS: Manipulation Through Racial Hoaxes

Hate Crime

Race

Racism

I&#8217;m not sure whether COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, China, in the U.S. qualifies as a true disaster. Putting the disease in perspective, we might look at current influenza illnesses. According to Centers for Disease Control estimates, between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 14, 2020, there have been 390,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations as a result of the flu, 38,000,000 to 54,000,000 flu illnesses and 23,000 to 59,000 flu deaths. That&#8217;s compared with, as of March 27, a total of 85,356 cases of COVID-19 resulting in the deaths of 1,246 people.
But let&#8217;s agree that COVID-19 is a disaster and ask what the appropriate steps that are to deal with it. One of the first observations about any disaster is that the quantity demanded of many goods greatly exceeds the supply. There is a shortage. The natural market response when there is a shortage is for prices to rise. Rising prices produce several beneficial effects. They reduce the incentive for people to hoard while suppliers, motivated by the prospect of higher profits, are incentivized to produce more of the good in short supply.
Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have anti-price gouging laws that prohibit &#8220;excessive and unjustified&#8221; increases in prices of essential consumer goods and services during a federal, state or local declared emergency. Price gouging is legally defined as charging 10 to 25% more for something than you charged for it during the month before an emergency. Sellers convicted of price gouging face stiff fines and perhaps prison terms.
But what about hoarding? Often, hoarding creates the shortage. In uncertain times, people may purchase three dozen eggs instead of one dozen. They may want to maintain stockpiles of canned goods and buy up large quantities of cleaners, paper towels and toilet paper. This kind of behavior has left some with overflowing freezers, shelves of sanitizers and garages full of toilet paper while their neighbors are left either wanting for the same items or paying what some call &#8220;excessive and unjustified&#8221; prices.
While it&#8217;s difficult to get beyond emotions, the fact is that consumers are not forced to buy products for the higher (gouged) price. If they pay, it is likely because they see themselves as being better off acquiring the good than the alternative &#8211; keeping their money in their pocket. Higher prices charged have a couple of unappreciated benefits. First, they get people to economize on the use of the good whose price has risen. That is higher prices reduce demand and encourage conservation. That helps with the disaster.
With higher prices, profit-seeking suppliers know that they can make more money by bringing additional quantities of the goods to the market. This increases the supply of goods, which helps to drive prices back down. Anti-price gouging laws disrupt these two very important functions of the marketplace and enhance and prolong a disaster. In other words, in a disaster, we want people to economize their use of goods and services and we want suppliers of these goods and services to produce more. Rising prices encourage these actions. Anti-price gouging laws stymy those incentives and create the pretense that a disaster does not exist.
Some people might reluctantly agree that allowing prices to rise during a disaster helps allocate resources. But they&#8217;ll complain that&#8217;s not the intention of greedy sellers who are out to profit. I say, so what? It&#8217;s not sellers&#8217; intentions that count but what their actions accomplish that&#8217;s important — namely, getting people to conserve more and suppliers to produce more.
Many of the problems associated with a disaster would be eliminated if people&#8217;s buying behavior were the same as it was before the disaster. To get people to behave nicely and consider their neighbors is the ultimate challenge. I think rising prices are the best and most dependable way to get people to be considerate of their 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 <a href="http://www.creators.com">www.creators.com</a>.

Empty shelves

WILLIAMS: Managing A Disaster

Price Gouging

A recent report by Chris Stewart has shed new light on some of the educational problems faced by black youth. The report is titled &#8220;The Secret Shame: How America&#8217;s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.&#8221; Stewart is a self-described liberal and CEO of Brightbeam, a nonprofit network of education activists who want to hold progressive political leaders accountable.
The report asks, &#8220;So how do we explain outstandingly poor educational results for minority children in San Francisco — which also happens to be one of the wealthiest cities in the country?&#8221; &#8220;The Secret Shame&#8221; reports that progressive cities, on average, have black/white achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities. For example, in San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students it&#8217;s 12% — a 58-point gap. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading compared to 23% of black students — a 60-point gap.
Yet, three of the 12 conservative cities researchers looked at — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth — have effectively closed or even erased the gap in at least one of the academic categories studied, achieving a gap of zero or one. &#8220;The politically conservative Oklahoma City has even turned the tables on our typical thinking about race-based gaps,&#8221; says Stewart. Black students in Oklahoma City even have higher high school graduation rates than white students.
Had the &#8220;Secret Shame&#8221; study analyzed other cities, it would have found that educational outcomes for most black youngsters is a national disgrace. As of 2016, in Philadelphia, only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state&#8217;s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state&#8217;s English test.
National Assessment of Education Progress tests (also called the Nation&#8217;s Report Card) give further testament to the tragedy. In Philadelphia, 47% of its students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, it was, respectively, 59% and 49%. In Detroit, 73% scored below basic in math and 56% in reading. Below basic means that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his or her grade level.
Then there&#8217;s gross fraud practiced by the education establishment. High school graduation rates for black students range from a high of 84% in Texas to a low of 57% in Nevada and Oregon. However, according to ACT data, the percentage of black students judged to be college-ready in English, math, reading and science ranges from 17% in Massachusetts to only 3% in Mississippi. One concrete example of this fraud is the fact that Baltimore&#8217;s Frederick Douglass High School has a graduation rate of 70% while not a single student tested proficient in mathematics and only 3% did so in reading.
&#8220;The Secret Shame&#8221; report didn&#8217;t say why the black/white achievement gap was smaller in conservative cities compared to their progressive counterparts. But permit me to make a suggestion. An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, &#8220;5.8% of the nation&#8217;s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.&#8221; The Justice Department&#8217;s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education&#8217;s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation&#8217;s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents. These are schools with predominantly black student populations. My guess is that part of the reasons black academic achievement is greater in conservative cities is that schools are less tolerant of crime whereas schools in progressive cities make excuses.
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.

Raising hands

WILLIAMS: Progressive Cities And Black Education

Sen. Bernie Sanders said: &#8220;I believe that health care is a right of all people.&#8221; He&#8217;s not alone in that contention. That claim comes from Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. It is not just a health care right that people claim. There are &#8220;rights&#8221; to decent housing, decent food, a decent job and prescription drugs. In a free and moral society, do people have these rights? Let&#8217;s begin by asking ourselves: What is a right?
In the standard usage of the term, a &#8220;right&#8221; is something that exists simultaneously among people. In the case of our U.S. Constitutional decree, we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our individual right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness imposes no obligation upon another other than the duty of noninterference.
As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess simultaneously. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Similarly, I have a right to travel freely. Again, that right imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference.
Sanders&#8217; claim that health care is a right does impose obligations upon others. We see that by recognizing that there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy who gives resources to government to pay for medical services. Moreover, the money does not come from congressmen and state legislators reaching into their own pockets to pay for the service. That means that in order for government to provide medical services to someone who cannot afford it, it must use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the earnings of another American to provide that service.
Let&#8217;s apply this bogus concept of rights to my right to speak and travel freely. In the case of my right to free speech, it might impose obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone and audience. It may require newspapers or television stations to allow me to use their property to express my views. My right to travel freely might require that others provide me with resources to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations. What if I were to demand that others make sacrifices so that I can exercise my free speech and travel rights, I suspect that most Americans would say, &#8220;Williams, you have rights to free speech and you have a right to travel freely, but I&#8217;m not obligated to pay for them!&#8221;
A moral vision of rights does not mean that we should not help our fellow man in need. It means that helping with health care needs to be voluntary (i.e., free market decisions or voluntary donations to charities that provide health care.) The government&#8217;s role in health care is to protect this individual right to choose. As Senator Rand Paul was brave enough to say, &#8220;The basic assumption that you have a right to get something from somebody else means you have to endorse the concept of theft.&#8221;
Statists go further to claim that people have a &#8220;right&#8221; to housing, to a job, to an education, to an affordable wage. These so-called rights impose burdens on others in the form of involuntary servitude. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, it means that another person does not have a right to something he did earn.
The provision by the U.S. Congress of a so-called right to health care 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 another. When God gave Moses the Eighth Commandment — &#8220;Thou shalt not steal&#8221; — I am sure that He did not mean, &#8220;Thou shalt not steal — unless there is a majority vote in the U.S. Congress.&#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.

Medicare for All sign

WILLIAMS: Rights Versus Wishes

Bernie Sanders

Free Speech

Health Care

human rights

Medicare for All

Here are a few headlines about an African tragedy: &#8220;Africa&#8217;s Worst Locust Plague in Decades Threatens Millions&#8221; (The Wall Street Journal), &#8220;&#8216;Unprecedented&#8217; Locust Invasion Approaches Full-Blown Crisis&#8221; (Scientific American), &#8220;Somalia Declares Locust Outbreak a &#8216;National Emergency'&#8221; (The National) and &#8220;UN Calls for International Action on East Africa Locust Outbreak&#8221; (Bloomberg Green). This ongoing tragedy is mostly man-made, according to an analysis by Paul Driessen, who is a senior policy adviser with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
Driessen says that billions of desert locusts have attacked the eastern Africa nations of Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. According to the U.N., the locust attack in Kenya is the worst in 70 years and the worst in 25 years for other east African nations. Locusts are destroying crops and threatening tens of millions of Africans with lost livelihoods and starvation. These locust swarms can blanket 460 square miles at a time and consume more than 400 million pounds of vegetation daily. They reproduce fast, too, meaning locust swarms could be 500 times bigger in six months.
Africa&#8217;s locust plague is man-made. Economic development organizations and activist nongovernmental organizations have foisted &#8220;agroecology&#8221; on the poorest nations — an organic-style agriculture. They promote the virtues of peasant farming. So how do these poor farmers fight the locust plague? Driessen says: &#8220;Desperate Africans are responding with &#8216;time-tested&#8217; methods: whistling and shouting loudly, banging on metal buckets, waving blankets and sticks, crushing the bugs perhaps even roasting and eating them, under UN-approved nutrition programs. In Eritrea, they are using &#8216;more advanced&#8217; methods: hand-held and truck-mounted sprayers. In Kenya, police are firing machine guns and tear gas into the swarms!&#8221;
Antonio Guterres of Portugal, the U.N. secretary-general, claimed global warming as a cause of the problem. He said there is a link between climate change and the unprecedented locust crisis plaguing Ethiopia and East Africa. Guterres said: &#8220;Warmer seas mean more cyclones generating the perfect breeding ground for locusts. Today the swarms are as big as major cities and it is getting worse by the day.&#8221;
Guterres&#8217; suggestion that global warming is the cause of today&#8217;s plague is sheer nonsense. Locust infestations have been feared and revered throughout mankind&#8217;s history. Devastating locust attacks in Egypt around 1446 B.C. were mentioned in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. &#8220;The Iliad&#8221; describes locusts taking flight to escape fire. Plagues of locusts are also mentioned in the Quran.
Driessen concludes: &#8220;A primary reason this plague of locusts has overwhelmed East Africa — indeed, perhaps THE primary reason — is that the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, other UN agencies and multiple environmentalist NGOs have been extolling and imposing &#8216;agroecology&#8217; on Africa. This highly politicized &#8216;movement&#8217; rabidly opposes hybrid seeds, synthetic insecticides and fertilizers, biotechnology, and even mechanized equipment like tractors! Acceptance of its tenets and restrictions has become a condition for poor farmers getting seeds and other assistance, and their countries and local communities getting development loans and food aid.&#8221;
By the way, locusts are not only a threat to crops; they threaten people in another way. In early January, a Boeing 737 on final landing approach to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, found itself in the midst of a massive cloud of locusts swarming above the airport. The insects were sucked into the plane&#8217;s engines. Their bodies were splattered across the windshield blinding the pilots to the runway ahead. The Boeing 737 climbed above the swarm. The pilot depressurized the cabin so he could open the side window and reach around to clear the windshield by hand. Diverting to Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, the pilot was able to land the plane safely.
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.

Locusts

WILLIAMS: Another African Tragedy

Africa

Climate Change

Before former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg threw his hat into the 2020 presidential race, he defended the New York Police Department&#8217;s use of &#8220;stop, question and frisk&#8221; policing. At a United States Naval Academy&#8217;s 2019 Leadership Conference, Bloomberg said, &#8220;We focused on keeping kids from going through the correctional system &#8230; kids who walked around looking like they might have a gun, remove the gun from their pockets and stop it.&#8221; He claimed that as a result of his policy, New York&#8217;s murder rate fell from 650 a year to 300 the year he left office.
In the cases of Terry v. Ohio, Sibron v. New York, and Peters v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1968, granted limited approval to officers to stop, question and frisk, even though they lacked probable cause for an arrest, if the officer believed the subject to be dangerous. The Court&#8217;s decision made suspicion of danger to an officer grounds for a &#8220;reasonable search.&#8221;
The stop, question and frisk policy has taken on racial overtones because most of the people stopped are black men. Let&#8217;s look at the numbers. Last year, NYPD data showed that 93% of suspects arrested for murder were black or Hispanic. Ninety-six percent of those nabbed in shootings were also minorities. Eighty-eight percent of New York City&#8217;s homicide victims were black or Hispanic as were 96% of shooting victims. While these percentages have been roughly the same for decades, New York police have brought the absolute number of crimes, including homicides, way down from its 1990 peak at 2,245 to 289 homicides in 2018. Since blacks and Hispanics are the major victims of homicide, as a result of the NYPD&#8217;s proactive response to crime, possibly tens of thousands of blacks are living today who would otherwise be dead.
For a law-abiding black person to be stopped, questioned and frisked — in a word or two, be racially profiled — is truly insulting. However, to analyze the policy, let&#8217;s look at the origins of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. First of all, policemen are neither mind readers nor are they equipped with X-ray vision. That means good policing requires learning how to use an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess or proxy for some other difficult-to-observe characteristic. Thus, the reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling.
The reality is that race and other behavioral characteristics are correlated, including criminal behavior. That fact does not dispel the insult, embarrassment, anger and hurt a law-abiding black person might feel when being stopped by police, being watched in stores, being passed by taxi drivers, standing at traffic lights and hearing car door locks activated or being refused delivery by merchants who fear for their safety in his neighborhood.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a politician in pursuit of his own agenda. President Donald Trump is also a politician in pursuit of his own agenda. Both will deny their support for and talk down the policy of stop, question and frisk in an effort to curry favor with black voters. Most Bloomberg and Trump supporters don&#8217;t live under the horrible conditions that so many blacks live under in high crime cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit. Black people must ask what needs to be done to stop criminals from preying on them and making so many of their communities economic wastelands. If stop, question and frisk can contribute to that goal, so be it. They need not listen to politicians, academics, talking heads on the news and others.
I&#8217;ll add that even if the police, intimidated by leftists, are not doing their job to safeguard black residents in high crime communities, that doesn&#8217;t mean that black people should not organize to take independent measures to protect themselves.
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.

NYPD car

WILLIAMS: Stop, Question And Frisk

Donald Trump

Michael Bloomberg

Police

Stop-and-frisk

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on our nation. The leftward political bias, held by faculty members affiliated with the Democratic Party, at most institutions of higher education explains a lot of that disappointment. Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens document this bias in &#8220;Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges.&#8221;
Langbert and Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they found a Democratic to Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1, which varied by rank of institution and region. For donations to political candidates (using the Federal Election Commission database), they found a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors, compared with 2,081 Democratic donors.
Several consistent findings have emerged from Langbert and Stevens&#8217; study. The ratio of faculty who identify as or are registered as Democratic versus Republican almost always favors the Democratic Party. Democratic professors outnumber their Republican counterparts most in the humanities and social sciences, compared with the natural sciences and engineering. The ratio is 42:1 in anthropology, 27:1 in sociology and 27:1 in English. In the social sciences, Democratic registered faculty outnumber their Republican counterparts the least in economics 3:1. The partisan political slant is most extreme at the most highly rated institutions.
The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. Let&#8217;s look at a few. At University of California, Davis, last month, a mathematics professor faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for faculty &#8220;diversity statements.&#8221; University of California, San Diego, requires job applicants to admit to the &#8220;barriers&#8221; preventing women and minorities from full participation in campus life. At American University, a history professor recently wrote a book in which he advocates repealing the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said, &#8220;Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness.&#8221; University of California, Berkeley, professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich chimed in to say: &#8220;Think about this: Iowa is 90.7% white. Iowa is now the only state with a lifetime voting ban for people with a felony conviction. Black people make up 4% of Iowa&#8217;s population but 26% of the prison population. How is this representative of our electorate?&#8221; A Williams College professor said he would advocate for social justice to be included in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University no longer have to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.
Then there&#8217;s a question about loyalty to our nation. Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested earlier this year on accusations that he made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about work he did for a program run by the Chinese government that seeks to lure American talent to China. He was paid $50,000 a month and up to $158,000 in living expenses for his work, which involved cultivating young teachers and students, according to court documents. According to the Department of Justice, Lieber helped China &#8220;cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China&#8217;s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not just Harvard professors. Newly found court records reveal that Emory University neuroscientist Li Xiao-Jiang was fired in late 2019 after being charged with lying about his own ties to China. Li was part of the same Chinese program as Lieber. A jury found a University of California, Los Angeles, professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. Newsweek reported that he was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges. Meanwhile, NBC reported that federal prosecutors say that University of Texas professor Bo Mao attempted to steal U.S. technology by using his position as a professor to obtain access to protected circuitry and then handing it over to the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.
The true tragedy is that so many Americans are blind to the fact that today&#8217;s colleges and universities pose a threat on several fronts to the well-being of our nation.
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

WILLIAMS: Political Bias And Anti-Americanism On College Campuses

Leftism

Progressivism

&#8220;A More or Less Perfect Union&#8221; is a three-part series, produced by Free to Choose Network, that will air on various PBS stations across the nation starting in February. The documentary is a personal exploration of the U.S. Constitution by Justice Douglas Ginsburg, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit and is now a senior justice on the court. Ginsburg explores the U.S. Constitution and features interviews with and gains the perspectives from constitutional experts of all political views — liberal, conservative and libertarian. He examines the key issues of liberty in the U.S. both from a historical and contemporary perspective. Among those issues are freedom of the press and religion, slavery and civil rights, the Second Amendment, separation of powers and the number of ways that the Constitution&#8217;s framers sought to limit the power of the federal government.
The first episode is titled &#8220;A Constitution in Writing.&#8221; It examines the contentious atmosphere that arose among the delegates in that hot, humid Philadelphia summer of 1787. State delegates were sent to Philadelphia to work out the problems of the Articles of Confederation, which served as the first Constitution of the 13 original states. This part of the documentary examines some of the efforts to deal with the problems of the Articles of Confederation while maintaining its guiding principle to preserve the independence and sovereignty of the states. It also examines the compromises and struggles that led to the document we know as the U.S. Constitution. Some of the framers, particularly the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry, saw the Constitution as defective and demanded amendments be added that contained specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights and clear limitations on the federal government&#8217;s power. They swore that they would never ratify the Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights.
The second episode is titled &#8220;A Constitution for All.&#8221; One major emphasis of this episode is the examination of the Supreme Court decisions that undermined racial justice both for slaves and later ex-slaves for a century after the Civil War. Several constitutional scholars discuss how the courts and states ignored and weakened the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Civil War Amendments, which were designed to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves. There is also discussion of Bill of Rights guarantees to people accused of a crime. There is more exploration into the Bill of Rights guarantees of free speech, religious freedom and the notion that &#8220;due process of law&#8221; be part of any proceeding that denies a citizen &#8220;life, liberty or property.&#8221; This forced the government to compensate citizens when it takes private property for public use.
Episode three, &#8220;Our Constitution at Risk,&#8221; examines the many ways that our Constitution is under assault today. It points out that the framers would be shocked by how all three branches of government have grown as a result of what we the people demand from our elected representatives. There&#8217;s a discussion about how some of our Bill of Rights guarantees mean absolutely nothing today, namely the 9th and 10th Amendments, which reaffirm personal liberty by specifically limiting the federal government to its &#8220;enumerated powers.&#8221;
&#8220;A More or Less Perfect Union&#8221; is not just a bunch of academics and constitutional experts preaching. It features interviews with everyday Americans weighing in with their visions on the rule of law, the branches of government and the debate over originalism. There&#8217;s a companion book titled &#8220;Voices of Our Republic,&#8221; edited by Ginsburg. It is a collection of thoughts about the Constitution from judges, journalists, and academics. It includes the thoughts of Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Neil Gorsuch and Sandra Day O&#8217;Connor, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, professor Alan Dershowitz, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and historians Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow, along with Jack Nicklaus, Gene Simmons and many others.
The most important audience for &#8220;A More or Less Perfect Union&#8221; is high school and college students. For it is they who stand a good chance of losing the liberties that made our nation the greatest and freest on earth.
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

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WILLIAMS: Rights Versus Wishes

WILLIAMS: Another African Tragedy

WILLIAMS: Stop, Question And Frisk

WILLIAMS: Political Bias And Anti-Americanism On College Campuses

WILLIAMS: A More Or Less Perfect Union

Menu

WILLIAMS: Charter Schools And Their Enemies

WILLIAMS: An Underappreciated American Scholar

WILLIAMS: Now What?

WILLIAMS: The True Plight Of Black Americans

WILLIAMS: Some Facts Worth Knowing

WILLIAMS: Insane News Tidbits

WILLIAMS: Rotten Education Isn’t Preordained

WILLIAMS: Let’s Not Waste A Crisis

WILLIAMS: The Nation’s Report Card

WILLIAMS: Today’s Americans And Yesteryear’s Americans

WILLIAMS: Benefits VS. Costs And COVID-19

WILLIAMS: Fixing College Corruption

WILLIAMS: Manipulation Through Racial Hoaxes

WILLIAMS: Managing A Disaster

WILLIAMS: Progressive Cities And Black Education

WILLIAMS: Rights Versus Wishes

WILLIAMS: Another African Tragedy

WILLIAMS: Stop, Question And Frisk

WILLIAMS: Political Bias And Anti-Americanism On College Campuses

WILLIAMS: A More Or Less Perfect Union

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