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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Thomas Sowell</title>
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	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
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		<title>Racial Quota Punishment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/racial-quota-punishment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=racial-quota-punishment</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/racial-quota-punishment/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:30:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[classroom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[discipline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[punishment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration's war on discipline in education -- and who really suffers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2512878_orig.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245404" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2512878_orig-450x337.jpg" alt="2512878_orig" width="332" height="249" /></a>If anyone still has any doubt about the utter cynicism of the Obama administration, a recent agreement between the federal government and the Minneapolis Public Schools should open their eyes.</p>
<p>Under the Obama administration, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have been leaning on public schools around the country to reduce what they call the &#8220;disproportionate&#8221; numbers of black male students who are punished for various offenses in schools.</p>
<p>Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent by the end of this school year, and then by 50 percent, 75 percent and finally 100 percent in each of the following years. In other words, there are now racial quota limits for punishment in the Minneapolis schools.</p>
<p>If we stop and think — as old-fashioned as that may seem — there is not the slightest reason to expect black males to commit the same number of offenses as Asian females or any other set of students.</p>
<p>When different groups of human beings have behaved differently in all sorts of ways, in countries around the world, for thousands of years of recorded history, why would we accept as dogma that the only reason one set of students gets punished more than others is because the people who are doing the punishing are picking on them?</p>
<p>Politically — which is the way the Obama administration looks at everything — any time they can depict blacks as victims, and depict themselves as their rescuers, that means an opportunity to get out the black vote for Democrats.</p>
<p>On the surface, this may look like a favor to blacks. But only on the surface.</p>
<p>Anyone with common sense knows that letting a kid get away with bad behavior is an open invitation to worse behavior in the future. Punishing a kid for misbehavior in school when he is 10 years old may reduce the chances that he will have to be sent to prison when he is 20 years old.</p>
<p>Other schools in other cities, which have also caved under pressure from the federal government, and agreed to lighten up on black kids who misbehave, have reported an increase in misbehavior, including violence.</p>
<p>Who would have thought otherwise?</p>
<p>Letting kids who are behavior problems in schools grow up to become hoodlums and then criminals is no favor to them or to the black community. Moreover, it takes no more than a small fraction of troublemakers in a class to make it impossible to give that class a decent education. And for many poor people, whether black or white, education is their one big chance to escape poverty.</p>
<p>The people in the Obama administration who are pushing this counterproductive policy are not stupid. They are political, which is worse. They know what they are doing and they are willing to sacrifice young blacks to do it.</p>
<p>This punishment issue made me think back to the 8th grade, when I was punished by being kept after school, more often than any other kid in the class — black, white, Hispanic or whatever. I was bored in school and did various pranks to liven things up.</p>
<p>One day, after school, as I sat alone among the empty chairs in the classroom, the teacher said, sarcastically: &#8220;Well, here we are again, Sowell, just the two of us!&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Good grief, Miss Sharoff,&#8221; I said. &#8220;If we keep staying in after school together all the time, people will begin to talk.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We will just have to live with the scandal,&#8221; she said, without even looking up from the papers she was correcting.</p>
<p>Thank heaven there was no Obama administration to exempt me from punishment. Who knows how I might have ended up?</p>
<p>Years ago, there was a study of a working class community where there were black, Hispanic and Italian kids, and where many of the cops were Italian. When a black or Hispanic kid broke the law, the police took him down to the station and booked him. But, if an Italian kid did the same thing, they reacted differently.</p>
<p>The Italian cop would take the Italian kid out into an alley and rough him up. Then he would take him home to his family, tell them what had happened and leave him there — where the kid could expect another beating, instead of the wrist-slap punishment of the law. Those cops understood the realities of life that politicians ignore. And they were doing a favor to their own.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>What Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-happened</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:01:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lame duck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Midterm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245227</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Looking at the years ahead after the midterm elections. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245228" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1-444x350.jpg" alt="Midterm Elections-1" width="312" height="246" /></a>Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?</p>
<p>The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of &#8220;we the people&#8221; only a distant memory and a painful mockery.</p>
<p>We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama&#8217;s term?</p>
<p>Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country&#8217;s immigration laws unilaterally.</p>
<p>Does that sound like a lame duck president?</p>
<p>On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic&#8217;s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.</p>
<p>People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.</p>
<p>You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.</p>
<p>When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.</p>
<p>The president&#8217;s refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans&#8217; interests for the sake of other people&#8217;s interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.</p>
<p>Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama&#8217;s citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: &#8220;We can&#8217;t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times &#8230; and then just expect that every other country&#8217;s going to say okay.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a similar vein, Obama said, &#8220;we consume more than 20 percent of the world&#8217;s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world&#8217;s oil reserves.&#8221; In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.</p>
<p>That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama&#8217;s vision.</p>
<p>Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don&#8217;t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.</p>
<p>The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.</p>
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		<title>Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/random-thoughts-on-the-passing-scene-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=random-thoughts-on-the-passing-scene-3</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2014 04:10:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Derek Jeter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242086</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A pivotal election draws near. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/thinking-pic.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242113" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/thinking-pic-450x305.jpg" alt="thinking-pic" width="341" height="231" /></a>Random thoughts on the passing scene:</p>
<p>What a non-judgmental society amounts to is that common decency is optional — which means that decency is likely to become less common.</p>
<p>The biggest issue in this fall&#8217;s election is whether the Obama administration will end when Barack Obama leaves the White House or whether it will continue on, by appointing federal judges with lifetime appointments who share President Obama&#8217;s contempt for the Constitution. Whether such judges will be confirmed by the Senate depends on whether the Senate continues to be controlled by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid.</p>
<p>Why in the world would any sane American go to North Korea and put themselves at the mercy of a crackpot dictator?</p>
<p>Since Illinois enacted a law permitting more people to carry concealed firearms, more than 65,000 people got permits to do so. Rates of robbery, burglary and motor vehicle thefts have dropped significantly, and the murder rate has fallen to a level not seen in more than half a century. If only the gun control fanatics would pay some attention to facts, a lot of lives could be saved.</p>
<p>If you took all the mumbo-jumbo out of our educational institutions, how much would be left? Students could finish their education years earlier and end up knowing a lot more than they know now.</p>
<p>Why are Americans — and the Western world in general — falling all over ourselves stifling our own self-expression to appease people who chose to immigrate here, and are now demanding the suppression of anything they don&#8217;t like, such as public expressions of Christianity or displays of the American flag?</p>
<p>Someone should write a history of political rhetoric, if only to put us on our guard against being deceived into disasters. The First World War, for example, was said to be a war &#8220;to make the world safe for democracy.&#8221; What it actually led to was the replacement of despotic dynasties by totalitarian dictatorships that were far worse, including far more murderous.</p>
<p>Professor Sterling Brown remains as much a hero to me in my old age as he was when I was a freshman at Howard University.</p>
<p>He wrote bitterly eloquent attacks on racism — and yet, when I was preparing to go off to Harvard, he said to me, &#8220;Don&#8217;t come back here and tell me you didn&#8217;t make it &#8217;cause white folks were mean.&#8221;</p>
<p>The fatal weakness of most clever people is that they don&#8217;t know when to stop being clever. The past cleverness of President Obama is finally starting to catch up with him.</p>
<p>Why Republicans would bring up the subject of immigration during an election year is beyond me. Yet Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner seems drawn to the subject like a moth to a flame.</p>
<p>Who says the Obama administration is not transparent? They are constantly telling our enemies overseas when it will pull out our troops and where we will not put boots on the ground.</p>
<p>Heartening as it has been to see Derek Jeter get farewell honors during his last season, as with Mariano Rivera last season, it is also a melancholy thought that we may not see their like again — in their personal dignity and class, as well as their performance on the field. They are throwbacks to an earlier time, in a sports world of spoiled brat showoffs today.</p>
<p>I must have heard the word &#8220;diversity&#8221; proclaimed in ringing tones as a great benefit to society at least a thousand times — and probably closer to a million — without even once hearing a speck of evidence provided, or even suggested as a way to test whether that is true or false.</p>
<p>Attorney General Eric Holder has picked the perfect time to resign, in terms of his own self-interest. He will have two years in which to cash in with lucrative fees on the lecture circuit and to make a big-bucks book deal. If he waited until the end of the Obama administration, a former Attorney General would be eclipsed in both respects by a former President of the United States, thereby reducing the demand for Holder.</p>
<p>With the momentous consequences of control of the Senate at stake in this fall&#8217;s election, anyone who risks the outcome by running as a third party candidate should not only be voted against this year but remembered for such irresponsibility in future years.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>De Blasio&#8217;s War on Achievement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/de-blasios-war-on-achievement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=de-blasios-war-on-achievement</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Aug 2014 04:10:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public school]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Teachers Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[test]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238449</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do high-achieving public high schools have a future in New York City?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/blasio2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238451" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/blasio2-423x350.jpg" alt="Bill De Blasio Holds Campaign Rally In Brooklyn" width="255" height="211" /></a>New York&#8217;s mayor, Bill de Blasio, like so many others who call themselves &#8220;progressive,&#8221; is gung-ho to solve social problems. In fact, he is currently on a crusade to solve an educational problem that doesn&#8217;t exist, even though there are plenty of other educational problems that definitely do exist.</p>
<p>The non-existent problem is the use of tests to determine who gets admitted to the city&#8217;s three most outstanding public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These admissions tests have been used for generations, and the students in these schools have had spectacular achievements for generations.</p>
<p>These achievements include many Westinghouse Science awards, Intel Science awards and — in later life — Pulitzer Prizes and multiple Nobel Prizes. Graduates of Bronx Science alone have gone on to win five Nobel Prizes in physics alone. There are Nobel Prize winners from Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech as well.</p>
<p>&#8220;If it ain&#8217;t broke, don&#8217;t fix it&#8221; is a motto that Mayor de Blasio and many other activist politicians pay no attention to. He is also out to curtail charter schools, which include schools that have achieved outstanding education results for poor minority students, who cannot get even adequate results in all too many of the other public schools.</p>
<p>What is wrong with charter schools and with elite high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech? Despite their educational achievements, they have political problems.</p>
<p>The biggest political problem is that the teachers&#8217; unions don&#8217;t like them — and the teachers&#8217; unions are the 800-pound gorilla among the special interests in Bill de Blasio&#8217;s Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The next biggest political problem is that people who don&#8217;t pass the tests for the elite public high schools don&#8217;t want to have to pass tests to get in.</p>
<p>Their politicians have been denouncing these admissions tests for decades, and so have various other ethnic community &#8220;leaders.&#8221; These include spokesmen for &#8220;civil rights&#8221; organizations, who think their civil rights include getting into these elite schools, whether they qualify or not.</p>
<p>Finally, there are the intelligentsia, who all too often equate achievement with privilege.</p>
<p>In times past, such people called Stuyvesant &#8220;a free prep school for Jews&#8221; and &#8220;a privileged little ivory tower.&#8221;</p>
<p>That was clever, but cleverness is not wisdom. Back in those days, Jewish youngsters were over-represented among the students at all three elite public high schools. Today it is Asian students who are a majority at those same schools — more than twice as many Asians as whites in all three schools.</p>
<p>Black and Hispanic students are rare at all three elite public high schools, and becoming rarer.</p>
<p>Many among the intelligentsia and politicians express astonishment that the ethnic makeup of these schools is so different from the demographic makeup of the city.</p>
<p>But such differences between groups are common in countries around the world. But in each country there are people who say that it is strange — and demand a &#8220;solution&#8221; to this &#8220;problem.&#8221;</p>
<p>In Malaysia, for example, before group quotas were established at the country&#8217;s universities, students from the Chinese minority earned more than 400 engineering degrees in the 1960s, while students from the Malay majority earned just 4.</p>
<p>When a university was established in 19th century Romania, there were more German students than Romanian students, and most of the professors were German. The same was true for most of the 19th century when a university was established in Estonia.</p>
<p>In none of these cases did the group that was over-represented have any power to discriminate against groups that were under-represented.</p>
<p>If racism is the reason why there are so few blacks in Stuyvesant High School, why were blacks a far higher proportion in Stuyvesant in earlier times, as far back as 1938? Was there less racism in 1938? Was there less poverty among blacks in 1938?</p>
<p>We know that there were far fewer black children raised in single-parent homes back then and there was far less social degeneracy represented by things like gangsta rap. If Mayor de Blasio wants to solve real problems, let him take these on.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>America&#8217;s Birthday</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/americas-birthday/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americas-birthday</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2014 04:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[4th of July]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235419</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can the American spirit be kept alive?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/america.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-235420" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/america.jpg" alt="Honduras v United States - FIFA 2014 World Cup Qualifier" width="300" height="205" /></a>Birthdays are supposed to be times for celebration and gift-giving. But America&#8217;s upcoming birthday on the Fourth of July is a time when the gift most needed is an urgent warning about the dangers of losing the things that have made this country America — and have long made &#8220;America&#8221; a ringing word of freedom, not only in this country but to people around the world.</p>
<p>All is not lost. But all could be lost — especially if too many of us take freedom for granted and focus our attention on other things, like electronic gadgets and the antics of celebrities, while ignoring such dangers as nuclear weapons in the hands of suicidal fanatics, with a track record of savagery, whom we are too squeamish to call anything stronger than &#8220;militants.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nor are all the dangers abroad. Within our own country there are all too many signs of people blithely ready to sacrifice the interests or freedom of Americans for the sake of symbolism or passing fashions.</p>
<p>When a former Speaker of the House of Representatives announces that she is going down to our border to greet and welcome masses of people crossing that border illegally, you know that something is fundamentally wrong.</p>
<p>No one knows, or apparently cares, what diseases these floods of illegals are bringing into the country, including diseases that have been largely stamped out in the United States, and which American doctors have seldom seen enough to know how to spot them or treat them.</p>
<p>No one knows, or apparently cares, how many of these &#8220;children&#8221; include teenage criminal gangs to whom murder is no big deal. Worst of all, no one knows, or apparently cares, that the elected representatives of the American people were cut out of the loop when it came to making these decisions.</p>
<p>All that matters to people like Nancy Pelosi is the symbolism of welcoming the oppressed, especially if they represent more votes for Democrats, who will shower the taxpayers&#8217; money on them.</p>
<p>As if to make clear the elite&#8217;s contempt for ordinary Americans&#8217; intelligence, President Obama tells us that the people crossing the border &#8220;love&#8221; America.</p>
<p>How could he possibly know that, any more than he could know how to &#8220;invest&#8221; the taxpayers&#8217; money in &#8220;the industries of the future,&#8221; which have in fact gone bankrupt?</p>
<p>What is involved are not just bad policy choices. What is involved are policies imposed unilaterally by the president, in defiance of Congress&#8217; authority to legislate and in contempt of the Constitution&#8217;s separation of powers — on which all our freedoms ultimately depend.</p>
<p>The people who wrote the Constitution of the United States understood what dangers there are to the freedom of the people — and that freedom can be quietly eroded by degrees, rather than taken all at once.</p>
<p>Too many people today seem oblivious to such dangers. So what if the government used the muscle of the Internal Revenue Service to keep groups opposed to the Obama administration tied up in red tape or litigation in an election year? Enough games like that can make our elections meaningless.</p>
<p>This arrogant abuse of power does not end with the federal government. In Massachusetts, teenager Justina Pelletier was taken from her parents&#8217; custody and held virtually incommunicado for over a year, because her parents preferred to continue to have her treated as the physicians at a medical facility associated with Tufts University had treated her, even though shrinks at Children&#8217;s Hospital in Boston said her problems were in her head, and took her off some of her medications.</p>
<p>This difference of opinion as to the best medical treatment for Justina Pelletier was enough to get a judge to side with headstrong bureaucrats and override her parents&#8217; rights. So a girl who was ice skating before ended up in a wheelchair under the &#8220;care&#8221; of shrinks.</p>
<p>Fortunately, enough media attention, especially by former governor Mike Huckabee on Fox News Channel, finally got this child freed. Perhaps we can hope that all is not lost — yet. But if this case is a symbol of Americans fighting back, it is also a symbol of why it is desperately important to fight back.</p>
<p>That spirit is the best birthday present for America.</p>
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		<title>Kangaroo Courts on Campus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/kangaroo-courts-on-campus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kangaroo-courts-on-campus</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 04:10:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[duke lacrosse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[duke lacrosse rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225415</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the entire learning atmosphere is effected by university rape hysteria. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ww.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225416" alt="ww" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ww-450x320.jpg" width="324" height="230" /></a>There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to &#8220;do something&#8221; about rape on campus.</p>
<p>But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions.</p>
<p>Why are rapists not reported to the police and prosecuted in a court of law?</p>
<p>Apparently this is because of some college women who say that they were raped and are dissatisfied with a legal system that does not automatically take their word for it against the word of someone who has been accused and denies the charge.</p>
<p>There seem to be a dangerously large number of people who think that the law exists to give them whatever they want — even when that means denying other people the same rights that they claim for themselves.</p>
<p>Nowhere is this self-centered attitude more common than on college campuses. And nowhere are such attitudes more encouraged than by the Obama administration&#8217;s Justice Department, which is threatening colleges that don&#8217;t handle rape issues the politically correct way — that is, by presuming the accused to be guilty and not letting Constitutional safeguards get in the way.</p>
<p>Anything that fits the &#8220;war on women&#8221; theme is seen as smart politics in an election year. The last thing Attorney General Eric Holder&#8217;s Justice Department is interested in is justice.</p>
<p>The track record of academics in other kinds of cases is not the least bit encouraging as regards the likelihood of impartial justice. Even on many of our most prestigious college campuses, who gets punished for saying the wrong thing and who gets away with mob actions depends on which groups are in vogue and which are not.</p>
<p>This is carried to the point where some colleges have established what they call &#8220;free speech zones&#8221; — as if they are granting a special favor by not imposing their vague and arbitrary &#8220;speech codes&#8221; everywhere on campus.</p>
<p>The irony in this is that the Constitution already established a free speech zone. It covers the entire United States.</p>
<p>Have we already forgotten the lynch mob atmosphere on the Duke University campus a few years ago, when three young men were accused of raping a stripper?</p>
<p>Thank heaven that case was handled by the criminal justice system, where all the evidence showed that the charge was bogus, leading to the district attorney&#8217;s being removed and disbarred.</p>
<p>If all the current crusades to institutionalize lynch law on campuses across the country were motivated by a zeal to protect young women, that might at least be understandable, however unjustified.</p>
<p>But those who are whipping up the lynch mob mentality have shown far less interest in stopping rape than in politicizing it.</p>
<p>Many of the politically correct crusaders are the same people who have pushed for unisex living arrangements on campus, including unisex bathrooms, and who have put condom machines in dormitories and turned freshman orientation programs into a venue for sexual &#8220;liberation&#8221; propaganda.</p>
<p>They laughed at old-fashioned restrictions designed to reduce sexual dangers among young people on campus. Now that real life experience has shown that these are not laughing matters, the politically correct still want their sexual Utopia, and want scapegoats when they don&#8217;t get it.</p>
<p>There is a price to pay for allowing unsubstantiated accusations to prevail, and that price extends beyond particular young men whose lives can be ruined by false charges. The whole atmosphere of learning is compromised when male faculty have to protect themselves from accusations by female students.</p>
<p>People today are amazed when I tell them about a young African woman who had just arrived in America back in 1963, and who was so overwhelmed by everything that she fell far behind in my economics class. I met with her each evening for an hour of tutoring until she caught up with the rest of the class.</p>
<p>There is no way that I would do that today, and there is no way that she would have passed that class otherwise. Instead, she would have returned to Africa a failure. There are many unintended consequences of lynch law policies that poison the atmosphere on campus and diminish American life in general.</p>
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		<title>Education and Moral Bankruptcy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/education-and-moral-bankruptcy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=education-and-moral-bankruptcy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2014 04:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the Left wastes poor students' time with destructive non-educational programing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224879" alt="092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens-450x350.jpg" width="270" height="210" /></a>If you want to get some idea of the moral bankruptcy of our educational system, read an article in the May 4th issue of the New York Times Magazine titled, &#8220;The Tale of Two Schools.&#8221;</p>
<p>The article is not about moral bankruptcy. But it is itself an example of the moral bankruptcy behind the many failures of American education today.</p>
<p>Someone had the bright idea of pairing public high school kids from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx with kids from a private high school that charges $43,000 a year.</p>
<p>When the low-income youngsters visited the posh private school, &#8220;they were just overwhelmed&#8221; by it, according to the New York Times. &#8220;One kid ran crying off campus.&#8221; Apparently others felt &#8220;so disheartened about their own circumstances.&#8221;</p>
<p>What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem.</p>
<p>No doubt those adults who believe in envy and resentment get their jollies from doing things like this — and from feeling that they are creating future envy and resentment voters to forward the ideological agenda of the big government left.</p>
<p>But at the expense of kids?</p>
<p>There was a time when common sense and common decency counted for something. Educators felt a responsibility to equip students with solid skills that could take them anywhere they wanted to go in later life — enable them to become doctors, engineers or whatever they wanted to be.</p>
<p>Too many of today&#8217;s &#8220;educators&#8221; see students as a captive audience for them to manipulate and propagandize.</p>
<p>These young people do not yet have enough experience to know that posh surroundings are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good education. Is anyone foolish enough to think that making poor kids feel disheartened is doing them a favor?</p>
<p>This school visit was not just an isolated event. It was part of a whole program of pairing individual youngsters from a poverty-stricken neighborhood with youngsters from families that can pay 43 grand a year for their schooling.</p>
<p>What do these kids do? They tell each other stories based on their young lives&#8217; unripened judgment.</p>
<p>They go to a big park in the Bronx together and take part in a garden project there. They talk about issues like gun violence and race relations.</p>
<p>They have a whole lifetime ahead of them to talk about such issues. But poor kids, especially, have just one time, during their school years, to equip their minds with math, science and other solid skills that will give them a shot at a better life.</p>
<p>To squander their time on rap sessions and navel-gazing is unconscionable.</p>
<p>This is just one of many programs dreamed up by &#8220;educators&#8221; who seem determined to do anything except educate. They see school children as guinea pigs for their pet notions.</p>
<p>The New York Times is doing these youngsters no favor by publishing page after page of their photographs and snippets of things they said. More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke lamented &#8220;everything which takes a man from his house and sets him on a stage.&#8221;</p>
<p>Setting adolescents on a stage is even more ill-advised, at a time of life when they do not yet have the experience to see what an inconsequential distraction such activities and such publicity are.</p>
<p>At a time when American youngsters are consistently outperformed on international tests by youngsters in other countries, do we have the luxury of spending our children&#8217;s time on things that will do absolutely nothing for them in the years ahead? Are children just playthings for adults?</p>
<p>Maybe the affluent kids can afford to waste their time this way, because they will be taken care of, one way or another, in later life.</p>
<p>But to squander the time of poor kids, for whom education is often their only hope of escaping poverty, is truly an irresponsible self-indulgence by adults who should know better, and it is one more sign of the moral bankruptcy of too many people in our schools.</p>
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		<title>Demonizing the Helpers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/demonizing-the-helpers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=demonizing-the-helpers</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[alternative]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224329</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Robbing minorities of education by denigrating those trying to reform the system. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/la-me-ln-walton-funds-la-charters-20140204-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224331" alt="la-me-ln-walton-funds-la-charters-20140204-001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/la-me-ln-walton-funds-la-charters-20140204-001-450x299.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a>It is not easy to demonize people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to help educate poor children. But some members of the education establishment are taking a shot at it.</p>
<p>The Walton Family Foundation — created by the people who created Walmart — has given more than $300 million to charter schools, voucher programs and other educational enterprises concerned with the education of poor and minority students across the country.</p>
<p>The Walton Family Foundation gave more than $58 million to the KIPP schools, which have had spectacular success in raising the test scores of children in ghettoes where the other children are far behind in academic performance.</p>
<p>D.C. Prep, in Washington, whose students are mostly poor and black, has also received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Its test scores likewise exceed those of traditional neighborhood schools, as well as the test scores of other local charter schools. Other wealthy people across the country have been doing similar things for years, including high-tech tycoons like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. It is one of the great untold stories of a unique pattern of philanthropy that makes America truly exceptional.</p>
<p>Yet these philanthropists have been attacked by the teachers&#8217; unions and by others in the education establishment, including academics.</p>
<p>It was painful to watch a well-known historian of education on a TV talk show recently, denouncing people from &#8220;Wall Street&#8221; who have promoted alternatives to the failing public schools. Apparently, in some circles, you can just say the words &#8220;Wall Street&#8221; and that proves that something evil is being done.</p>
<p>You can listen in vain for any concrete evidence that these philanthropic efforts to help educate poor children are creating harm.</p>
<p>Instead, you get statements like that from the head of the American Federation of Teachers, saying, &#8220;they&#8217;re trying to create an alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American democracy.&#8221;</p>
<p>If government-monopoly schools, with iron-clad tenure for incompetent teachers, have been an anchor, they have been an anchor around the necks of American students, who consistently score lower on international tests than students from countries that spend half as much money per student, and yet have students who outperform our youngsters, year after year.</p>
<p>It is not written in the stars that youngsters in ghetto schools have to score miles behind everybody else.</p>
<p>Data from the 1940s show test scores in Harlem schools comparable to test scores in white working class schools on New York&#8217;s lower east side. (See &#8220;Teachers College Record,&#8221; Fall 1981, pages 40-41.)</p>
<p>Even today, particular minority schools — sometimes charter schools, sometimes Catholic schools, and sometimes even regular public schools headed by principals who defy the prevailing educational dogmas — turn out black students who can compete with other students academically.</p>
<p>Teachers&#8217; unions and others who defend the public school establishment decry competing schools, on grounds that they are somehow undermining the public schools.</p>
<p>One of the claims is that these alternative schools drain money from the public schools. But expenditures per pupil in the public schools have risen during the era of the spread of alternative schools.</p>
<p>Of course, if there were no alternative schools, the total amount of money going to the public school system might have increased more. But this would not necessarily produce more money per student, since charter schools typically do not get as much money per student as the public schools get.</p>
<p>Then there is the claim that alternative schools &#8220;skim the cream&#8221; of the students, and that this explains why their test results are better. But many, if not most, charter schools select among their applicants through a lottery.</p>
<p>Lots of things need to be done by lots of people to improve our education system, especially for schools in minority neighborhoods. Demonizing those who are trying to help is not one of them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The &#8216;War on Women&#8217; and Statistical Frauds</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-war-on-women-and-statistical-frauds/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-on-women-and-statistical-frauds</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:00:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[77 cents]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[equal pay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fraud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender way gap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223545</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's war against common sense. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/equal-pay-women-006.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223546" alt="equal-pay-women-006" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/equal-pay-women-006-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>The &#8220;war on women&#8221; political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.</p>
<p>It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination.</p>
<p>It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same.</p>
<p>Constantly repeating the &#8220;77 percent&#8221; statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people&#8217;s ignorance — something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues.</p>
<p>What if you compare women and men who are the same on all the relevant characteristics?</p>
<p>First of all, you can seldom do that, because the statistics you would need are not always available for the whole range of occupations and the whole range of differences between women&#8217;s patterns and men&#8217;s patterns in the labor market.</p>
<p>Even where relevant statistics are available, careful judgment is required to pick samples of women and men who are truly comparable.</p>
<p>For example, some women are mothers and some men are fathers. But does the fact that they are both parents make them comparable in the labor market? Actually the biggest disparity in incomes is between fathers and mothers. Nor is there anything mysterious about this, when you stop and think about it.</p>
<p>How surprising is it that women with children do not earn as much as women who do not have children? If you don&#8217;t think children take up a mother&#8217;s time, you just haven&#8217;t raised any children.</p>
<p>How surprising is it that men with children earn more than men without children, just the opposite of the situation with women? Is it surprising that a man who has more mouths to feed is more likely to work longer hours? Or take on harder or more dangerous jobs, in order to earn more money?</p>
<p>More than 90 percent of the people who are killed on the job are men.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During my research on male-female differences for my book &#8220;Economic Facts and Fallacies,&#8221; I was amazed to learn that young male doctors earned much higher incomes than young female doctors. But it wasn&#8217;t so amazing after I discovered that young male doctors worked over 500 hours more per year than young female doctors. </span>There is no point pretending that there are no differences between what women do and what men do in the workplace, or that these differences don&#8217;t affect income.</p>
<p>Even when women and men work at jobs that have the same title — whether doctors, lawyers, economists or whatever — people do not get paid for what their job title is, but for what they actually do.</p>
<p>Women lawyers who are pregnant, or who have young children, may have good reasons to prefer a 9 to 5 job in a government agency to working 60 hours a week in a high-powered law firm. But there is no point comparing male lawyers as a group with female lawyers as a group, if you don&#8217;t look any deeper than job titles.</p>
<p>Unless, of course, you are not looking for the truth, but for political talking points to excite the gullible.</p>
<p>Even when you compare women and men with the &#8220;same&#8221; education, as measured by college or university degrees, the women usually specialize in a very different mix of subjects, with very different income-earning potential.</p>
<p>Although comparing women and men who are in fact comparable is not easy to do, when you look at women and men who are similar on multiple factors, the sex differential in pay shrinks drastically and gets close to the vanishing point. In some categories, women earn more than men with the same range of characteristics.</p>
<p>If the 77 percent statistic was for real, employers would be paying 30 percent more than they had to, every time they hired a man to do a job that a woman could do just as well. Would employers be such fools with their own money? If you think employers don&#8217;t care about paying 30 percent more than they have to, just go ask your boss for a 30 percent raise!</p>
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		<title>The Left Versus Minorities</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-left-versus-minorities/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-left-versus-minorities</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:10:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grades]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[schools]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220731</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How progressives are destroying the only schools that give underprivileged kids a chance. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bill-de-blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220732" alt="bill de blasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bill-de-blasio-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left&#8217;s avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things.</p>
<p>These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30 percent of the students in the city as a whole.</p>
<p>Why would anybody who has any concern at all about minority young people — or even common decency — want to destroy what progress has already been made?</p>
<p>One big reason, of course, is the teachers&#8217; union, one of Mayor de Blasio&#8217;s biggest supporters. But it may be more than that. For many of the true believers on the left, their ideology overrides any concern about the actual fate of flesh-and-blood human beings.</p>
<p>Something similar happened on the west coast last year. The American Indian Model Schools in Oakland have been ranked among the top schools in the nation, based on their students&#8217; test scores. This is, again, a special achievement for minority students who need all the help they can get.</p>
<p>But, last spring, the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut this school down!</p>
<p>Why? The excuse given was that there had been suspicious financial dealings by the former — repeat, former — head of the institution. If this was the real reason, then all they had to do was indict the former head and let a court decide if he was guilty or innocent.</p>
<p>There was no reason to make anyone else suffer, much less the students. But the education establishment&#8217;s decision was to refuse to let the school open last fall. Fortunately a court stopped this hasty shut-down.</p>
<p>These are not just isolated local incidents. The Obama administration has cut spending for charter schools in the District of Columbia and its Justice Department has intervened to try to stop the state of Louisiana from expanding its charter schools.</p>
<p>Why such hostility to schools that have succeeded in educating minority students, where so many others have failed?</p>
<p>Some of the opposition to charter schools has been sheer crass politics.</p>
<p>The teachers&#8217; unions see charter schools as a threat to their members&#8217; jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that teachers&#8217; unions can provide.</p>
<p>The net result is that public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a decent education is secondary, at best.</p>
<p>In various parts of the country, educators who have succeeded in raising the educational level of minority children to the national average — or above — have faced hostility, harassment or have even been driven out of their schools.</p>
<p>Not all charter schools are successful, of course, but the ones that are completely undermine the excuses for failure in the public school system as a whole. That is why teachers&#8217; unions hate them, as a threat not only to their members&#8217; jobs but a threat to the whole range of frauds and fetishes in the educational system.</p>
<p>The autonomy of charter schools is also a threat to the powers that be, who want to impose their own vision on the schools, regardless of what the parents want. Attorney General Eric Holder wants to impose his own notion of racial balance in the schools, while many black parents want their children to learn, regardless of whether they are seated next to a white child or a black child. There have been all-black schools whose students met or exceeded national norms in education, whether in Louisiana, California or other places around the country. But Eric Holder, like Bill de Blasio, put his ideology above the education — and the future life — of minority students.</p>
<p>Charter schools take power from politicians and bureaucrats, letting parents decide where their children will go to school. That is obviously offensive to those on the left, who think that our betters should be making our decisions for us.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Freedom Is Not Free</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/freedom-is-not-free/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-is-not-free</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:03:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FCC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Press]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220218</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is our generation up to fighting for it?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Irs.png"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-220229" alt="Irs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Irs-450x306.png" width="450" height="306" /></a>There may be something to the claim that all people want to be free. But it is a demonstrable fact that freedom has been under attack, usually successfully, for thousands of years.</p>
<p>The Federal Communications Commission&#8217;s recent plan to have a &#8220;study&#8221; of how editorial decisions are made in the media, placing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices across the country, was one of the boldest assaults on freedom of the press. Fortunately, there was enough backlash to force the FCC to back off.</p>
<p>With all the sweeping powers available to government, displeasing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices could have brought on armies of &#8220;safety&#8221; inspectors from OSHA, audits from the Internal Revenue Service and many other harassments from many other government agencies.</p>
<p>Such tactics have become especially common in this administration, which has the morals of thugs and the agenda of totalitarians. They may not be consciously aiming at creating a totalitarian state, but shameless use of government power to crush those who get in their way can produce totalitarian end results.</p>
<p>The prosecution of Dinesh D&#8217;Souza for contributing $20,000 to a political candidate, supposedly in violation of the many campaign finance laws, is a classic case of selective prosecution.</p>
<p>Thugs who stationed themselves outside a polling place in Philadelphia to intimidate white voters were given a pass, and others accused of campaign finance violations were charged with misdemeanors, but Dinesh D&#8217;Souza has been charged with felonies that carry penalties of years in federal prison.</p>
<p>All of this is over a campaign contribution that is chicken feed, compared to what can be raised inside of an hour at a political fundraising breakfast or lunch.</p>
<p>Could this singling out of D&#8217;Souza for prosecution have something to do with the fact that he made a documentary movie with devastating exposures of Barack Obama&#8217;s ideologies and policies? That movie, incidentally, is titled &#8220;2016: Obama&#8217;s America,&#8221; and every American should get a copy of it on a DVD. It will be the best $10 investment you are ever likely to make.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights.</p>
<p>And it doesn&#8217;t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials&#8217; power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.</p>
<p>In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don&#8217;t protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.</p>
<p>As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom — and all our freedom — to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously.</p>
<p>The arrogance of arbitrary power is not confined to the federal government. An egregious case in Massachusetts involves a teenage girl from Connecticut named Justina Pelletier, who was being treated for a rare disease by doctors at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.</p>
<p>When her parents brought this 15-year-old girl to an emergency room in Boston, the doctors there decided that her problem was not medical but psychological. When the parents objected, and sought to take her back to the doctors who had been treating her at Tufts University, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families charged the parents with &#8220;medical child abuse,&#8221; and were granted legal custody of the teenager.</p>
<p>Once given arbitrary power over Justina, the DCF bureaucrats kept her all but isolated from her parents for more than a year. To add insult to injury, a judge issued a gag order, forbidding the parents from discussing the case publicly.</p>
<p>Only after Megyn Kelly on the Fox News Channel brought this case to national attention did the Massachusetts bureaucrats back off and turn the teenager&#8217;s medical care back to the doctors at Tufts University. Whether her parents will get to see their daughter freely again is still up in the air.</p>
<p>Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it or lose it. But is our generation up to fighting for it?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.<br />
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		<title>The Inequality Boogeyman</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-inequality-boogeyman/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-boogeyman</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rockefeller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real cause of wealth differentials in society. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217519" alt="income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif" width="263" height="178" /></a>During a recent lunch in a restaurant, someone complimented my wife on the perfume she was wearing. But I was wholly unaware that she was wearing perfume, even though we had been in a car together for about half an hour, driving to the restaurant.</p>
<p>My sense of smell is very poor. But there is one thing I can smell far better than most people — gas escaping. During my years of living on the Stanford University campus, and walking back and forth to work at my office, I more than once passed a faculty house and smelled gas escaping. When there was nobody home, I would leave a note, warning them.</p>
<p>When walking past the same house again a few days later, I could see where the utility company had been digging in the yard — and, after that, there was no more smell of gas escaping. But apparently the people who lived in these homes had not smelled anything.</p>
<p>These little episodes have much wider implications. Most of us are much better at some things than at others, and what we are good at can vary enormously from one person to another. Despite the preoccupation — if not obsession — of intellectuals with equality, we are all very unequal in what we do well and what we do badly.</p>
<p>It may not be innate, like a sense of smell, but differences in capabilities are inescapable, and they make a big difference in what and how much we can contribute to each other&#8217;s economic and other well-being. If we all had the same capabilities and the same limitations, one individual&#8217;s limitations would be the same as the limitations of the entire human species.</p>
<p>We are lucky that we are so different, so that the capabilities of many other people can cover our limitations.</p>
<p>One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them, in the first place.</p>
<p>The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things — goods and services.</p>
<p>Those goods and services are the real &#8220;wealth of nations,&#8221; as Adam Smith titled his treatise on economics in the 18th century.</p>
<p>Yet when the intelligentsia discuss such things as the historic fortunes of people like John D.Rockefeller, they usually pay little — if any — attention to what it was that caused so many millions of people to voluntarily turn their individually modest sums of money over to Rockefeller, adding up to his vast fortune.</p>
<p>What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.</p>
<p>Before Rockefeller came along in the 19th century, the ancient saying, &#8220;The night cometh when no man can work&#8221; still applied. There were not yet electric lights, and burning kerosene for hours every night was not something that ordinary working people could afford. For many millions of people, there was little to do after dark, except go to bed.</p>
<p>Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to &#8220;greed&#8221; — as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you. It is a childish idea, when you stop and think about it — but who stops and thinks these days?</p>
<p>The transfer of money was a zero-sum process. What increased the wealth of society was Rockefeller&#8217;s cheap kerosene that added hundreds of hours of light to people&#8217;s lives annually.</p>
<p>Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, and innumerable others also created unprecedented expansions of the lives of ordinary people. The individual fortunes represented a fraction of the wealth created.</p>
<p>Even those of us who create goods and services in more mundane ways receive income that may be very important to us, but it is what we create for others, with our widely varying capabilities, that is the real wealth of nations.</p>
<p>Intellectuals&#8217; obsession with income statistics — calling envy &#8220;social justice&#8221; — ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone&#8217;s well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Leftists: For the &#8216;People&#8217;?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/leftists-for-the-people/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftists-for-the-people</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jan 2014 05:09:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217045</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[History demonstrates otherwise. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/845990-sydney-uni-protest.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217046" alt="845990-sydney-uni-protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/845990-sydney-uni-protest-428x350.jpg" width="300" height="245" /></a>One of the things that attracted me to the political left, as a young man, was a belief that leftists were for &#8220;the people.&#8221; Fortunately, I was also very interested in the history of ideas — and years of research in that field repeatedly brought out the inescapable fact that many leading thinkers on the left had only contempt for &#8220;the people.&#8221;</p>
<p>That has been true from the 18th century to the present moment. Even more surprising, I discovered over the years that leading thinkers on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum had more respect for ordinary people than people on the left who spoke in their name.</p>
<p>Leftists like Rousseau, Condorcet or William Godwin in the 18th century, Karl Marx in the 19th century or Fabian socialists like George Bernard Shaw in England and American Progressives in the 20th century saw the people in a role much like that of sheep, and saw themselves as their shepherds.</p>
<p>Another disturbing pattern turned up that is also with us to the present moment. From the 18th century to today, many leading thinkers on the left have regarded those who disagree with them as being not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant. And again, this pattern is far less often found among those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.</p>
<p>The visceral hostility toward Sarah Palin by present day liberals, and the gutter level to which some descend in expressing it, is just one sign of a mindset on the left that goes back more than two centuries.</p>
<p>T.R. Malthus was the target of such hostility in the 18th and early 19th centuries. When replying to his critics, Malthus said, &#8220;I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.&#8221;</p>
<p>But William Godwin&#8217;s vision of Malthus was very different. He called Malthus &#8220;malignant,&#8221; questioned &#8220;the humanity of the man,&#8221; and said &#8220;I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.&#8221;</p>
<p>This asymmetry in responses to people with different opinions has been too persistent, for too many years, to be just a matter of individual personality differences.</p>
<p>Although Charles Murray has been a major critic of the welfare state and of the assumptions behind it, he recalled that before writing his landmark book, &#8220;Losing Ground,&#8221; he had been &#8220;working for years with people who ran social programs at street level, and knew the overwhelming majority of them to be good people trying hard to help.&#8221;</p>
<p>Can you think of anyone on the left who has described Charles Murray as &#8220;a good person trying hard to help&#8221;? He has been repeatedly denounced as virtually the devil incarnate — far more often than anyone has tried seriously to refute his facts.</p>
<p>Such treatment is not reserved solely for Murray.</p>
<p>Liberal writer Andrew Hacker spoke more sweepingly when he said, &#8220;conservatives don&#8217;t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even in the midst of an election campaign against the British Labour Party, when Winston Churchill said that there would be dire consequences if his opponents won, he said that this was because &#8220;they do not see where their theories are leading them.&#8221;</p>
<p>But, in an earlier campaign, Churchill&#8217;s opponent said that he looked upon Churchill &#8220;as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart.&#8221;</p>
<p>Examples of this asymmetry between those on opposite sides of the ideological divide could be multiplied almost without limit. It is not solely a matter of individual personality differences.</p>
<p>The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create &#8220;social justice&#8221; and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left, whether on gun control, minimum wages, or innumerable other issues — and why they react so viscerally to those who challenge their vision.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A New Year and Old Problems</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/a-new-year-and-old-problems/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-year-and-old-problems</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jan 2014 05:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[new year]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214312</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Facing our historic crossroads. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214313" alt="obama-sad-frown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy, and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.</p>
<p>Sometimes we are content to try to change ourselves with New Year&#8217;s resolutions to do better in some respect. Changing ourselves is a much more reasonable undertaking than trying to change other people. It may or may not succeed, but it seldom creates the disasters that trying to change others can produce.</p>
<p>When we look beyond ourselves to the world around us, peering into the future can be a very sobering, if not depressing, experience.</p>
<p>ObamaCare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover at their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.</p>
<p>What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts&#8217; Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems — and even catastrophes — that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.</p>
<p>The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally — after nearly five long years — begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.</p>
<p>What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans, and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?</p>
<p>What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings, because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?</p>
<p>With all the time that elapsed between the passage of ObamaCare and its going into effect, why were the so-called &#8220;navigators&#8221; who were to be handling other people&#8217;s financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn&#8217;t care?</p>
<p>Caring is not a matter of words.</p>
<p>&#8220;By their fruits ye shall know them&#8221; — not by their rhetoric, image or symbolism.</p>
<p>Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year, as the medical, financial and other painful human consequences of ObamaCare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.</p>
<p>The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.</p>
<p>ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.</p>
<p>In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn — citizens or subjects.</p>
<p>This means that Republicans have to decide whether their top priority is internal strife among the different wings of the party — another circular firing squad — or whether either wing puts the country first.</p>
<p>A prediction on how that will turn out in the new year would be far too hazardous to attempt.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The War on Achievement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/the-threat-of-achievement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-threat-of-achievement</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Nov 2013 04:05:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[achievement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[helen keller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211124</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why celebrating self-reliant heroes shatters the Left's ideological vision of the world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RICHIE-PARKER-NO-ARMS-NASCAR-ENGINEER.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211154" alt="RICHIE-PARKER-NO-ARMS-NASCAR-ENGINEER" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RICHIE-PARKER-NO-ARMS-NASCAR-ENGINEER-435x350.jpg" width="261" height="210" /></a>A friend recently sent me a link to an inspiring video about an upbeat young black man who was born without arms. It showed him going to work — unlike the record number of people living on government payments for &#8220;disabilities&#8221; that are far less serious, if not fictitious.</p>
<p>How is this young man getting to work? He gets into his car and drives there — using controls set up so that he can operate the car with his feet.</p>
<p>What kind of work does he do, and how does he do it? He is involved in the design of racing cars. He sits at his computer, looking at the screen, with the keyboard on the floor, where he uses his toes as others use their fingers.</p>
<p>His story recalls the story of Helen Keller, who went to an elite college and on to a career, despite having been born both deaf and blind. Her story was celebrated in books, in television documentaries and in an inspiring movie, &#8220;The Miracle Worker.&#8221;</p>
<p>But our culture has changed so much over the years that the young man with no arms is unlikely to get comparable publicity. Helen Keller&#8217;s achievement was seen as an inspiration for others, but this young man&#8217;s achievement is more like a threat to the prevailing ideology of our times.</p>
<p>The vision on which the all-encompassing and all-controlling welfare state was built is a vision of widespread helplessness, requiring ever more expanding big government. Our &#8220;compassionate&#8221; statists would probably have wanted to take this young man without arms, early on, and put him in some government institution.</p>
<p>But to celebrate him in the mainstream media today would undermine a whole ideological vision of the world — and of the vast government bureaucracies built on that vision. It might even cause people to think twice about giving money to able-bodied men who are standing on street corners, begging.</p>
<p>The last thing the political left needs, or can even afford, are self-reliant individuals. If such people became the norm, that would destroy not only the agenda and the careers of those on the left, but even their flattering image of themselves as saviors of the less fortunate.</p>
<p>Victimhood is where it&#8217;s at. If there are not enough real victims, then fictitious victims must be created — as with the claim that there is &#8220;a war on women.&#8221; Why anyone would have an incentive or a motivation to create a war on women in the first place is just one of the questions that should be asked of those who promote this political slogan, obviously designed for the gullible.</p>
<p>The real war — which is being waged in our schools, in the media and among the intelligentsia — is the war on achievement. When President Obama told business owners, &#8220;You didn&#8217;t build that!&#8221; this was just one passing skirmish in the war on achievement.</p>
<p>The very word &#8220;achievement&#8221; has been replaced by the word &#8220;privilege&#8221; in many writings of our times. Individuals or groups that have achieved more than others are called &#8220;privileged&#8221; individuals or groups, who are to be resented rather than emulated.</p>
<p>The length to which this kind of thinking — or lack of thinking — can be carried was shown in a report on various ethnic groups in Toronto. It said that people of Japanese ancestry in that city were the most &#8220;privileged&#8221; group there, because they had the highest average income.</p>
<p>What made this claim of &#8220;privilege&#8221; grotesque was a history of anti-Japanese discrimination in Canada, climaxed by people of Japanese ancestry being interned during World War II longer than Japanese Americans.</p>
<p>If the concept of achievement threatens the prevailing ideology, the reality of achievement despite having obstacles to overcome is a deadly threat. That is why the achievements of Asians in general — and of people like the young black man with no arms — make those on the left uneasy. And why the achievements of people who created their own businesses have to be undermined by the President of the United States.</p>
<p>What would happen if Americans in general, or blacks in particular, started celebrating people like this armless young man, instead of trying to make heroes out of hoodlums? Many of us would find that promising and inspiring. But it would be a political disaster for the left — which is why it is not likely to happen.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Destroying Household Jobs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=destroying-household-jobs</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extension]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-skill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[worker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's latest attack on the poor through wage-control regulations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206011" alt="National-Unemployment-Rat-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg" width="270" height="218" /></a>Despite evidence from around the world that minimum wage laws can price low-skilled workers out of jobs, the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to extend minimum wage coverage to domestic workers, such as maids or those who drop in from time to time to do a few household chores for the sick and the elderly.</p>
<p>This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.</p>
<p>If making household workers subject to the minimum wage law is expected to produce good results, why not let those good results begin early, so that voters will know about them before the next election?</p>
<p>But, if this new extension of the minimum wage law opens a whole new can of worms — as is more likely — politicians who support this extension want to insulate themselves from a voter backlash. Hence artfully choosing January 2015 as the effective date, to minimize the political risks to themselves.</p>
<p>The reason this particular extension of the minimum wage law is likely to open a can of worms is that both household workers and those who employ them will face more complications than employers and employees in industry or commerce.</p>
<p>First of all, ill or elderly individuals who need someone to help them from time to time are not like employers who have a business that regularly hires people and may have a personnel department to handle all the paperwork and keep up with all the legal requirements when government bureaucrats are involved.</p>
<p>Often the very reason for hiring part-time household workers is that some ill or elderly individuals have limited energy or capacity for handling things that were easy to handle when they were younger or in better health. Bureaucratic paperwork and legal technicalities are the last thing they need to have to add to their existing problems.</p>
<p>The people being hired to do household chores also have special problems.</p>
<p>Often such people have limited education, and may also have limited knowledge of the English language.</p>
<p>Why make it harder for ill or elderly people to get some much-needed help in their homes, and harder for low-skilled people to get some much-needed jobs?</p>
<p>Despite all the talk about how we need more people with high-tech skills, there is also a need for people who can help clean a home or carry groceries or do other things that need doing, and which do not require years of schooling. As the elderly become an ever growing proportion of the population, there will be a growing demand for such people.</p>
<p>More precisely, there would be more jobs for such people if the government did not step in to complicate the hiring process and price potential workers out of jobs, with minimum wages set by third parties who do not, and cannot, know what the economic realities are for either the ill and the elderly or for those whom the ill and the elderly wish to hire.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws in general are usually set with no real knowledge of the economic realities and alternatives for either employers or employees. Third parties are simply enabled to indulge themselves by imagining what is &#8220;fair&#8221; — and pay no price for being wrong about the actual economic consequences.</p>
<p>That is why countries with minimum wage laws usually have much higher rates of unemployment than those few places where there have been no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Singapore — or the United States, before the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1931.</p>
<p>Government interventions in labor markets have already created needless complications, and not just by minimum wage laws. The welfare state has already taken out of the labor market millions of people who could perform work that would be well within the capacity of inexperienced young people or people with limited education.</p>
<p>With welfare, such people can stay home, watch television, do drugs or whatever — or else they can hang out in the streets, often confirming the old adage that the devil finds work for idle hands.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Minimum Wage Madness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/minimum-wage-madness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=minimum-wage-madness</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Sep 2013 04:20:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor Unions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204450</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The surest way to harm low-wage and minority workers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204454" alt="minimum_wage_onpage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage-450x302.jpg" width="189" height="127" /></a>A survey of American economists found that 90 percent of them regarded minimum wage laws as increasing the rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers. Inexperience is often the problem. Only about 2 percent of Americans over the age of 24 earned the minimum wage.</p>
<p>Advocates of minimum wage laws usually base their support of such laws on their estimate of how much a worker &#8220;needs&#8221; in order to have &#8220;a living wage&#8221; — or on some other criterion that pays little or no attention to the worker&#8217;s skill level, experience or general productivity. So it is hardly surprising that minimum wage laws set wages that price many a young worker out of a job.</p>
<p>What is surprising is that, despite an accumulation of evidence over the years of the devastating effects of minimum wage laws on black teenage unemployment rates, members of the Congressional Black Caucus continue to vote for such laws.</p>
<p>Once, years ago, during a confidential discussion with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, I asked how they could possibly vote for minimum wage laws.</p>
<p>The answer I got was that members of the Black Caucus were part of a political coalition and, as such, they were expected to vote for things that other members of that coalition wanted, such as minimum wage laws, in order that other members of the coalition would vote for things that the Black Caucus wanted.</p>
<p>When I asked what could the black members of Congress possibly get in return for supporting minimum wage laws that would be worth sacrificing whole generations of young blacks to huge rates of unemployment, the discussion quickly ended. I may have been vehement when I asked that question.</p>
<p>The same question could be asked of black public officials in general, including Barack Obama, who have taken the side of the teachers&#8217; unions, who oppose vouchers or charter schools that allow black parents (among others) to take their children out of failing public schools.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.</p>
<p>In 1925, a minimum wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.</p>
<p>A well regarded Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia&#8217;s minimum wage law as a means to &#8220;protect the white Australian&#8217;s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese&#8221; who were willing to work for less.</p>
<p>In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.</p>
<p>Some supporters of the first federal minimum wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and under-bid construction companies using unionized white labor.</p>
<p>These supporters of minimum wage laws understood long ago something that today&#8217;s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through.</p>
<p>People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum wage rate.</p>
<p>Labor unions have been supporters of minimum wage laws in countries around the world, since these laws price non-union workers out of jobs, leaving more jobs for union members.</p>
<p>People who are content to advocate policies that sound good, whether for political reasons or just to feel good about themselves, often do not bother to think through the consequences beforehand or to check the results afterwards.</p>
<p>If they thought things through, how could they have imagined that having large numbers of idle teenage boys hanging out on the streets together would be good for any community — especially in places where most of these youngsters were raised by single mothers, another unintended consequence, in this case, of well-meaning welfare policies?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Unintended Consequences</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/unintended-consequences/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unintended-consequences</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/unintended-consequences/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Sep 2013 04:02:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Housing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can politicians really "fix" community diversity? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203263" alt="eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eric-holder-hated-by-gop-4x3.gif" width="262" height="204" /></a>One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers.</p>
<p>The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer.</p>
<p>The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone&#8217;s home values depend, tends to decline. &#8220;Who&#8217;s going to paint the outside of a rented house?&#8221; one resident was quoted as saying in a recent New York Times story.</p>
<p>Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level than homeowners. They are also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of homeowners that had not had such activities before.</p>
<p>None of this should be surprising. Individuals and groups of all sorts have always differed from one another in many ways, throughout centuries of history and in countries around the world. Left to themselves, people tend to sort themselves out into communities of like-minded neighbors.</p>
<p>This has been so obvious that only the intelligentsia could misconstrue it — and only ideologues could devote themselves to crusading against people&#8217;s efforts to live and associate with other people who share their values and habits.</p>
<p>Quite aside from the question of whose values and habits may be better is the question of the effects of people living cheek by jowl with other people who put very different values on noise, politeness, education and other things that make for good or bad relations between neighbors. People with children to protect are especially concerned about who lives next door or down the street.</p>
<p>But such mundane matters often get brushed aside by ideological crusaders out to change the world to fit their own vision.</p>
<p>When the world fails to conform to their vision, then it seems obvious to the ideologues that it is the world that is wrong, not that their vision is uninformed or unrealistic.</p>
<p>One of the political consequences of such attitudes is the current crusade of Attorney General Eric Holder to force various communities to become more &#8220;inclusive&#8221; in terms of which races and classes of people they contain.</p>
<p>Undaunted by a long history of disasters when third parties try to mix and match people, or prescribe what kind of housing is best, they act as if this time it has to work.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter how many government housing projects that began with lofty rhetoric and heady visions have ended with these expensive projects being demolished with explosives, in the wake of social catastrophes that made these places unlivable.</p>
<p>To those with the crusading mentality, failure only means that they should try, try again — at other people&#8217;s expense, including not only the taxpayers but also those who lives have been disrupted, or even made miserable and dangerous, by previous bright ideas of third parties who pay no price for being wrong.</p>
<p>This headstrong dogmatism and grab for power is not confined to housing. Attorney General Holder is also taking legal action against the state of Louisiana for having so many charter schools, on grounds that these schools do not mix and match the races the way that public schools are supposed to.</p>
<p>The fact that those charter schools which are successful in educating low-income and minority students that the public schools fail to educate are giving these youngsters a shot at a decent life that they are not likely to get elsewhere does not deter the ideological crusaders.</p>
<p>Nor does it deter the politicians who are serving the interests of the teachers&#8217; unions, who see public schools as places to provide jobs for their members, even if that means a poor education and poor prospects in life for generations of minority students.</p>
<p>All this ideological self-indulgence and cynical political activity is washed down with lofty rhetoric about &#8220;compassion,&#8221; &#8220;inclusion&#8221; and the like.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Who Is Racist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/who-is-racist-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-is-racist-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2013 04:03:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civil rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Equality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196588</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the civil rights movement was transformed into a vehicle for race hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/jesse_jackson_and_al_sharpton.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196589" alt="jesse_jackson_and_al_sharpton" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/jesse_jackson_and_al_sharpton-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.</p>
<p>Apparently other Americans also recognize that the sources of racism are different today from what they were in the past. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks think that most blacks are racists, while 24 percent of blacks think that most whites are racist.</p>
<p>The difference between these percentages is not great, but it is remarkable nevertheless. After all, generations of blacks fought the white racism from which they suffered for so long. If many blacks themselves now think that most other blacks are racist, that is startling.</p>
<p>The moral claims advanced by generations of black leaders — claims that eventually touched the conscience of the nation and turned the tide toward civil rights for all — have now been cheapened by today&#8217;s generation of black &#8220;leaders,&#8221; who act as if it is all just a matter of whose ox is gored.</p>
<p>Even in legal cases involving terrible crimes — the O.J. Simpson murder trial or the charges of gang rape against Duke University students — many black &#8220;leaders&#8221; and their followers have not waited for facts about who was guilty and who was not, but have immediately taken sides, based on who was black and who was white.</p>
<p>Among whites, according to the same Rasmussen poll, 38 percent consider most blacks racist and 10 percent consider most whites racist.</p>
<p>Broken down by politics, the same poll showed that 49 percent of Republicans consider most blacks racist, as do 36 percent of independents and 29 percent of Democrats.</p>
<p>Perhaps most disturbing of all, just 29 percent of Americans as a whole think race relations are getting better, while 32 percent think race relations are getting worse. The difference is too close to call, but the fact that it is so close is itself painful — and perhaps a warning sign for where we are heading.</p>
<p>Is this what so many Americans, both black and white, struggled for, over the decades and generations, to try to put the curse of racism behind us — only to reach a point where retrogression in race relations now seems at least equally likely as progress?</p>
<p>What went wrong? Perhaps no single factor can be blamed for all the things that went wrong.</p>
<p>Insurgent movements of all sorts, in countries around the world, have for centuries soured in the aftermath of their own success. &#8220;The revolution betrayed&#8221; is a theme that goes back at least as far as 18th century France.</p>
<p>The civil rights movement in 20th century America attracted many people who put everything on the line for the sake of fighting against racial oppression. But the eventual success of that movement attracted opportunists, and even turned some idealists into opportunists.</p>
<p>Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans. After the success of the civil rights insurgency, the latter have come into their own, gaining money, power and fame by promoting racial attitudes and actions that are counterproductive to the interests of those they lead.</p>
<p>None of this is unique to blacks or to the United States. In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people — and to hate those other people.</p>
<p>This was the history of anti-Semitic movements in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars, anti-Ibo movements in Nigeria in the 1960s, and anti-Tamil movements that turned Sri Lanka from a peaceful nation into a scene of lethal mob violence and then decades-long civil war, both marked by unspeakable atrocities.</p>
<p>Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having racial or ethnic leaders. While most Americans can easily name a number of black leaders, current or past, how many can name Asian American ethnic leaders or Jewish ethnic leaders?</p>
<p>The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Loss of Trust</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/the-loss-of-trust/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-loss-of-trust</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:10:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[phone records]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trust]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193625</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Obama scandals are doing permanent damage to the nation's spirit. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/obama-5.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193628" alt="obama-5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/obama-5-450x329.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>Amid all the heated cross-currents of debate about the National Security Agency&#8217;s massive surveillance program, there is a growing distrust of the Obama administration that makes weighing the costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess.</p>
<p>The belated recognition of this administration&#8217;s contempt for the truth, for the American people and for the Constitution of the United States, has been long overdue.</p>
<p>But what if the NSA program has in fact thwarted terrorists and saved many American lives in ways that cannot be revealed publicly?</p>
<p>Nothing is easier than saying that you still don&#8217;t want your telephone records collected by the government. But the first time you have to collect the remains of your loved ones, after they have been killed by terrorists, telephone records can suddenly seem like a small price to pay to prevent such things.</p>
<p>The millions of records of phone calls collected every day virtually guarantee that nobody has the time to listen to them all, even if NSA could get a judge to authorize listening to what is said in all these calls, instead of just keeping a record of who called whom.</p>
<p>Moreover, Congressional oversight by members of both political parties limits what Barack Obama or any other president can get away with.</p>
<p>Are these safeguards foolproof? No. Nothing is ever foolproof.</p>
<p>As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago: &#8220;Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, we do not have a choice whether to trust or not to trust government officials. Unless we are willing to risk anarchy or terrorism, the most we can do is set up checks and balances within government — and be a lot more careful in the future than we have been in the past when deciding whom to elect.</p>
<p>Anyone old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy took this country to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, may remember that there was nothing like the distrust and backlash against later presidents, whose controversial decisions risked nothing approaching the cataclysm that President Kennedy&#8217;s decision could have led to.</p>
<p>Even those of us who were not John F. Kennedy supporters, and who were not dazzled by the glitter and glamour of the Kennedy aura, nevertheless felt that the President of the United States was someone who knew much more than we did about the realities on which all our lives depended.</p>
<p>Whatever happened to that feeling? Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon happened — and both were shameless liars. They destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility of the office.</p>
<p>Even when Lyndon Johnson told us the truth at a crucial juncture during the Vietnam war — that the Communist offensive of 1968 was a defeat for them, even as the media depicted it as a defeat for us — we didn&#8217;t believe him.</p>
<p>In later years, Communist leaders themselves admitted that they had been devastated on the battlefield. But, by then it was too late. What the Communists lost militarily on the ground in Vietnam they won politically in the American media and in American public opinion.</p>
<p>More than 50,000 Americans lost their lives winning battles on the ground in Vietnam, only to have the war lost politically back home. We seem to be having a similar scenario unfolding today in Iraq, where soldiers won the war, only to have politicians lose the peace, as Iraq now increasingly aligns itself with Iran.</p>
<p>When Barack Obama squanders his own credibility with his glib lies, he is not just injuring himself during his time in office. He is inflicting a lasting wound on the country as a whole.</p>
<p>But we the voters are not blameless. Having chosen an untested man to be president, on the basis of rhetoric, style and symbolism, we have ourselves to blame if we now have only a choice between two potentially tragic fates — the loss of American lives to terrorism or a further dismantling of our freedoms that has already led many people to ask: &#8220;Is this still America?&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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