Spanish – Blame the welfare state, not racism, for the problems of poor Black people, says Thomas Sowell, a libertarian economist who turned 90 on June 30.
Racism is not dead, but it is on life support—kept alive by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as “racists,” Sowell proclaimed.
He points out to the progressive, leftist, self-proclaimed savior of the Black people. They have caused more damage to the Black family than segregationist laws. The progressives have removed the father from the equation and replaced him with the “welfare state.”
“Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves,” Sowell said. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement was instituting a “redistributive” discourse.
Happy 90th birthday to the legend, @ThomasSowell.
“Facts.”
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— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) June 30, 2020
He emphasizes that such trends are not exclusive to Black people, even in the United States. He claims that the welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white working class in England during the same period.
Sowell recommends reading Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor who worked in a hospital in a white-collar slum. It shows how no person, of any color, is exempt from the requirements of civilization, including work, standards of conduct, personal responsibility, and all the other basic premises that many intellectuals scorn, without ruinous consequences for themselves and society.
Sowell studied at night at Howard University, where the student body has been historically African American, like himself. Given his excellent grades, he was able to study at Harvard, where he graduated as an economist with distinction: magna cum laude.
As an economist, he has notably criticized systems of state dependency that have mostly marginalized the Black population in the U.S. He was born in Harlem, New York, a historically impoverished, predominantly Black area.
Black Lives Matter seeks to take the class struggle from Marxism to racial redistribution
It was in the very New York City that Opal Tometi, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, honored Nicolás Maduro during the People of African Descent Leaders’ Summit in 2015. Tometi herself traveled to Venezuela to oversee the counting of votes in the 2015 parliamentary elections. When the regime lost the election, Black Lives Matter issued a statement referring to the opposition in Venezuela as “counter-revolutionaries.”
In other words, the organization that claims to speak on behalf of the Black people who are victims of police abuse supports a regime where the Bolivarian National Guard persecutes, tortures, and kills the population.
Through the M4BL (Movement for Black Lives) coalition, Black Lives Matter openly declared that its struggle is racial socialism. That is, the principles of Marxism, but instead of a class struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois, it would be White versus Black.
Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the institution of the family
Sowell forthrightly asks, “if Black lives matter, why doesn’t education matter? He points to the freedom of parents to choose private education, including a religious one, as the path to prosperity, the opposite of what is demanded by the Black Lives Matter organization, which requires a state education, where the curriculum teaches that abortion is a right.
Faithful to the Communist Manifesto, M4BL proposes the abolition of the family, the institution which Marx argued was the “seed” of the distribution of tasks that keeps capitalism afloat. Therefore, he also sought to abolish inheritance as a way to eliminate private property.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
Sowell responds to this by saying that the destruction of the family by the welfare state impoverishes communities and encourages crime.
In 1960, 78% of black children were raised in families with a mother and a father. “But thirty years after the implementation of the progressive welfare state, the vast majority of Black children were being raised by one parent (66%),” he wrote in 2014.
Joe Biden’s Crime bill fragmented the Black family
Today, two out of three black children grow up without a father. Sowell says it is crucial to note that the poverty rate among Black married couples has been in the single digits every year since 1994.
It was in 1994 that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden (then Senator) enacted the Crime Bill that has affected Black men more than it impacted anyone else. Joe Biden helped draft the bill that was passed by the administration of then Democratic presid Bill Clinton.
Despite being 12.1% of the total US population, in 2016, 78.5% of those sentenced to life in prison were “people of color.” And the bill gave the state the power to enforce the death penalty for more than 60 crimes and imposed life imprisonment for repeat offenders.
“This law does everything but hangs people for crossing the street where they shouldn’t,” he told the congress, bragging about introducing a law that criminalizes victimless crimes and even criminalizes infractions.
Despite the racist legacy of the Democratic Party, within the ranks of which the KKK was founded, 90% of Black voters supported the Democratic Party in the 2018 parliamentary elections, just 9% supported the Republicans, according to Pew Research figures.
So the Democratic Party promoted what has been dubbed as “plantation policies.” It supports subsidies for single mothers, housing, and even food, thus discouraging parental responsibility, work, and endeavor, but, above all, promoting perpetual dependence.
To understand how much better the nation can do for Black people, the economist Sowell cites Frederick Douglass, a freed slave, and co-founder of the Republican Party. In the 19th century, Douglass saw the dangers of well-meaning whites. He said, “Everybody has asked the question… “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!”
Amen, exclaims Sowell. He believes that the worst threat to the Black man is progressive. For the latter builds a welfare state where the Black person is not considered an equal, but as someone unable to sustain a family on his own; then, the state takes over the role of the father.
Sowell, as a libertarian, demands to treat each person as he is: an individual. This helps to diminish the most primitive form of collectivism: racism.