Yes, the U.N. does some good things. But the assumption that, if the United Nations didn’t exist, those good things wouldn’t get done is ridiculous. It’s like saying that if government didn’t pick up your garbage, garbage would never get collected. Meanwhile, the U.N. does all manner of terrible things, that wouldn’t be done if it didn’t exist.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Goldberg File: The U. N. vs. Israel,” December 30, 2016 (National Review newsletter)
Thomas Sowell, who retired from his syndicated column last week, may be the greatest public intellectual of our time.
Though he is “an original,” an iconoclast, his work is best seen as the carrying on of a tradition. Or two.
Consider his most famous research area: race. An African-American, Sowell is the age’s most persuasive dissident to the dominant strains of racial advocacy. He brought much common sense to a subject beset with unhinged passion.*
And yet even here he was obviously drawing on traditions that, if not well known, were firmly established.†
One of Sowell’s most important contributions, in books such as A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed, is his distinction between two very different ways of looking at the social world:
For many conservatives, this is Sowell at his best. But is it original? A few of my readers could probably lecture me on its origins in a famous essay by F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False.”‡
Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, David R. Henderson addresses the one area where I tend to disagree with Sowell: foreign policy. Henderson gently calls out Sowell’s apparent credulity regarding the dishonesty of our war party leaders. Sure, Henderson writes, “[t]here are downsides to distrust. . . . But there are upsides too.”
Mourning the loss of trust in presidents, Sowell blames it on presidents lying to us in recent decades. But, as Henderson notes, “war presidents” lying to us about war is not new — providing examples.
Pity that Sowell, of all people, does not see the pattern here.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* See Sowell’s Ethnic America: A History, Race and Culture: A World View, and The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; but also popular argumentation, such as Pink and Brown People and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. And then there is the important Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
† Economists W. H. Hutt and Gary Becker, at the very least, provided the background for Sowell’s research with their respective books The Economics of the Colour Bar and The Economics of Discrimination.
‡ See F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. In another essay, Hayek provides Sowell with the seed of Knowledge and Decisions.
War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993), Ch. 6
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
Should we “err on the side of security”?
We shouldn’t err at all. That gets us nowhere. And unthinkingly sticking to failed notions of security is not helping avoid mistakes.
Click on over to Townhall. Then back here for more intel.
Purpose is what separates success from failure. Those with a guiding purpose, however small, can make a difference in the lives of others.
That is why I always suggest think locally and act locally. You can change the world, even if it is just your own. At the end of the day — or year — that is really all that matters.
Brion McClanahan, email newsletter for The Brion McClanahan Show, December 30, 2016
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
Lots of people are saying that 2016 was “the worst.” Dan Hannan disagrees:
Krist Novoselic, my colleague at FairVote.org, here gives a little talk about how we can change our democratic processes for the better. “We’re getting there,” he says, about the organization’s substantial election reform — a non-partisan variety of reform that, he says, will benefit all Americans. For some reason not many people have seen this video:
But are things really all that good? A lot of folks will say that the President-elect is the most dangerous trending topic. But Professor Gad Saad suggests, in this entry of The Saad Truth, that the worst trend is the victimology cult:
The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer if they disregard the record of the past.
Thomas Sowell, “Random Thoughts, Looking Back,” his final syndicated column upon retirement, National Review (December 27, 2016).
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”