What a shame this man can't run for the Presidency

Right, here's a little test for you.  Who pointed out these, and other, truths which have been paraphrased thus:

Gun-control laws began to be passed during times when crime was declining, rather than climbing.

Crime began climbing after gun-control laws were passed.

Places with very strict gun-control laws typically have more crime than do places without them—a fact that holds true between countries and between regions of the United States.

There is little or no relationship between the rigorousness of gun-control laws and criminals’ access to guns.

Many countries have lots of guns but relatively few murders, while others have few guns but relatively many murders.

Swimming pools kill many more people in accidents than guns do.

Well, you can almost feel the liberal nannies wincing, but he went further and into much more dangerous territory when he asked, again paraphrased:

Why is it that these programs that we are told will help blacks in fact hurt them? And what should be done about that?

Even worse he pointed to actual examples:

He points to the case of Dr. Patrick Chavis, a celebrated case study of affirmative action, and notes: “[Chavis was] publicly praised by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights—just two weeks before his license was suspended, after his patients died under conditions that brought the matter to the attention of the Medical Board of California. An administrative law judge referred to Chavis’s ‘inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.’ A year later, after a fuller investigation, his license was revoked.”

Not that his enquiring mind is limited to investigating American domestic idiocies.  He has given considerable thought to the travails of Africa:

Consider his fascinating disquisition on the geography and natural environment of Africa, in which he argues that such factors as the lack of navigable interior waterways, the steepness of its rivers, the lack of pack animals due to insect-born disease, the lack of natural ports and harbors on the continent’s smooth coastline, other interior barriers to travel, the resulting isolation of group from group, and linguistic fragmentation (Africa, he points out, has 10 percent of the world’s people and a third of its languages) explain much of the continent’s socioeconomic backwardness. Such brilliant observational analysis does not fit neatly into orthodox conservative or orthodox liberal explanations of development. It is fact-intensive and based upon observable, empirical realities ...

Now, were any of the Republican hopefuls, currently bashing each other to pieces so that the survivor will be easy meat for the Dem-controlled media to finish off, to say these things we would hear the howls of outrage 'over here'.  But it is a little tricky for the massed regiments of the politically-correct brigades to attack this man.  For a start, he is black which helps but does not make you fireproof as Herbert Cain has recently discovered.  Also, he has just about the most 'authentic' black background a noodle-headed liberal would swoon over - he was born poor in the south and remained poor in Harlem where he was eventually raised.  He was forced to drop out of school at 17 and was quickly called up to the Marines during the Korean war.  During his twenties he was a Marxist until his inner compulsion to follow facts and reason where-ever they led turned him into a conservative, free-market libertarian.

This man is Thomas Sowell whom I first came across and admired back in the '80s when I used to subscribe to The American Spectator.  Intermittantly, I have followed his career as he has steadily decimated what he calls "the vision of the anointed", that is, all the pontifical streams of un-consciousness poured forth by the liberal 'Great and the Good'.  He would be the first to admit that he is not necessarily always one hundred percent right about everything, but you would need to get up very early in the morning to prove him wrong.  What a pity his talents are denied in the field of politics.

I am grateful to an article in Commentary by Kevin D. Williamson from which I have quoted above.

 

Comments

[Hank]

David

A great man.

If you find a hole in you pile of books to be read pick up a "Conflict of Visions". He explains the basic "pre-cognitive" assumptions that go into left and right thought process.

[David Duff]

Yes, Hank, I really must find time to read one of his books.