Thomas Sowell – Loudoun Liberty

Backward-looking ‘progressives’

People who call themselves “progressives” claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.

One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

Biography

Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina on June 30, 1930.
As his father passed away prior to his birth, and his mother, a housemaid, had 4 children already, he was adopted and raised by his great aunt and her 2 grown daughters.
When he was 9 years old his family moved to Harlem, New York in search of better opportunity.
After dropping out of the prestigious Stuveysant High School for family reasons, he was drafted into the military in 1951 and served as a photographer in the Marine Corps during the Korean War.
On returning from military duty, he began attending night classes at Howard University, where he was encouraged to apply to Harvard.
In 1959, he graduated magnua cum laude from Harvard. The following year, he received his masters degree from Columbia University.
“Sowell cares about people. He believes that compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis”
– Walter Williams
Despite studying under Milton Friedman and George Stigler, in 1961 Sowell considered himself a Marxist. It was his internship with the US Department of Labor in the summer of 1961 and his observations of the inefficiencies and perverse incentives within government that eventually dissuaded him from Marxism.
In 1968 he earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.
From 1963-1978, he held teaching positions in economics at various institutions including Rutgers, Howard, Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, and Amherst College.
Since 1972, Sowell has published 56 books, over 70 essays, and more than 30 books reviews
In 1980, he was awarded the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, where he continues his writings and work to this day.

https://sowell.org/about

Sample Interview

Article Excerpt

Excerpt from:
Farewell and a few more random thoughts
By THOMAS SOWELL | Press-Enterprise
December 27, 2016 at 2:00 p.m.

https://www.pressenterprise.com/2016/12/27/farewell-and-a-few-more-random-thoughts/

Looking back over the years, as old-timers are apt to do, I see huge changes, both for the better and for the worse.
In material things, there has been almost unbelievable progress. Most Americans did not have refrigerators back in 1930, when I was born. Television was little more than an experiment, and such things as air-conditioning or air travel were only for the very rich.
My own family did not have electricity or hot running water, in my early childhood, which was not unusual for blacks in the South in those days.
It is hard to convey to today’s generation the fear that the paralyzing disease of polio inspired, until vaccines put an abrupt end to its long reign of terror in the 1950s.
Most people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things like cable television, microwave ovens and air-conditioning. Most Americans did not have such things, as late as the 1980s. People whom the intelligentsia continue to call the “have-nots” today have things that the “haves” did not have, just a generation ago.
In some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the years. Politics, and especially citizens’ trust in their government, has gone way downhill.
Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.
Most of us did not question what he did. He was president of the United States, and he knew things that the rest of us couldn’t know — and that was good enough for us. Fortunately, the Soviets backed down. But could any president today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?
Years of lying presidents — Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially — destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.
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