Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

  How did that happen? It happened because they set up their own schools, even in places where such schools were illegal and had to operate underground. What an insult to their memory when blacks in ghetto schools today who want to get an education are accused by their peers of “acting white”! Black people risked jail to set up schools for their children before the Civil War.

  One of the most inspiring and heroic episodes in the history of black education in America came after the Civil War, when numerous white school teachers from the North went South to teach the children of the freed slaves, often under the auspices of religious organizations—and in defiance of ostracism by Southern whites. Voluntary and privately financed efforts to educate blacks were so widespread that it was 1916 before there were as many blacks in public high schools as in private high schools.

  Blacks themselves went to extraordinary lengths to create an educated class. The building of Tuskeegee Institute, literally with the students' own hands, is a story seldom told, because it was done under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, who is not politically correct today. He is excoriated by those who have never bothered to study the facts about the man or his times.

  As far back as 1899, the one black academic high school in Washington scored higher on standardized tests than two of the three white high schools in the nation's capital. In the decades that followed, its graduates went on to college at a higher rate than that of white Americans. From this school came the first black federal judge, the first black general to lead men in combat, the first black Cabinet member, the first black elected to the Senate and many other firsts. All this from one school.

  Yet this story too is seldom mentioned today, because it too was done in ways that are not considered politically correct. Far from looking inward at the ghetto or being Afro-centric or teaching—or even tolerating—“black English,” it opened the students' minds to a wider world of culture, including requiring the learning of Latin and the study of the classics.

  Facts about other successful black schools, past and present, get very little attention from the intelligentsia because the stories of these schools would not forward the agendas of the left. In short, history is treated as just the continuation of politics by other means.

  But for anyone who is serious about wanting to see black youngsters get a better education, the story of what works and what doesn't work is more important than what is fashionable and not fashionable in the education establishment, or what is or is not considered politically correct among the intelligentsia, politicians, the education establishment or the media.

  The real question is: How many people are serious about improving the education of black youngsters, as distinguished from advancing the many other agendas that stand in the way of that improvement?

  PART V

  LEGAL ISSUES

  PROPERTY RITES

  With police on hand to try to maintain order, the Loudon County (Virginia) board of supervisors recently imposed severe restrictions on the building of homes, despite angry protesters. The board's plan allows only one house to be built for every 10 acres in some places and for every 20 or 50 acres in other places.

  Opponents of these restrictions accused the supervisors of violating their property rights. One of their signs read: “Thou shalt not steal.”

  Property rights are one of the most misunderstood things in law and one of the most disregarded things in politics. The vast amount of land that the Loudon County supervisors are micro-managing does not belong to them or to Loudon County. It belongs to its respective individual owners.

  According to the Constitution of the United States, the government cannot take private property without compensation. However, judges have been letting governments get away with doing just that for about half a century now. So long as the title to the property remains in the hands of its owners, the courts let local, state and federal governments do pretty much what they please, even if that destroys much of the value of the property.

  From an economic point of view, there is no real difference between confiscating half of someone's property and reducing its value by half. When county officials drastically restrict the uses to which land can be put, that land becomes less valuable on the market. A farmer cannot sell his land to someone who wants to build an apartment complex if the county regulations make it illegal to build an apartment complex.

  When the use of land is restricted to ways that only the wealthy can afford, that eliminates a major part of the demand for that land—and a major part of its value. Land use laws are just one way that governments can confiscate much of the value of private property without having to compensate the owner. Where there are stringent rent control laws, as in New York City, the cost of the services that a landlord is required to provide can exceed the rents he is allowed to collect, so that an apartment building can end up with a zero value—or even a negative value.

  That is why thousands of buildings in New York have been simply abandoned by their owners and ended up boarded up. The entire value of the building has been destroyed by government, without compensation.

  One of the reasons property rights do not get all the protection that the Constitution prescribes is that they are seen as special benefits to the affluent, which must give way to the general welfare. The old leftist phrase “property rights versus human rights” summarizes this mindset.

  This ignores the value of property rights to the society as a whole, including people who own no property. Most Americans do not own agricultural land, but they get an abundance of food at affordable prices because farmers own both land and its produce as their private property, and therefore have incentives to produce far more efficiently than in countries where the land is owned by the government. The Soviet Union was a classic example of the latter, with hungry people despite an abundance of fertile land, inefficiently used under government control.

  Loudon County illustrates another danger in political confiscation of private property. It is precisely the wealthy and the affluent who gain by restricting other people's property rights. Although the average rich person—by definition—has more money than other people, the non-rich often have far more wealth in the aggregate, simply because they are more numerous.

  In a free market with undiluted property rights, the non-rich would out-bid the rich for much land and use that land in ways that suit the circumstances of ordinary people. For example, grand estates would be broken up into smaller plots for more modest homes or used for building apartment complexes. That is what the affluent and the wealthy strive to prevent by government-imposed restrictions on land use. Such restrictions also increase the value of the existing estates of the rich.

  California pioneered in such restrictions, years ago, which is why California real estate prices and apartment rents are out of sight. But Loudon County is one of many other places that are now catching up, using the same legalistic techniques and the same political rhetoric about the environment, preventing “sprawl,” and other pieties that beguile the gullible.

  LOVE THOSE KILLERS!

  Most of us were horrified to learn that Andrea Yates had killed five of her own children by drowning them—one at a time—in a bathtub. But that may be because we are not among the morally anointed. Big time celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell and Today Show hostess Katie Couric apparently see things differently.

  “I felt such overwhelming empathy for her of what it must have been like for her to do that,” said Rosie O'Donnell. “When you've been on the edge you can understand what it's like to go over.”

  Katie Couric on the Today Show seemed likewise to think the big issue was Mrs. Yates' psyche. She said: “Mrs. Yates, after you drowned your five children, how did that make you feel?”

  The Today Show put on the screen information showing where to send donations to the legal defense fund for Andrea Yates. In Houston, the local chapter of the National Organization for Women formed something called “The Andrea Yates Support Coalition” and is planning to
raise money for her defense.

  This has apparently become a so-called woman's issue because the claim is being made that Mrs. Yates suffered from postpartum depression and that either that or the drugs she had to take caused her to kill her children. But of course the reason we hold trials is to find out which claims by either side can stand up in court.

  The judge has slapped a gag order on the attorneys in this case, in order to prevent pre-trial publicity from biasing the jury. But, in reality, that just means that the public will hear only Andrea Yates' side of the story before the trial. We will of course never hear the children's side of the story.

  Unfortunately, the vogue of leaping to the defense of killers is not limited to women or even to the United States. Just this summer, two teenage boys who had sadistically murdered a two-year old toddler in Britain when they were ten years old were released from prison—and given new identities, so that they would not suffer any bad consequences from members of the public who were not as much in tune with current non-judgmental fashions.

  What other people might suffer from these young killers in the course of another half century or more of their lives did not seem to raise nearly as much concern. Shrinks said that they were no danger to others—which is what shrinks said about some of the American teenagers who later killed their schoolmates in shooting sprees.

  At a cost of about $2 million to the British taxpayers, the young British killers and their families have been set up in three-bedroom homes. They have even been given spending money, with which one of the parents has bought a car.

  Even before being released from “imprisonment”—in facilities without bars but with TV and other amenities, including karate lessons and spending money for Christmas—the young killers were allowed out on supervised furlough to see sports events and even visit shopping malls. It was at a shopping mall that they had lured the little toddler away and then tortured him to death.

  The foreman of the jury that convicted them recalls seeing the terrible pictures of the little toddler's body and then catching the eye of one of the young killers—who smirked in the courtroom. However, the politically correct line in Britain, as in the United States, is that expressed by a “penal reform” advocate, who said: “If children do something wrong, they should be dealt with through the care system and not the criminal justice system.”

  Meanwhile, the liberal media in England has vilified the mother of the murdered child, who has protested these boys' early release and the posh life provided for them and their families. The media “compared her unfavourably with more forgiving mothers,” according to The Guardian newspaper. Apparently all mothers should be non-judgmental about their babies' sadistic young killers.

  Back in the 1960s, it was considered eccentric, at least, when Norman Mailer took up the cause of a convicted murderer and managed to get him released from behind bars. It was no doubt considered somewhat more than eccentric by a man that the ex-con killed after being released. But today, what was once considered eccentric is par for the course in certain elite circles.

  Outcries of outrage from the public only confirm the anointed in their own smug sense of being special—nobler and wiser than the common herd. What a price to pay so that some people can feel more non-judgmental than thou or simply affirm within their own little coterie that they are one of Us instead of one of Them.

  MICROSOFT AND ANTI-TRUST “LAW”

  The biggest question about anti-trust law is whether there really is any such thing. There are anti-trust theories and antitrust rhetoric, as well as judicial pronouncements on antitrust. But there is very little that could be called law in the full sense of rules known in advance and applied consistently.

  Federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's recent ruling in the anti-trust case against Microsoft is a classic example of lawless “law.” Just what specific law did Microsoft violate and how did they violate it?

  While Judge Jackson's long pronouncement opens with a brief reference to sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman anti-trust act, this is little more than a passing formality. What follows is a lengthy exposition of theoretical conclusions about the economic meaning of Microsoft's actions. Is Microsoft supposed to have violated a theory or to have violated a law? What was it that they should have known in advance not to do?

  Courts have declared laws against vagrancy to be void because of their vagueness, which gives the individual no clear understanding of just what they are supposed to do or not do. But vagrancy laws are a model of clarity compared to Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, which forbid conspiracies “in restraint of trade” or any “attempt to monopolize.”

  Just what does that mean? It means whatever Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson or any other federal judge says it means—at least until they are reversed on appeal.

  But what does it mean to a company that is supposed to obey this law? It means that there is no law, just a cloud of legal uncertainties, from which lightning can strike at any time.

  In economics, “monopoly” means simply one seller. If you could invoke this provision of the Sherman Act only when there was just one seller, lots of Justice Department lawyers would be out of work, because there are very few products sold by only one company.

  The ploy that prevents unemployment among anti-trust lawyers is to claim that some company sells a high percentage of some product—or, in the rhetoric of anti-trust, “controls” a large share of the market. And the way to produce statistics showing large shares is to define the market as narrowly as possible.

  Judge Jackson does this by defining the market for operating systems like Microsoft's Windows as being only those operating systems using Intel's processors and their clones. That means we don't count Apple computers or computer systems relying on the Linux computer language.

  These kinds of definitional games have been played throughout the history of anti-trust “law.” The net result is that there are statistics showing many more “dominant” companies with “market power” in these narrowly defined industries than there would be if industries were defined in some economically meaningful way. Judge Jackson's pronouncements are larded with such ominous rhetoric.

  What also runs through Judge Jackson's statements—and through the whole anti-trust tradition—is a confusion between competitors and competition. Harm to Microsoft's competitors is equated with harm to competition in the software industry. But nothing harms particular competitors like competition.

  When Microsoft spent $100 million to develop its Internet browser and included it in Windows free of charge, to Judge Jackson that showed monopoly power and hurt competition. But why would a monopoly have to blow $100 million to improve its product?

  It was precisely because Microsoft was not as optimistic as Judge Jackson about a lack of competition that they spent the money to keep their customers. Is it a violation of law to operate on a different economic theory than the one a judge believes in?

  But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Microsoft was guilty of every terrible thing the Judge came up with. All the contract provisions he doesn't like can be forbidden and all the competitors who were supposed to have been harmed can be compensated to the tune of millions of dollars.

  Why then is the Justice Department involved? Because they want the power to oversee and second-guess the computer software industry. Microsoft's competitors in Silicon Valley may rejoice at its legal misfortunes, but once Washington bureaucrats start calling the shots in the computer industry, their joy may be very short-lived. Silicon Valley rivals of Microsoft could turn out to be like those Democrats of a few years ago, who voted for special prosecutors as if they were only going to prosecute Republicans.

  LESSONS NOT LEARNED

  With all our looking back at the 20th century, we have missed some of its most blatant and most horrifying lessons. The worst horrors of that century, under both the Nazis and the Communists, came from concentrations of political power, brought about by heady rhetoric, powerful visions and emotional manipulat
ions. Yet we remain as susceptible to all these things as if none of these horrors had happened.

  The constitutional barriers that stand between us and the tyrannies that have swept over other peoples around the world are treated as things to be brushed aside or finessed when those who are skilled with words manipulate our emotions.

  The constitution's proclamation of “equal protection of the laws” for all Americans is swept aside by saying the magic word “diversity,” while creating preferences and quotas for some at the expense of others. Cry “Big Tobacco!” and due process of law vanishes into thin air. The first amendment to the constitution says that the right of free speech cannot even be infringed, but that is all forgotten in the stampede for “campaign finance reform.”

  There is nothing wrong with changing the constitution, which itself prescribes procedures for doing so. But we are playing with fire when we simply ignore the constitution or find clever ways around it. Without a constitution, we are at the mercy of whatever phrase or fashion sweeps across the political landscape.

  Even Supreme Court justices, who are supposed to be guardians of the constitution, have often treated it as a nuisance to be gotten around or, worse yet, as political cover for using their power to advance whatever ideas they personally want to impose on the country. The federal government has only the powers specifically granted to it in the constitution, but many judges feel free to grant it more power when they happen to agree with its policies.

  In a recent decision, Justice David Souter upheld campaign contribution restrictions on grounds that big contributions create “the perception of impropriety.” Where does the constitution give the federal government the power to stop anything that creates the perception of impropriety? If it did, then any of our freedoms could be abolished just by using this magic phrase. Indeed, this decision opens the door to such an erosion in the years ahead.