A good half of the world will not recognize that the looter is the greedy one.
A+
(as usual)
It is like a starving man who sees a meal, knowing it will never be his.
Sowell's work demolishes many, if not all, liberal tropes related to racism, equality, and income disparity.
Brilliant work.
But I have come to the conclusion it is all for naught. The people who need to read it the most are the ones who will never read it and will resist reading it and understanding it to the last.
To quote Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
In this case, liberals are so heavily invested that, if they were to read Sowell's work with an open mind, they might well have their entire liberal edifice come crashing down on top of themselves. And they can't let that happen.
“Rich Bastards” pretty much sums up the governing philosophy of the Left. Someone once told me that the measure of your character defects is the difference between what you want out of life and how hard you are willing to work to get it. If you want a nice car but are not willing to work to get it, you will steal one, or be envious of people who have them.
He left out the connection between the facts and the conclusion, here. "Studies show" (wizard words ;-) that a child's school success can be predicted based on the number of words the child understands when he starts school. Verbal comprehension is both in itself a key academic ability, and a marker for a whole array of factors that contributed to academic success.
The “rest of the story” is the biographical information that Sowell is too modest to refer to in his article.
In “A Personal Odyssey” Sowell recounts his childhood in Harlem and his tough time in the educational system. He had to drop out of High School but after the Marine Corps ended up magna cum laude at Harvard for his Bachelors in economics. Working hard and eventually getting a doctorate from the University of Chicago, he left his early study of Marx and became a free market man through force of intelligent observation, not through some sort of political conversion.
He was the perfect candidate for the politics of race and victimization, but just too damn intelligent to buy into it.
At age 84 this brilliant man is still writing the most deep and thoughtful books as well as his columns that are wonderful educational moments.
If we had to pick the four writers that redefined modern conservatism in the chronological order of their ascendancy, we could do no better than Russell Kirk — Fredric Hayek — Milton Friedman — Thomas Sowell.
One problem with leftists and “equality” is that their solutions never equalize up; they always close the gap by lowering everyone.
Seems like a no brainer, which explains a lot of peeps choices.
Nine times out of ten, when I hear someone bellyaching about “inequality” nowadays, I’m actually hearing “I want a free ride!”