My colleague Walter Williams celebrates Thomas Sowell on the latter’s 90th birthday. A slice:
Sowell cares about people. He believes that compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis. He takes seriously the admonition given to physicians, “primum non nocere” (first, do no harm).
In many respects, Sowell is an Austrian economist like the great Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, who often talked about elites and their “pretense of knowledge.” These are people who believe that they have the ability and knowledge to organize society in a way better than people left to their own devices — what Hayek called the fatal conceit. Their vision requires the use of the coercive powers of government.
My friend Vince Graham, a housing developer in South Carolina, named a street in his development after Professor Sowell.
Mark Perry, too, wishes a Happy Birthday to Thomas Sowell.
Matt Taibbi brilliantly and scathingly calls out the nonsense that is Robin DiAngelo’s book. A slice:
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.
Jeff Jacoby reports on the increasing cruelty of cancel culture.
GMU law professor Ilya Somin warns of the dangers in Trump’s covid-excused immigration bans.
