Ideas Matter

Blacks and Education: The Song Remains the Same

Milton Friedman once said that two of the most anti-black policies on the books were public education and the minimum wage. He said this in about 1978, only a few years before the above piece was created by Free To Choose Network President, Bob Chitester.

Walter Williams is a credible host in this 1982 video. And notice that little of what Prof. Williams is saying has changed. 

Walter Williams on "Certificates of Performance"

For those of you still at your desks before the holidays, I came across this great little talk from Walter Williams, which you're bound to enjoy as you undertake your shopping. You'll no doubt be handing out certificates of performance if you haven't already. (And if you read Hebrew, welcome!)

Happy Holidays from Free To Choose Network. If you love reading us, help us keep going in 2012.

Walter Williams on Envy Politics and Corporate Taxes

Walter Williams gives the trustafarians of the "Occupy" movement what for in this great clip. But I want to draw your attention to the bit about corporate taxation. That is: do companies pay taxes?

Walter Williams and James Buchanan - Wealth must first be created

How do you neutralize the zero-sum fallacy? How do you explain to people that prosperity comes from people working and often cooperating to serve others? You have two award-winning economists - one with a Nobel Prize - and neither can figure out how to communicate effectively to the layman that wealth must be created through productive activity and exchange. Well, it's not so much that they can't communicate it effectively, it's that the message doesn't seem to get very far. 

This is an uphill battle, one requiring constant attention. And in many respects it's is the sort of thing that is supposed to be our job here at Free To Choose Network. But dispelling the zero-sum fallacy is not easy. Not only are you going against people's intuitions on the matter, but against pervasive campaigns to perpetuate the fallacy. And while each new generation must learn it anew, they're getting very little of the truth. So the job is Sisyphean. 

Williams, for example points to the horrible slogan "give back," often employed by CEOs and corporate types in public relations campaigns. Such slogans feed into the notion that something had been taken in the first place. Of course, Buchanan -- as a father of public choice theory -- knows that wealth is sometimes taken in the form of rent-seeking. But, by and large, entrepreneurs are people who became wealthy by producing something, and then improving the situation of others via exchange. Indeed that is how wealth is created.

So back to the drawing board. We'll have to tell stories, make analogies, use metaphors and appeal to people's reason. And we'll have to do it over and over again. It may be one of the most important lessons civilization has to learn and very few people are teaching it -- much less teaching it effectively.

Walter Williams - A Life of Liberty

Walter Williams has a new memoir out called Up from the Projects. If you haven't yet seen this Reason.tv video yet, it rewards viewing. If you've seen it already, consider some added thoughts from the Ideas Matter peanut gallery:

• Walter Williams became a prominent individualist intellectual at a time when his peers -- both angry blacks and while intellectuals -- were mired in collectivist groupthink. The narrative of this groupthink made blacks perpetual victims. Political correctness, affirmative action, and welfare were offered as ways to socially engineer black America away from its victimhood. Of course, affirmative action and welfare had no "exit strategy," so it's still with us. Ironically, blacks have been the victims of these remedies. 
  
  
• What's even more astounding to me is that Williams' formitive years as a thinker must have occurred right in the middle of Jim Crow and wider national racism. While any of us might claim we'd stick to our classical liberal guns, such would be difficult at a time when you might get asked to leave if you walked into a diner in Greensboro, or sent to the back of the bus.

• Williams can die knowing that he's no black intellectual. He is an economist. And his dizzying output (of articles and papers) over the last decades reveals more about his "economic way of thinking" than about race issues in particular. The story of race in America is but a strand in his life and work. He is and will always will be remembered as an economist and a classical liberal. His memoir is a testament to his refusal to accept the narrative of victimhood for himself or anyone else. His body of work is a monument to the blessings of liberty.

• At Free To Choose Network, we have tons of great archival footage of Walter Williams, which we'll continue to roll out as we grow our fan base. Here are some examples.

Walter Williams, Milton Friedman on Unions -- A Relevant Classic

Walter Williams and Milton Friedman are in good form above. The question set before them is: what force has done the most to improve the conditions of the American worker? The market? Or the unions?

Williams and Friedman have no trouble with the idea that markets create wealth and that government-enabled unions are essentially a labor cartel designed to exclude. The others seem to be trying to change the subject, to trot out the same old lines about unions as essential for "democracy," or the necessity of unions in taming the robber barons. (Interesting also how willing Ernest Green was to pull the slavery card. But I digress.)

Although Friedman and Williams have no problem with any form of voluntary association, they reminds the audience that most unions use legislation as leverage (government power), which they find objectionable.

So back to the question: which helps the worker? The market or unions? Before wealth can be distributed, it must be created. Without markets, including labor markets, no wealth can be created -- even wealth that would be distributed, unjustly, among the members of a labor cartel. As William Brady reminds the audience in this clip (and he was both correct and oracular), union membership has been declining. See also here and here. If unions do so much good for workers, why aren't their ranks swelling?

As the public sector union issue continues to unfold, Williams and Friedman remind us just how long we've been having this debate. 

Walter Williams and James Buchanan - Democracy is Overrated

I shake my head when I hear the term "market fundamentalism." Why? I look around. And when I do, I see a world that -- when it is not authoritarian and poor -- is prostrate before the golden calf of democracy. Not free markets. As James Buchanan reminds us, majority rule means "the minority is going to get screwed." And that's if the majority can even get its way. Often it cannot.

What fewer people realize is that while the minority is getting screwed, the majority is getting screwed too. Buchanan shares a tradition with Mancur Olsen who figured out the problem of concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. That is, small interests groups are nimble, vocal constituencies with direct interests in the outcome of this legislation or that. The rest of us stand to lose fractions on the dollar, pound, kroner or yen. So we have little incentive to advocate vociferously for this bill or that -- much less pay attention to its passage. But all these dispersed costs add up over time in the form of economic malaise. And the special interests win -- at least in the medium term.

Walter Williams says "there is nothing sacrosanct about majority rule." It can, indeed, be tyranny. And the tyranny is compounded when moneyed interests are involved. When the state and business get in bed together, citizens lose. Democracy becomes but a holy shroud that obscures the dissolution of freedom and prosperity.

Walter Williams and James Buchanan: An Eroded Constitution & Folk Activism

Note: To order the complete DVD, please contact us at 800-876-8930.

If we can agree with Walter Williams and James Buchanan about a) a limited role for government and b) the fact of the Constitution's erosion, we have to turn to the hard questions. Now that modern Congresses have reduced questions of constitutionality to "Can we get a vote?" is it possible to put the genie back in the bottle? Is there a way to constrain the state and restore the Constitution as a means of checking power? 

James Buchanan himself pushed along a tradition in political economy - public choice economics - that should make us skeptical. That skepticism is expressed bluntly here by Patri Friedman who reminds us:

We do not live in a world that mainly suffers bad policies due to lack of ideas about better ones, or lack of elegant explanations supporting good policies, but one that suffers bad policies due to system and meta-system level incentives. In the real world, if you want to have any chance at any effect on changing bad policies, you must take this into account, frustrating and difficult though it is. Vaguely assuming that the problem is not enough eloquent blog posts or op eds is like finance professors actively investing in individual stocks (ignoring both efficient markets & diversification), or nutrition experts living on Twinkies – experts behaving directly contrary to the most basic results in their own fields.

Friedman's tired of playing political tug-o-war only to watch the special interests win. He wants to start over--install a new OS somewhere else--which is simultaneously the most difficult and simplest approach to take.

I find it hard to disagree with him. But just like those "system and meta-system level incentives" that work against the Republic, similar incentives keep some of us fighting trench warfare. Another way of putting this is: Megan McArdle gets paid to fart "into the microphone."