Stop and think: Part III

There is a lot of inertia in politics. The "solid South" voted for Democrats in every Presidential election for more than a century. Blacks have voted for every Democratic candidate for President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Al Gore. The Jewish vote has been just about as solidly Democratic as that of blacks.

Recent polls suggest that President Bush will get a higher percentage of the black vote in this election than he did in the 2000 election -- and higher than Republican Presidential candidates have been getting in recent times. More blacks are apparently stopping to think.

There is probably no group that has been hurt so much when they voted by inertia. The reason is that the Democrats' most influential constituencies have interests and agendas with major negative impacts on blacks.

No special interest group within the Democratic party has as much influence -- domination might be a better word -- as the teachers' unions. The top priority of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers is their members' jobs.

Even black Democrats in Congress seldom dare to cross these unions by supporting anything that would threaten unionized teachers' jobs, such as vouchers or any other form of choice that would allow black parents to take their children out of failing and dangerous schools.

Parents may think that public schools exist to educate their children but, to the teachers' unions, these schools exist to provide their members with jobs, with iron-class tenure, and with pay increases based on seniority, not performance. If maintaining that status quo means sacrificing the education of a whole generation of young blacks, the teachers' unions will do it.

Blacks have millions of votes but, so long as those votes go automatically to the Democrats, there is no need for Democrats to do anything for blacks that would rile up the teachers' unions. Not when Democrats can get black voter turnout just by coming up with some scare rhetoric.

Another major constituency of the Democratic party are the environmentalists. Where you find a concentration of liberal, Democratic environmentalists in political control for decades, as on the San Francisco peninsula, you find housing costs driven up so high by all their restrictions against building that ordinary working people are increasingly forced out of the area.

Tens of thousands of blacks left San Francisco during a decade when the total population of the city was rising by tens of thousands. The same was true in adjoining San Mateo County.

When environmentalists ban housing under the pretty name of "open space" laws, they say that it is to prevent "over-crowding." But such laws don't reduce the amount of crowding in the slightest. The crowding just takes place somewhere else. Black communities are among the somewhere elses.

Other restriction promoted by environmental extremists cost jobs and drive up the cost of producing goods and services -- which is to say, they drive up the cost of living and make it harder to find jobs to pay for it.

Green zealots go through life leaving havoc in their wake and feeling good about themselves as lofty idealists. Blacks are among the many people on whom the cost of their idealism falls -- and blacks are among those least able to afford it.

What blacks can also least afford are liberal judges who turn criminals loose. Those criminals don't hang out where the judges live but many of them commit their crimes in black neighborhoods. Their presence also means higher costs of living, as local stores pass on the costs of theft, vandalism, and violence.

Who appoints liberal judges? Conservatives? Not very likely. Look for lots more liberal judges if you elect a liberal President.

That means judges who will turn more criminals loose and impose their own pet notions as "law," including gay marriage in all likelihood, with the net effect being more AIDS when the gay lifestyle is legitimized to the young.

Political inertia is powerful, but the time is overdue for more black voters to look beyond the rhetoric and images to the realities that affect themselves and their children.

I love The Vision of the Anointed. The optional reality chapter is spot on.

"FAIR" IS ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is "fair," this means that there must be some third party with power -- the government -- to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with "fairness."

Among the many innocent casualties of the "war on drugs" are terminally ill patients who suffer needless pain because drug-control bureaucrats can create trouble for doctors who prescribe enough narcotics to give them relief.

The next time some academics tell you how important "diversity" is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Despite a widespread belief that hostility across racial lines is the worst kind of hostility, the worst atrocities of the past decade have been committed by white people against other white people in the Balkans and by black people against other black people in Rwanda.

Now that we know what dumb teachers there are in Massachusetts, it is no wonder that the voters there keep electing people like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank.

The American Council on Science and Health's publication "Facts versus Fears" exposes unfounded media scares over the past 3 decades -- about DDT, asbestos, Love Canal, Three-Mile Island, Alar, etc.

Someone ought to keep track of the judges who freed Susan McDougal and dismissed tax evasion charges against Webster Hubbell. See if they end up getting presidential appointments or jobs at Revlon.

What do automobiles, guns, and home-schooling all have in common that makes the liberals hate them? All these things reduce individual dependence on the government and on the grandiose schemes for other people's lives created by liberals and imposed by government.

All sorts of institutions, including corporations and the army, manage to teach people not only their particular skills but often also the basics that people were supposed to get in our public schools. Yet those who run the public schools talk as if they have some mysterious "expertise" beyond the grasp of critics.

No one can really understand the political left without understanding that they are about making themselves feel superior, however much they may talk piously about what they are going to do to help others. The left's lack of interest in testing the actual results of their bright ideas against hard facts betrays what their real interest is.

Gun control advocates have gotten a lot of political mileage out of the inflammatory phrase "assault weapons," without having to define it. This vague language lets them leave audiences thinking that they are talking about machine guns, which have already been heavily regulated for more than half a century.

Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics: "Ironically, the birth of a child is registered as a reduction in national income per head, while the birth of a calf shows up as an improvement."

The latest crusade among liberals is to seek release for older prisoners who are presumably harmless now. But anyone with enough strength left to pull a trigger is dangerous. Moreover, when someone is sentenced to 20 years, why should it not mean 20 years? Are such sentences just placebos for the public?

The environmental Nazis treat national parks as their own personal property and want the millions of other taxpayers who pay for these parks to be treated as interlopers, who are to be kept out if possible, and admitted if necessary, only if they conform to the vision of the environmental Nazis.

Parents who kept their children out of the public schools and taught them at home used to have to take on a huge task all by themselves. But today there are home-schooling associations, home-schooling teaching materials, and a magazine called "Home-Schooling News."

Are umpires so lazy that they cannot be bothered to keep track of where home plate is when calling balls and strikes, and simply allow themselves to be decoyed by where the catcher takes his position? The league authorities could at least install a video camera to keep track of what percentage of the "strikes" called by various umpires never crossed the plate.

A Thomas Sowell Reader...

July 11:

To those who do not want to face up to hard and brutal choices in a nuclear age, the magic formula is to turn to something called "the international community" -- or, more concretely, the United Nations or "our European allies." As with so many rhetorical solutions to hard problems, the specific realities behind the rhetoric get very little attention.

What is the actual track record of the UN or Europe? Is it something to rely on, in life and death decisions?

The UN stood idly by in Rwanda while mass slaughters went on. The UN passed resolution after resolution on Iraq for years, without taking any action to enforce them. Indeed, the UN was part of the massive corruption in the oil-for-food program, which enabled Saddam Hussein to divert money intended to feed the Iraqi people into buying weapons and palaces for himself.

July 8:

Nations do not wait for iron-clad proof when there are lethal threats. The massive Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb was begun when the United States was at peace because of reports that Hitler's scientists were working on such a weapon.

We had no proof -- and, after Germany surrendered, it turned out that Hitler's atomic bomb project was nowhere near the stage that we feared. But we couldn't take that chance.

People who talk glibly about "intelligence failure" act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything. But intelligence-gathering has always been a chancy business. In a nuclear age, the only thing that makes sense is to fail safe -- and strike pre-emptively, if necessary. If that offends people who think and talk in abstract terms about international law, then it is better that they be offended than that we wake up some morning and find New York or Chicago in radioactive ruins.

It was Saddam Hussein who chose to play cat-and-mouse with the weapons inspectors whom he had agreed to let monitor Iraqi facilities as part of the peace treaty ending the first Gulf War. It was his intelligence failure to think that he could keep on doing that indefinitely.

May 26:

Senator Kerry has no choice but to pretend to be something that he is not, both personally and politically. An aloof and self-infatuated man who is not liked even by fellow Democrats in the Senate, Kerry has to learn to smile and act like a regular guy during the election campaign.

Senator Kerry has even had to learn to pronounce his wife's name the way Americans pronounce it, rather than the way it is pronounced in Europe, which is the way he pronounced it all these years, before he became a presidential candidate.

John Kerry should get the Academy award if he succeeds in this year's challenging acting performance -- but not the presidency.

Above all, Senator Kerry cannot run as a Massachusetts liberal on the left fringe of American politics. Instead, both he and his supporters in the media must decry the use of "labels" -- even as they call Bush's Cabinet members "chicken hawks."

All attempts to expose what Senator Kerry has actually said and done in his long political career are denounced as "personal attacks" and "negative advertising" -- as if it is worse to tell the truth than to let someone lie his way into the White House by projecting a completely false image that his handlers have manufactured.

Nothing is more phony than Kerry's statement that he would welcome being considered the second "black" president -- Bill Clinton having been considered the first. Now one of the Democrats' own black strategists has pointed out publicly that blacks are rare as hen's teeth in Kerry's campaign team.

May 11:

It is hard to think of a war in which we did not confront terrible setbacks at some point, beginning with the American military defeats in the war for independence, the British setting fire to the White House during the War of 1812, numerous bloody disasters during the Civil War, and Pearl Harbor in World War II.

No one in World War II demanded that President Roosevelt present them with a timetable for the end of the war, much less for when our military occupation would end in Europe. Nor did anyone demand to know how much the war would cost in dollars and cents.

But the maturity to think beyond the moment has apparently become far more scarce today than it was in the days of the greatest generation. Will future historians call us the childish generation?

How much today's childishness will cost this country in the long run only the future will tell -- and it may tell in blood.

April 14:

All this political grandstanding is taking place in the shadow of the greatest danger our nation has ever faced. North Korea is not only rebuilding its nuclear capacity, it is a threat to sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations, including those who planned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Make no mistake about it. We could wake up some morning and find American cities in smoldering radioactive ruins.

Against the background, partisan political grandstanding is obscene. It is as if officers on the Titanic were spending their time arguing among themselves about who should have seen the iceberg, instead of getting people into lifeboats.

We already know that our enemies are following American political bickering. Senator John Kerry's political statements are being reported extensively in North Korea's government-controlled press. The North Korean regime is no doubt among the foreign supporters who want him to win this year's election.

February 10:

Negotiations are not a substitute for force. When international negotiations work, often it is because aggressors know what is going to happen if it doesn't work.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/archive.shtml

Thank you, Professor Sowell!

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