Tag: race

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general freedom local leaders national politics & policies political challengers

Virginia Déjà Vu?

Republican Ed Gillespie, Democrat Ralph Northam, Libertarian Cliff Hyra, Virginia, Governor, race, election, vote,

Virginia’s odd-year elections this November 7th offer the nation’s premier race for governor, pitting Republican Ed Gillespie against Democrat Ralph Northam . . .

. . . oh, and also Libertarian Cliff Hyra.

Could it be a repeat of four years ago?

In 2013, notable Friend-of-Bill and Democratic Party nominee for governor Terry McAuliffe defeated Ken Cuccinelli, the state attorney general and Republican nominee, by a mere 2.6 percent. McAuliffe garnered 48 percent of the vote to Cuccinelli’s 45 percent . . .

. . . to Libertarian Robert Sarvis’s impressive 7 percent. In fact, the Sarvis vote more than doubled the margin between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli.

Last month, a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) poll showed a close gubernatorial race with Northam at 42 percent leading Gillespie at 37 percent . . .

. . . oh, and Hyra at 6 percent among likely voters. Once again, the Libertarian’s support proved greater than the margin between Democrat and Republican.

Back in 2014, Mr. Gillespie challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Mark Warner, nearly pulling a stunning upset, falling just 0.8 percent short. Libertarian Robert Sarvis was also in that race, receiving 2.4 percent.

Lt. Governor Northam, a former U.S. Army doctor, was twice elected to the state Senate.

Former Republican National Committee a Chairman Gillespie, a counselor to President George W. Bush and a lobbyist and political consultant, won the GOP primary by only one percentage point.

Hyra, a patent attorney with no experience in public office, is pushing a tax cut that dwarfs what Republican Gillespie advocates. The Libertarian is also campaigning on criminal justice reform and legalizing recreational use of marijuana.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, Gillespie seems mobile on the pot issue. He has announced his support for legalizing medical marijuana and wants to criminalize recreational use only after two offenses.

A Libertarian influence?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture moral hazard

The Damage Done

black, father, racism, children, race

In his Washington Post op-ed, “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father,’” Mychal Denzel Smith argues that “responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression.”

He asks:

If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes where electricity, running water and food were never scarce, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren’t too exhausted to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said their lives were incomplete because they didn’t have a father, would they hold on to the  pain of lack well into adulthood?”

Hmmm. The first question answers itself. If all children get everything they “need to thrive,” it is assumed they’ll thrive. The second question is impossible to know . . . at least until the creation of that perfect utopia with universal material abundance, a flawless education system and indefatigable single-parents.

Fatherlessness is not just a black problem. And let’s agree there are great single-parent (or no-parent) homes as well as terrible two-parent homes.

Still, fathers are nice. Oftentimes they help children thrive, in part by providing “electricity, running water and food” as well as “love” — both tough and nurturing. Proclaiming that fathers would not matter in a society where everything’s automatically supplied is . . . simple-minded.

Often called socialism.

Smith raises the issues of “racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures . . . the poisoning of their water.” He’s right: having a father won’t magically solve those.

But it would solve the problem of not having a father.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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black, father, racism, children, race

 

Original photo by Sunil Soundarapandian on Flickr

 

Categories
general freedom ideological culture individual achievement too much government

The Pattern Here

Thomas, Sowell, intellectual, race, Common Sense

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:

  • the “constrained vision” . . . . of most conservatives and classical liberals; and
  • the “unconstrained vision” . . . of so many socialists, anarchists and progressives.

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.

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Thomas, Sowell, intellectual, race, Common Sense

 

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Common Sense education and schooling national politics & policies

Diversity Double-Talk

Diversity, schools, collage, photomontage, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

“Black teachers flee schools, leading to concerns about diversity,” warned the Washington Post headline. I’m less concerned about “diversity” and more about why teachers — black or otherwise — would “flee.”

The study found a significant drop between 2002 and 2012 in the percentage of teachers who are black in nine large city public schools systems — Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

In New Orleans, the percentage of black teachers fell from 74 to 51 percent, while the percentage of white teachers rose from 25 to 43 percent. In the nation’s capital, black teachers tumbled from 77 to 49 percent, while white teachers went from 16 to 39 percent.

“The whole effort . . . toward minority-teacher recruitment . . . [has] been an unheralded victory, really,” argues the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll. “The problem is with retention. Minority teachers have significantly higher quit rates than non-minority teachers.”

Some argue the problem is a system that micromanages teachers. Others cite the expansion of “teacher evaluation systems.” Neither reason explains the racial discrepancy.

However, black teachers do appear to be overrepresented in rougher, lower-performing schools — often with large minority populations. That may be causing a higher “quit rate.”

It may also be purposeful. As The Post article informs, “[R]esearch has suggested that students who are racially paired with teachers — black teachers working with black students and Hispanic teachers working with Hispanic students — do better academically.”

So, all the talk of diversity is aimed at keeping students and teachers with their own race?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Note: My Townhall column last Sunday was a longer treatment of this subject.

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Diversity, schools, collage, photomontage, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Rise in Unrest

political, politics, Brothers' Keeper, Obama, race relations, crime, police abuse, drug war, arrest, collage, photomontage, illustration, James Gill, Paul Jacob, hope, arrest, inner city, Baltimore, riot

On Monday, pushing an expansion of his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, President Barack Obama gave a talk about the recent rise in racial discord.

Does he ever ask himself, “Under whose watch?”

When the financial system melted down in 2008, candidate Obama — not without some justification — blamed President Bush and the Republicans. Why shouldn’t he and his party be today held somewhat responsible for rising racial unrest?

Wasn’t his very status as the First Black American President supposed to continue the healing process between blacks and whites?

In his talk, Obama recognized the “sense of unfairness, of powerlessness, of not hearing their voices, that’s helped fuel some of the protests. . . .” Well, sure. But there would be no occasion for this were inner-city blacks not treated unfairly in the first place.

The president wants to spend more money on education, for example, despite the high levels of per-student public ed funding in hot spot Baltimore.

It is quite clear that other programs have done the most damage. We still have a War on Drugs, which is unpopular enough that it turns cops “racist” perhaps even against their wills — as I’ve explained before, police tend to focus their unpopular policing against drug use to the classes of society that have the least direct political power, most especially against inner-city blacks.

But even more bedrock: we see protests and talk about inequality during economic downturns. Obama should learn from Bill Clinton’s initial presidential campaign: It’s the economy, stupid.

Or put more bluntly: It’s your stupid economic policies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Brothers' Keeper

 

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nannyism responsibility too much government

A Progressive Non-Solution

Baltimore Riots and Taxes

Urban African-American poverty is a problem, as is, increasingly, rural and urban white poverty. What can we do?

Not what folks at The Nation suggest: by increasing progressivity in local taxation, adding progressivity to fines (making the poor pay less and the rich more), and the like. That’s the gist of what Brad Lander and Karl Kumodzi write about in their article “How Cities’ Funding Woes Are Driving Racial and Economic Injustice—And What We Can Do About It.”

Though they call their solution “forward-looking,” it is not that time element that makes their views “progressive.” It’s their obsession with tax rates. What makes a progressive a progressive seems to be little more than a reliance on progressive rate taxation.

Embarrassing.

The three big examples of failed cities the authors give are the urban community of Ferguson, near St. Louis; Detroit, Michigan; and now Baltimore, Maryland, currently undergoing “protests” and conflagration.

Typical for Nation writers, they see the problem as not the poverty, culture, and behavior of black individuals in neighborhoods where few work and 70 percent grow up in fatherless families, but not taxing whites enough.

Meanwhile, Detroit and Baltimore have been run as “liberal” Democratic enclaves for years. Yet “blame the rich” is the approach. The authors want to double down on old, failed policies. More taxes. More government.

Now, government is to blame, of course: “welfare” programs encourage the break-up of the nuclear family; horrible public schools; minimum wage laws that hit low-skilled population hardest; and the Drug War.

The authors are right, though, that the cities’ desperate regressive burdens on the poor are no answer. Less taxes, less regulation, less subsidy, less policing for profit, more freedom — those are the better solutions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Baltimore Riots and Taxes

 

Categories
Common Sense national politics & policies Popular responsibility

My Privilege Isn’t White

Privilege

“White privilege” is all the rage . . . on college campuses. But is there anything substantive to the notion?

As long as some folks view individuals as nothing more than their race, I suppose one can accrue a few advantages simply by being part of the largest racial group.

Moreover, as I explained at length in my Sunday column at Townhall.com, numerous government policies do indeed hit minorities harder.

The War on Drugs has ravaged the black community much more than the white community, for example. This may result more from the higher poverty rates for minorities than to race alone: Police and prosecutors are more likely to arrest and harshly prosecute the poor for no better reason than that the poor are less able to defend themselves, legally or politically.

That’s wrong. We very much need major reforms of unaccountable police power and abusive prosecutors as well as end the drug war.

But getting back to that trendy “white privilege” — it misses a big source of “unfair” advantage.

I’m white, but my privilege mostly isn’t. Of my many advantages, my skin pigmentation nowhere near tops the list.

Whatever success I’ve enjoyed derives mostly from this: I was reared by two parents who supported me, nurtured me, corrected me and cared about me every day from before I was born to now.

No government program, no amount of money, can best that gift.

The most critical element in the success of black and brown and yellow and peach and white kids is not a politician who cares, but a parent — or, better yet, two — providing a nurturing environment, including tough love.

We could all use more of the “unfair” advantage that parents provide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom individual achievement judiciary U.S. Constitution

Racial Justice Advanced

Racial Justice Advanced (Paul Jacob on the leading thinker on race today)

[mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”60″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap] don’t know if Juan Williams is right about who qualifies as America’s most influential thinker on race. But I hope he is.

In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Fox News’s liberal-leaning political analyst and author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998), argues that our country’s most important influencer of thought on race is neither some current and trendy academic writer nor our current president (or his outgoing attorney general). Instead, it is none other than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

While more famous figures of African-American descent have dominated the news talk shows and airwaves and popular consciousness, Justice Thomas has gone about “reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench.” While previous African-American racial activists and thinkers have striven to defend the rights of black people, Justice Thomas, “the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.”

Opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering,” Thomas has marshaled Frederick Douglass’s words to make his case: “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.” And justice, in Clarence Thomas’s judgment, does not entail a constant rescue-worker attitude towards minorities, or other disadvantaged folks. It requires nothing other than equality of rights before the law.

And perhaps some hard work on the part of the disadvantaged.

Hats off, then, to Juan Williams for recognizing the importance of Thomas’s common sense contention that “black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-sufficient citizens.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Prez States Obvious; News at 11


A magazine profile of President Barack Obama has set the commentariat a-talking.

On racism, the president says that “some” folks hate him because he’s black; and others support him because he’s black.

Wow. What was obvious in 2008 seems . . . painfully obvious now.

Similarly, the prez ’fessed up (again) to his past marijuana use — and his long-term tobacco habit. He uttered the word “vice.” He noted that marijuana doesn’t seem any more harmful than alcohol . . . which implies that the prohibition of marijuana makes less sense than the once-prohibited but now-legal hootch.

A reasonable opinion. Held, before President O’s pronouncement, by a clear majority of the public  . . . not as radical, but as obvious.

So why make such a big deal about these statements? Because of previous taboos? It’s not as if Obama took leadership on any of these ideas, moving them from “horrors!-false” to “blah-true.”

Years ago, the movie Bulworth featured Warren Beatty as a senator who, all the sudden, started blurting out things he believed to be true, but which were not usually said in public. It was a comedy. (Your tastes and appraisals may vary.) The prez comes off as nowhere near as outrageous (or straightforward) as the Beatty character, though he, too, has rapped in public.

But perhaps we grade on a curve. A president speaking obvious truths is memorable not because the truths are daring, but because of the novelty: a politician has deigned to acknowledge truth.

File the brouhaha under O, not for Obama but for Obvious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.