Controversial Essays
Thomas Sowell
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
www.hoover.org
Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 511
Copyright © 2002 by Thomas Sowell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
First printing 2002
07 06 05 04 03 02 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
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(CIP data for this publication is available from the Library of Congress.)
ISBN 0-8179-2992-4
CONTROVERSIAL ESSAYS
Thomas Sowell
HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS
Stanford University
Stanford, California
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
www.hoover.org
Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 511
Copyright © 2002 by Thomas Sowell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
First printing 2002
07 06 05 04 03 02 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 0-8179-2992-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-2993-0 (electronic)
CONTENTS
Preface
PART I: ECONOMIC ISSUES
Drugs and Politics
The Real Revolutionaries
India Unbound
Capital Gains and “Trickle Down”
No Sense of Proportion
Headline News
Warrior in a 200-Year War
The Role of the Rich
Perennial Economic Fallacies
Sweatshops at Home and Abroad
Sanity in San Francisco
The End of Montgomery Ward
“Saving” Social Security
Social Security vs. Privatization
Minimum Journalism
Merit and Money
PART II: RACIAL ISSUES
Routine Cruelty
Losing the Race
Reparations for Slavery?
The Lessons of Indonesia
Blacks and Bootstraps
“Racism” in Word and Deed
Sweeping Success Under the Rug
Sorting By Race
The Magic Word
Race and the New Century
“Access” to Responsibility
PART III: POLITICAL ISSUES
Poverty and the Left
“Useful Idiots”
Facts versus Dogma on Guns
Global Hot Air
“Campaign Finance Reform” Follies
Ugliness in Yosemite
State Stealing
Loving Enemies
Microsoft and Campaign Finance Reform
Lying Statistics
Are We Still Americans?
Pacifism and War
Intended Consequences
Islam and the West
Pandering to the Anointed
Green Bigots versus Human Beings
Another Outrage
The Best of the Century
PART IV: EDUCATIONAL ISSUES
The Wrong Filter
Too Many Ph.D.s?
“No Excuses”
Back Door Quotas
We Are All “Dropouts”
School to School?
The War Against Boys
“Research” Marches On
Let's Hear It for Unfairness!
Does It Add Up?
Diversity versus “Diversity”
Choosing A College
A Painful History
“Forced to Volunteer”
Drugging Children
Goodbye to Sara and Benjamin?
Success Concealing Failure
The Old Neighborhood
Wasting Minds
The “Non-Profit” Halo
Do Facts Matter?
Do Facts Matter? Part II
PART V: LEGAL ISSUES
Property Rites
Love Those Killers!
Microsoft and Anti-Trust “Law”
Lessons Not Learned
Law on Trial
Aborted Knowledge
Murder is Murder
McVeigh and the Death Penalty
PART VI: SOCIAL ISSUES
Boomers and Boomerangs
Deep Trouble from Shallow People
Thanksgiving and “Fairness”
Was the Ball Juiced?
The Dangers of “Equality”
Is the Family Becoming Extinct?
Life at the Bottom
Gay Marriage
The Einstein Syndrome
Loose Lips
“The Duty to Die”
Shocked by the Obvious
Families and Dictators
The “Autism” Dragnet
Racial Profiling of Authors
Chandra Levy Clues
Barry and the Babe
Media Fraud
The Insulation of the Left
W. Glenn Campbell (1924–2001)
PART VII: RANDOM THOUGHTS
Random Thoughts
PREFACE
These essays first appeared in my nationally syndicated newspaper column, and the favorable responses they received from readers have led to their being reprinted here. Many of the events which provoked these writings raised questions that went beyond the passing episodes involved. This was especially so where economic issues were involved, for these same fundamental issues recur in the economy over the years—and centuries—in various guises. Similarly, racial issues in the United States today involve many of the same principles that have been controversial in relations between various racial and ethnic groups in other countries and in other times.
In addition to the very serious issues raised in many of these essays, there are also some lighter subjects and even the serious issues sometimes have their lighter aspects. Without a sense of humor, politics would be too painful to bear.
Special thanks must go to the Hoover Institution and to Stanford University, whose rich research sources made informed commentary on a wide variety of subjects possible, and to my assistant Na Liu, whose diligent work unearthed the information tha
t I needed. Finally, acknowledgement is also due to Karen Duryea of Creators Syndicate, who caught errors in spelling, grammar, syntax, and facts that might otherwise have slipped in these columns, to my chagrin. The same thanks must go to a conscientious copy-editor at the Hoover Institution Press who caught some more lapses of mine.
Thomas Sowell
PART I
ECONOMIC ISSUES
DRUGS AND POLITICS
A tourist in New York's Greenwich Village had his portrait sketched by a sidewalk artist, who charged him $100.
“That's expensive,” the tourist said. “But it's a great sketch, so I'll pay it. But, really, it took you only five minutes.”
“Twenty years and five minutes,” the artist replied.
The same misconception of costs runs through the much more serious issue of the prices of medicine and government regulation of those prices. When a pill whose ingredients cost a quarter is sold for two dollars, that is an open invitation to demagogues to begin loudly denouncing the pharmaceutical drug company's “obscene” and “unconscionable” profits at the expense of the sick. But the people who are doing this are counting only the five minutes and ignoring the twenty years.
The physical ingredients of the medicine are its cheapest ingredients. The ingredient that costs millions of dollars—sometimes hundreds of millions—is the knowledge gained from years of research, and trial and error, which finally results in the creation of a new medicine. That is what the price of the pills has to cover, if we expect investors to continue to pour vast sums of money into drug companies that are trying to discover new cures for such diseases as cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer's.
Other companies, manufacturing generic equivalents, pay only the costs of the physical ingredients, having copied the enormously expensive formula free of charge—legitimately after the patent has expired and not so legitimately in other countries, where patent laws are not taken as seriously as in the United States. The company that simply uses someone else's formula free of charge can sell the same pill for 35 cents and still make a profit.
Somebody has to pay the high costs of discovery or the development of new drugs will be slower and therefore more people will needlessly suffer and die. While allowing patent laws to be over-ridden by politicians allows some people to buy the drug at low prices, based on the low current costs of manufacturing the medicine, that just leaves the far greater overhead costs of creating these medicines to be paid by others.
Worst of all, it leaves the even higher costs of needless pain, suffering and premature death to be paid by those whose relief is delayed for years by policies like these, which slow down the development of new medicines to cure their afflictions.
The United States has been one of the few countries resisting political pressures to impose price controls on pharmaceutical drugs, or to water down the patent laws which allow the original discoverer of new drugs to have a monopoly for a fixed number of years, so as to recover the costs of discovery before other companies get to use their formula free of charge.
The United States also produces a wholly disproportionate share of all the new life-saving drugs in the world. But politicians ignore this connection. Other countries have scientists capable of developing new medicines, but the economics and politics of the situation discourage companies in those countries from making the huge investments made by American pharmaceutical companies under American patent law.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has recently begun to cave in to the demagogues at home and abroad. After Congressional liberals like Ted Kennedy, Henry Waxman, and Charles Schumer began making noises about a need to get the drug Cipro cheaper because of the anthrax scare, the administration threatened to over-ride the patent for the drug unless the manufacturer supplied it at a cheaper rate.
The retail price of Cipro was $5 a pill and the government itself says that someone stricken with anthrax needs to take two pills a day for five days and cheaper antibiotics thereafter. Is $50 too much to pay to save your life? And is it worth jeopardizing a whole system that has made this country the leading creator of life-saving drugs, just to get the demagogues off the Bush administration's back politically?
The administration also caved at a recent international conference in Qatar, where foreign countries gained the right to set aside international patent agreements whenever they choose to decree a public health “emergency.” This allows them a free ride on costly American research, at least until they kill the goose that lays the golden egg—new life-saving medicines in this case.
THE REAL REVOLUTIONARIES
The twentieth century was, among other things, a century of revolutions—not only bloody uprisings and military coups, but also revolutions in science, politics and in the way people live. However, as much as the political left loves to use words like “change” and “revolution” as if they had a monopoly or a copyright on them, the actual track record of the left pales in comparison with the social revolutions created by the free market.
No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.
The history of the American economy in the twentieth century was an incredible story of the luxuries of the rich becoming commonplace among the masses and even the poor. When liberal and radical intellectuals speak of a period of “change,” they almost never mention the 1920s, because it was not an era of the kinds of political changes they favor. But it was a pivotal decade of change in the material well-being and expansion of the horizons of most Americans, including the poor.
It was during the 1920s that electricity, the automobile and radio reached the masses, when motion pictures came of age and began to talk. While technology and mass production spearheaded the changes of the 1920s, this was also a decade that saw a revolution in more efficient distribution systems through grocery and department store chains that brought the cost of many goods and services down within the reach of ordinary Americans.
All this added up to a social revolution—but it was not “change” as defined by the intelligentsia, because it happened independently of them and of the government, and was not part of any master plan or ideological crusade.
As late as 1930, most American homes did not have a refrigerator but, by the end of the decade, most did. By 1970, virtually all families living in poverty had refrigerators. By 1994, most American households below the poverty line had a microwave oven and a videocassette recorder—things that less than one percent of all American households had in 1971.
All of this went into raising the standard of living of the average American. It was not political rhetoric, mass rallies or poses of moral indignation that gave the people a better life. It was capitalism.
Even in the homeland of socialism, the Soviet Union, it was capitalists who created much of the industrialization for which the Communists took credit. The first new automobile factory built under the Communists was built by the Ford Motor Company. Germany's Krupp and I. G. Farben were also key builders of Soviet industry, along with DuPont, RCA, International Harvester and others from the capitalist world.
Even when it comes to the redistribution of wealth that is at the heart of the ideology of the left, the market does it better. Most American millionaires did not inherit their wealth, but created it themselves. As for the poor, imagine anyone so radical as to promise to move the bottom 20 percent of Americans out of that bracket within a decade and put more of them up in the top 20 percent than were left back where they were originally.
Yet this happens regularly and with no fanfare in the American economy. B
ut even a big change in the distribution of income like this does not count with those who talk about income brackets and ignore the actual flesh-and-blood people who move in and out of those brackets. Most people who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were in the top 20 percent at some point before 1992.
The poor will always be with us, so long as they are defined as the bottom 20 percent, even if yesterday's bottom 20 percent are now among “the rich,” as such terms are defined by those with a stereotyped vision of a static world.
Dynamic income changes among people are concealed by talking about brackets, as if the same people stayed in those brackets. The left cannot accept the kind of income redistribution that does not fit their vision. These and other benefits of a free market will certainly never be called a “public service.”
INDIA UNBOUND
There are few things more heartwarming than watching people rise out of poverty to a better life. When it is a whole nation in the process of doing so, it is especially inspiring. That is the theme of a marvelous new book titled India Unbound by Indian hi-tech entrepreneur Gurcharan Das.
In a well-blended combination of facts, history and personal experiences, the author spells out how and why India took so long after achieving independence from Britain in 1947 before its economy began to improve dramatically after the 1991 reforms that allowed more of a free market to operate. That was a decisive turning point, with businesses no longer being suffocated by some of the most pervasive and intrusive government controls in the world.
Before the reforms, Indian entrepreneurs could not make the most basic decisions about their own businesses without permission from an army of government bureaucrats. Decisions about hiring, firing (virtually impossible), expanding output or ordering raw material were all subject to the whims, the delays and the extortions of bribes by petty officials who knew little and cared less about the realities of business.
The Indian entrepreneur “has to bribe from twenty to forty functionaries if he is serious about doing business.” Moreover, he must “grovel” before these petty tyrants who have been armed with the power to say “yea” or “nay” to a sweeping range of business plans. Even some of India's biggest and most distinguished enterprises, the Tata industries, had more than a hundred proposals to start new businesses or expand old ones end up “in the wastebaskets of the bureaucrats.”
