When wheat prices soar, for example, nothing is easier for a demagogue than to cry out against the injustice of a situation where speculators, sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices, grow rich on the sweat of farmers toiling in the fields for months under a hot sun. The years when the speculators took a financial beating at harvest time, while the farmers lived comfortably on the guaranteed wheat prices paid by speculators, are of course forgotten.
Not all former British colonies established or preserved British governmental structures or principles, or the freedom based on them. But the line of demarcation between those that did and those that did not largely coincided with the line between free people and those living under various forms of despotism.
It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.
Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers: It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies – ill as well as good propensities.
The costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that “justice at all costs” is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost – whether economic, psychic, or other – on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?
Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.
Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think.
One of the ways of understanding the consequences of economic decisions is to look at them in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue.
His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.
Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.
Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards.
Politics is not about empirical realities, but about popular images. So long as the image of rent control is good, it wins votes at election time-and that is what it is all about, as far as politicians are concerned.
The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called “Balkanization” or “diversity,” has been appalling, in countries around the world.
At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful.
With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.
The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos.
In a realm where educational failure has long been the norm – schools in low-income minority neighborhoods – this is success, a remarkable success. What is equally remarkable is how unwelcome this success has been in many places. What has been especially remarkable is that it has been the most educationally successful charter schools that seem to have drawn the most hostility, both in words and in deeds.
To refer to Stuyvesant High School as a “privileged little ivory tower” may be clever, but cleverness is not wisdom.
Whether the elite public high schools of New York were overwhelmingly Jewish in one era or overwhelmingly Asian in a later era, their lack of demographic “diversity” seems not to have adversely affected their educational performances or their graduates’ achievements in later life. And that is what such schools are there for, not to present a tableau that matches fashionable preconceptions.
After the Dunbar alumni lost in the courts, the original Dunbar High School building was demolished. It was one of many triumphs of the ghetto culture across the country in the second half of the twentieth century, with consequences that spread far beyond educational institutions.