Posted on 07/13/2020 4:49:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Fifty-five-plus books on the table and more on the way. Charter Schools and Their Enemies, another bestseller, is hot off the press. The Thomas Sowell corpus stands as one of the rare and most impressive monuments of massive and meticulous research ever erected on this earth by one person. He came up from 1930s poverty-stricken Jim Crow North Carolina, a high school dropout, a stint with the United States Marine Corps, scraping and clawing his way through the streets of post-Renaissance Harlem and then the halls of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and now he has four decades behind him at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
One summer working a government job accomplished what multiple semesters under Nobel Prizewinning conservative economist Milton Friedman could not it separated Sowell from his Marxist views. Sowell always tests theories by real life, not the reverse. And what a fruitful separation it has been.
Sowell's books sell, and he boasts a global following, but the left works hard to keep his voice out of the mainstream and out of higher education. The pampered socialist and pre-Marxist products pumped out of our colleges and universities into the other culture-shaping institutions of America are proof enough of that.
But a smitten stream of conservatives couldn't resist Sowell when he burst onto the national scene. There he was in 1981, poised and confident at 51, seated opposite William F. Buckley on PBS's Firing Line. But how much of Sowell's unmatched wisdom has really been examined and put to fruitful use across the decades? Not nearly enough.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I checked the source of your comment that the collapse of export demand for U.S. farm product could not have been “the” cause or even “a” cause of the Great Depression because trade was a small part of the entire U.S. economy.
https://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/smoot.shtml
Neat the way the fellow compares the collapse in exports to the entire U.S. economy, as opposed to comparing the collapse in exports to the farm economy. It is not controversial that the collapse in export demand subsequent to Smoot-Hawley devastated the farm economy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_crisis#Crisis_of_the_1920s_and_1930s
As to what was or were the causes of the Great Depression, the reference gives the Democrat / FDR / progressive / socialist hypothesis of a roaring stock market and income inequality.
Perhaps you know that FDR and his progressive socialist economists were in total control of the federal government following 1932. Yet, they didn’t fix the problem. The country continued to have double-digit unemployment for ten more years. And, full employment during World War II was (understandably I’d say) for war production.
Only after FDR left the scene to be succeeded by relatively moderate Harry Truman, and the Republican victory in the 1946 midterm elections did the economy recover in terms of both employment and consumption.
The progressive socialist economists, being true believers is their religion of big government thought, OMG! we’re going to fall back into the Great Depression. But, no, with a return to a free-market, the country embarked on strong economic growth. In Germany, it was called a miracle. But, our recovery was no less of a miracle.
So, if the free traitor hypothesis of the Great Depression falls short, to what do you subscribe? The progressive socialist hypothesis that the country had to be punished for the Roaring Twenties? Is there another option?
Hahahaha...for attack dog mode, we could put Dan Bongino on there to light the fires on the other side...:)
I like a mix...if only Phyllis Schlafly were still alive!
I have always liked Walter Williams.
Yes sir.
What’s interesting, as I read your comment and think about what I wrote, it has nothing to do with them being black guys. That’s one thing I didn’t even think about, but now that I am, it’s pretty amazing that some of my first team picks would be black.
I’d take Ben Carson in a minute. Soft spoken but he puts it out there about as plainly as anyone and I’ve yet to hear him say anything wrong.
Another would be Carol Swain. Woman should be the Mayor of Nashville, but that city is gone and now run by radical Leftists. Never to return to its former glory.
That “thinking” has brought us ( and the world ) to with an inch of total Chinese economic hegemony.
Love Dinesh D’Souza...I am currently listening to “The United States of Socialism”
My favorite book of his is “What’s So Great About America?”
That book explains why this is still the greatest country on the face of the earth, and why people want to come here.
It isn’t just for, as the enemies (the Left, the Media, and Islamic fundamentalists among them) like to say “The Bitch Dollar”.
It is because, even with all the BS put on this country by the Left, an individual and come here, BE an American, and rise up to be a top earner. ANYONE can do it.
The Left and our other enemies HATE that.
Sowell has had the bigger influence on me, but my children have had to sit and endure Walter Williams on YouTube to learn about economics. He is such an incredible teacher!
Dinesh would deserve a spot on the panel if he could stay focused on the subject at hand. There are very few people who know the history of the left like he does.
Hahahahaha...I thought that was an apt presentation of humor to make a point!
I had this conversation with another Freeper about the intellectual underpinnings of the way some people make decisions about things.
Some people view complex issues in a Manichean way, and not just a little. We all view things in somewhat black and white terms, especially when we have boiled an issue down to its more fundamental premises so we can make it black and white, and from that boiled down state, make a choice between two things.
The problem with some people is that they simply start off at 20,000 feet and makes their choice at that altitude without boiling it down.
Of course, when one boils it down to “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879” or “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912, well, I guess it is a cleavage point and you can only go one way or another...:)
But some people make those choices without boiling it down even a little. Very reminiscent of people who brand someone a “Never Trumper” based on a 20,000 foot view.
Carson is not a very assertive or authoritative speaker. It is not his words, which are correct, but his soft-spoken style is not really conducive to a debate. I like him very much, but he is too easy to talk over.
Carol is fantastic and I started listening to interviews with her a few years ago on YouTube. She really gets it and her intellectual honesty is refreshing. I could care less what “color” any of them are, it is their ideas that resonate deeply.
Bongino is really good. Especially because he talks like a regular guy and comes across as someone that would have no problem punching someone in the throat.
Tucker Carlson is in the same boat, but rather than punching someone, it’s his very dry sarcasm that would drive them insane.
Schafly....my bad, forgot about her. But, she’s definitely on the Dream Team.
What is blindingly obvious is, the Left would have nobody to stand toe to toe with them.
Heh, the Left is going to come after you for what they would view as child abuse!
Much in the same way we would go after them for teaching pre-schoolers about homosexuality, except you happen to be correct and a great parent for having them endure Walter Williams!
As for homosexuality and pre-schoolers...well, that speaks for itself.
It's not attractive to millions of workers and economically devastated cities and small towns all over the USA that once were the engine of the economy. This is the rub, you can make a great profit making things in the USA and selling to other Americans, or you can make a little more profit, increase the margin, using coolie labor and 3rd world labor. These Free Traitors can only get away with this because the likes of Sowell spread false economic theory and apply falsely the idea of comparative advantage between the 3rd world and the 1st world.
If Adam Smith has proposed in the 18th century to off shore all of England's factories to the 3rd world ( in this case the colonies ) and re import those goods duty free he would have been hung. Yet our Free Traitors walk around with nary a worry in the world. I don't get it. Their time is coming though..
He teaches snake oil free trade.
Sowell is completely about free markets. He’s not a globalist. I suppose the real problem arises when another country unfairly uses tarrifs on your country among other underhanded strategies.
Regardless, a country that utilizes free market ideas should always win out even against the power of China, that is if the economy isn’t hamstrung by the Federal government, which it is.
Sowell advocates loosening the bonds the Federal government places on all Americans through crushing regulation and taxes. If it weren’t for that we would crush China.
That would be, for the Left, like coming to a Battle of Wits unarmed.
Really, who on their side would they choose? Some dried up, dessicated old bag of crap like Noam Chomsky? THAT would have huge entertainment value for us, even at Thomas Sowell’s advanced age.
They don’t have anyone. And if you watch the videos of Thomas Sowell going up against the “Lights of the Left” like Francis Fox Piven, they didn’t have a chance against him because...
He had facts on his side, and was able to present them in an environment where refuting them by labeling him or calling him names simply didn’t work.
I notice how they stopped that practice of trying to go toe to toe with him after the Seventies, and decided to shut him up instead by ignoring him, labeling him, and suppressing his authorship.
He defines globalist. It not just the good Dr., globalist economic policies in general cause huge domestic social and political problems and alleviate them in the countries that are being use to produce goods imported into the USA ( like China and Mexico ).
Exactly so.
I believe in the concept of a Free Market, but the Chinese have amply illustrated they are not in the business of a “Free Market”, so we shouldn’t treat them as such partners.
A great book that explains in nauseating depth is “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept” by Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.)
I am wholly in favor of using tariffs in these cases against China. On this I disagree with Thomas Sowell.
But I don’t believe that, in the end, unless tariffs change the behavior of the Communist Chinese, our own government will do what is needed on our side to unfetter industry in this country...barring some huge change in the political environment, which is, I suppose, possible.
It’s a fallacy the industry cares about govt. taxes, rules and regulation. It only costs pennies on the dollar to comply with those and it keeps the under capitalized upstarts out of the market.
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