There has been so much racism in the full sense of open animosity toward particular groups, combined with dogmatic beliefs that there is a fixed ceiling to their intellectual or other development, that the term is weakened, rather than strengthened, when it is applied sweepingly to people who have neither animosity nor a claim that some invisible ceiling dooms a whole race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.
What was said of Romania’s institutions of higher education between the two World Wars – that they were “numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated,” as well as “veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues”56 – could be said of such institutions in other nations in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during that era and in various nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in later times.
Political incentives are for government officials to supply public schools with things that are in demand from organized constituencies such as teachers’ unions that want smaller classes, better facilities and job protection.
Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money...
Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human.
Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.
In contrast to times past when low-income people lived packed into overcrowded housing, Americans living below the official poverty level today have more housing space per person than the average European – not poor Europeans, but the average European.
Lack of awareness or concern for the context and constraints of the times is only part of the problem of those today assessing such historic figures as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln – or the American nation as a whole.
We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.
But beliefs are neither moral nor immoral. They may be accurate or inaccurate, founded or unfounded, but they acquire moral significance only when they are shaped to serve some ulterior purpose that is either moral or immoral.
The Chinese in the Philippines are among the many productive groups whose economic success has led to violent backlashes.
The feeling that the government should “do something” has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not “do something.
In Hawaii, the most generous state, an unemployed single mother with two children has been eligible for welfare benefits worth more than $49,000 a year.
Quibbles about the fact that some other European explorers touched the hemisphere earlier, or that the Indians knew it was here all along, trivialize this turning point in the history of the world.
If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?
The strategic location of the intelligentsia, whether in the mass media or in educational institutions, enables them to filter what information gets through to the general public, protecting the welfare state vision and with it a flattering vision of themselves.
The ideal of freedom behind the American Revolution had its effect in freeing thousands of people from slavery in the newly formed United States, something that was happening nowhere else in the world at that time. To call slavery “America’s original sin” is to turn reality upside down.
The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superior.
The presumption of equal outcomes in the absence of malign actions can lead to incorrect – and disastrous – conclusions in other circumstances.