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 Prize–winning 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 ...
Thirty years ago, I was in college. It was becoming rife with political correctness. And the “climate change” activists were also beginning to bleat.
Amen! Bump!
I disagree.
If the costs of manufacturing go up due to legislation, or additional corporate taxes are required, the company simply adds that cost onto their products and that company becomes, as is commonly said, a tax collector for the government. It becomes a pass through cost.
But just because it is a pass through cost, that does not mean there is no cost.
That means the taxpayer has to pay more for a product, and is going to have to earn more to buy products, driving wages up, which puts US industry at a competitive disadvantage.
And that is by no means the only mechanism, absolutely none of this functions in a compartmentalized vacuum.
Excessive taxation on the citizenry to pay for any and all things (from necessary military to social experimentation crap) decreases the amount of money they have to enjoy the fruits of their labor at best, or at worst, pay for the necessities of life such as a roof over the head, car in the garage, food on the table, and clothes on their backs.
They have to have their wages increased to meet these needs, which Industry must eventually do in order to attract skilled workers. That they can also try to pass onto the consumers, but at some point, their productivity will decrease because they will hire fewer workers or less skilled workers to meet the financial requirements (in the eyes of financial people) for a healthy business.
Or, they will find places where they can manufacture things more cheaply. Moving closer to the source of raw materials for their products, moving to a part of the country where labor is cheaper and less unionized, buying cheaper materials, cutting corners.
Or they may choose to move a plant to a foreign country like Mexico, over the border, where moving a plant from fifty miles from the Mexican border on the US side, to fifty miles from the US border on the Mexican side.
Point is, none of this works in a vacuum. Taxation and Over-regulation KILL industry. Absolutely kill it. Thomas Sowell believes in removing those taxes and regulation to make the move to a foreign country a moot point.
Glad you liked it, BradyLS.
I cannot read anymore (my eyes cannot take it) so I listen to audiobooks now, which isn’t the same. But, for a certain few books, I have taken to purchasing the eBook or Kindle version.
Some examples of books like “Witness”, “The Road to Serfdom”, “Blacklisted by History” and “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to The Economy”, and “The Federalist Papers”. I also have the hardcover versions of these as well.
It is kind of funny, the reason I now buy the Kindle or eBook versions is that they can be marked up and searched.
My copy of “The Road to Serfdom” was so full of underlines, highlights, stickies, scribbling in the margins and such, that...I could not find a single, blasted thing when I needed it...it was stupidly frustrating. It got to the point it would have been easier to mark everything that wasn’t interesting and comb through everything else. The Kindle and eBook versions are great for tagging and commenting!
You want Dr. Walter E. Williams on your team, too. He studied at Sowell’s feet and they’re good friends besides. He’s occassionally filled in for Rush, too. Your fifth should be Mark Steyn, IMHO.
“and thereby caused a dust bowl.”
The dust bowl was a physical phenomenon, not a financial one. Topsoil dried up and blew away. Actual physical dirt, not some financial fiction. This happened because some genius came up with a way of preparing the soil for winter, which was supposed to hold the moisture from winter precipitation.
Instead, together with reduced precipitation, it prepared the soil to blow away with any slight wind.
But maybe you didn’t mean to say that tariffs caused dust storms.
He was great last night on Levin.
Age 40 is a gift. . . . I would say at any age.
Did you read this book by TS?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0688048323?tag=duckduckgo-ipad-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1
If you haven’t, your loss.
You need to read Sowell... that might change your mind on a few things.
I notice you offer no explanation for the Great Depression.
As to the dust bowl, yes, a contributing factor to the dustbowl was the extraordinarily high temperatures of the mid 1930s before those temperatures were “corrected” by NASA/NOAA.
Some guy compares the previously published temperature records to the “corrected” numbers in a gif shown at the link.
The fall in exports following Smoot-Hawley occurred during 1930-1932.
Temperatures rose during the same period, and remained extraordinarily high for several years. 1936 (well into the Great Depression) was the worst year of the heat wave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
The loss of export markets and the heat wave were a double whammy hitting the farmers of the country. But, the fall in farm income coincided with the fall in exports. Farm income actually stared recovering by 1934.
https://growinganation.org/content/show-content/from_defeat_to_victory/
By the mid 1930s the worst of the heat wave was upon us. It was like the second of a one-two punch combination.
Higher wages are good for the economy. It's called prosperity. Falling or even stagnant wages = social revolution. Your pick.
Yes. I suppose I will never meet him in person, as he probably doesn’t lecture much anymore.
But I wish him to remain healthy and enjoy his life as well.
I expect you would agree that there is a limit to high wages?
Like water that finds its own level, wages would do that as well and find an equilibrium.
Much like the market if forces were allowed to work it. As many of us agree, we are not operating in a “free market” right now, with Communist China, it is adversarial and predatory.
Is there a limit to how much a company can charge for their product?
Yes, there is indeed a limit to how much a company can charge for their product.
In a free market system, that is set by people voting with their dollars.
If a product is too expensive for whatever reason than a similar product of comparable quality offered by a competitor, sales will decline, and the company will be forced to decrease the cost of their product to be competitive.
It does work.
If we close off the USA to immigration, at least for several decades, then every company will have to compete for the same labor from the same pool. A good thing.
See...we CAN agree on something, central_va.
That would be a good thing.
Sowell is a National Treasure.
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