Thomas Sowell: Ignoring Economics (Part I)

Creator's Syndicate ^ | November 15, 2005 | Dr. Thomas Sowell

[bkepley]

What is your final solution for muslims living in America?

[GladesGuru]

I suggest "doing a Mormon". I refer to the choice we gave to the Mormons because of the following:
1. The religious questions were incompatable.
2. We had the leverage due to comparitive strength differences.
3. It worked.

[bvw]

An astute point.

Law is inalienably based upon what we being idoits call "religion". Were we culturally wiser and more intelligent we would be unable to seperate law from religion. But idiocy allows us the fool's pleasure of so doing.

[Willie Green]

We could almost think of France as a huge laboratory, in which Sowell's clear-headed ideas have been tested and validated

Sowell's focus on the minimum wage is overly simplistic.
It ignores that France flooded its labor market with immigration and subjected it to competition within the European Union while other Euroweenie nations were also being flooded with immigrants along with absorbing labor from the former communist bloc.

In his treatise on "comparative advantage", globalization deity David Ricardo asserted that the "natural price" of labor stabilizes at the subsistance level.

Through willful neglect of massive illegal immigration and pursuit of "free trade" agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, etc.), George W. Bush is attempting to engineer the same conditions for us that France is currently suffering. It's all part of "The Race to the Bottom".

[GladesGuru]

My step father told me that probably Moses outlawed pork because he knew about trichinosis. Religion can be seen accurately, I think, as the distilled experience of the culture that practices it.

A case can be made that Islam is proof positive of that hypothesis.

[bkepley]

I suggest "doing a Mormon". I refer to the choice we gave to the Mormons because of the following:

Meaning? And what of those who refuse?

[syriacus]

Thanks for the information. I will keep it in mind.

Sowell's focus on the minimum wage is overly simplistic.

I've read a number of Sowell's books and find his thinking clear-headed.

[Willie Green]

I've read a number of Sowell's books and find his thinking clear-headed.

Sowell's a helluva lot better than Walter Williams, but that's not saying much.

[GladesGuru]

America told the Utah Territory that a condition of joining the union was that a central Mormon belief, that practice known as plural marriage, had to go.

It did.

Lo and behold - the spirit of Joseph Smith appeared to the Elders and doctrine changed.

It also changed when the Mormons dropped their belief that the "children of Ham" were cursed. Seems that the Civil Rights movement was none too pleased with racial discrimination of that egregious a level.

Presto - Chango. And the Mormons decided blacks were not the accursed of God after all.

And before anyone decides to flame me because I wrote of the Mormon religious changes as I did, let me remind one and all that while the original Mormon faith allowed more than one wife, divorce was practically unavailable.

Now we secular Americans have easy divorce. Which is really sequential Pygmy.