Debunking Systemic Racism & Having Common Decency (Pt. 2) | Thomas Sowell | POLITICS | Rubin Report

What would you do with our school systems? Oh my god, I'll try. Try to be rational. Try it. Yes, they are so horrible, but the audience has no idea what I'm reading. A book about schools and the woman who is writing a Diane Rabbit just talks about how teachers have due process before they can be fired now when you look at the facts down here and I think there is a certainty that it cost half a million dollars fire an incompetent teacher, you know I don't I don't have a big enough budget, you know, and in New York, yes, when I call the rubber room, there are teachers who are so incompetent that the principal doesn't want them in the classroom Yes, and they pay them their full salary and they prove it. and they accumulate pension rights and so on, and last time I forget how many millions of dollars are spent a year in New York paying teachers who don't teach and don't actually do anything but show up at the same time. time as if they are teaching and they read magazines or whatever they feel like doing and this force continues at a time when they don't have enough money to provide the children with decent supplies, so how can we reduce this?

We can talk, we can talk about it through the lens of education, but in any area where government has taken on a bigger role than it's supposed to, I think one of the things you hear all the time is that it's already too late. I think a lot of people think it's too late to take back government power, no, jeez, uh, during the Reagan administration, that was the only time I know the Federal Register got smaller, that's where they compile all the laws that have been approved. in a certain time so it can be done it is not it is not it is not it is not and that is not easy but it can be done someone wants to although it is said that some topic was being discussed by Reagan and someone says that you know it is complicated he said that it is not complicated it's just not easy to do, I mean right now we're one of the big forces here talking about affordable housing and they're pointing to the Blue Ribbon committees to look into why there's no affordable housing and I think that's like name a blue ribbon. committee to explain why the ground is wet after a rain.

I mean, it's very simple, if you prevent people from building housing and the population is growing, you will have a housing shortage, yes, and you will not have affordable housing. You really know economics. one for the first two weeks they are not very good at economics 101 I don't think so, so your answer would be in almost all cases to simply reduce the government reduce regulation it's the president what they don't know There are some things that the government must do, so , what are those types of things that you should for security? First of all, have reliable laws.

Some people think that if you're pro-free market that means you don't believe the government. you should do anything, no you can, free markets don't operate except within a framework of laws which is completely different than them operating with politicians jumping in at unpredictable times to suddenly pass some new legislation, yeah what can we do right now? I mean, really this. It would simply be a matter of electing politicians with a more libertarian mentality. So I mean really the only way we can change things do you think not? I think the main thing is that people have to know what the facts are if everyone knew what all the facts were.

I think there would be a completely different set of people chosen. I can't believe any of the presidential candidates in 19 and 2016 would have been the candidates if they had an informed public. How much of this do you think is part of it? It's the fault of the media, that's one of the things, well, the media is mostly uninformed, no, no, they are not uninformed, they are misinformed hmm and they simply do not verify the facts on big issues, they are small ones, yes, what can we do to solve it? What do you think I mean? I guess not this, no, I know that you know how to write books like this, but I think that mentally it is more fun for the voting public to be informed and not be so easily impressed by slogans and some numbers thrown around as you know, women they earn true, but when you look at it you find that young doctors work an average of 500 hours a year more than young female doctors and they get paid for the 500 hours, but there is no reason why women and men should do that.

Same thing, your circumstances are different, so are there laws in place right now that you believe are discriminatory in one way or another, a grievance toward any community or against any community? I would have to write a bigger book to cover them all, the minimum wage law. The policy of saying that you cannot have more children from one ethnic group disciplined in school and from another is nonsense, meaning the groups are different from each other in countless ways and then these helis have the presumption that they are the same except The way they're treated, there's nonsense that's never been true and I don't know why we'd think it's true here today, so I feel like some of what you just said is bubbling up into the national consciousness.

Conservatives now are people who feel like they haven't been represented fairly or that the so-called leaders of the black community that are on TV all the time are actually preaching the complete opposite of everything you've said here, yes. Do you feel like there is some kind of conservative movement growing? Well, no, there was a community. There was a time when that community consisted of Walter and me. Well, yeah, I know everything they used to say, we with... I should never fly. in the same plane, otherwise all movement will disappear, that fits well. I mentioned to you before we started that Larry Eldar caused my awakening because I was progressive and I said something to him about

systemic

racism

, non-air man, he beat me senseless. facts and I had to go back and re-evaluate what was wrong with my thinking, well you know someone in one of the chapters there, I have a little section on the apartheid era in South Africa and I had that in there. because there are so many arguments about how much

racism

there is, so I said, let's test this hypothesis in an environment where there is absolutely no doubt and that is apartheid in South Africa with a government where black people are not allowed to vote, etc., and then apply the economic principle and you will find that economic principles apply in South Africa, that there are some occupations.

The law did not allow blacks to be insane occupations by more than the same percentage and in some occupations they could not be hired at all and in other of those occupations where they could not be hired at all, it was illegal to hire them, more blacks were hired than white because there are economic factors that come into play and you don't pass a law and that automatically produces the results that you want, yeah, can you go into some of the economic factors that you mentioned there because I thought that was kind of interesting about the types of jobs that had and why would that affect well?

No, it is the competitiveness of the industry and a competitive industry. discrimination and then in the sense that we use for anti-discrimination laws it costs the discriminator as well as others now to the extent that that price can be evaded by those discriminated against, he will describe, for example, minimum wage laws, let that when you have With a minimum wage law, there are more people applying for jobs in those categories than there are jobs available because the Razrs are Asian, the salary causes more people to apply and employers hire less because they are more expensive and that's why we have a chronic surplus.

Now, if you have a chronic surplus in an industry, it costs nothing to discriminate, but and and but, but if you have a competitive market, then of course it costs something for every person you discriminate against who is qualified and you have to hire. that someone else and you raised that pavé to attract people, so I show how competitive industries have much less discrimination than, for example, regulated utilities, so when I read it I was wondering if you were ever going to talk about how to do it now. Technology is changing this too, so we see a lot of these movements for a $15 minimum wage and I know why you don't think that's a great idea, but even now we see McDonald's and some of these other places just replacing people with yes and computers.

This has been happening I don't know when I grew up in Harlem when you went to the movies here this is a little neighborhood movie theater in Harlem there was a boy walking next to a hot rock down the hall with you with a place The light shows you so you can see, you see , and now that we have so many compassionate people who wanted people to be paid a minute of a living wage, you actually stumbled upon the accusation of walking down the aisle to your seat as best you can. Yeah, because they're not going to pay that kind of money, you know, that's not related to productivity.

Yes, what would you say to people? I hear a growing movement of people saying, "Well, that's why we need a universal basic income, because technology is going to force so many people out of the workplace, oh, and that has been and is always been done for centuries." and it has been proven wrong for centuries. I would ask the question: what has happened? We have moved in that direction, we already have many of the people who can live on welfare say and no and no and they don't have to. be productive and are better people as a result of what I saw some time ago and I have not followed this that young people are suicides The rates among young people were one of the negative consequences of the 1960s.

People have taken away all meaning to people's lives and so they find all kinds of crazy things like doing drugs, whatever and, again, it's not unique to the United States like you Find us in Britain, other countries and, again, the. people who say this almost never look at any facts about what happened as we expanded the welfare state, that people behave better, no, you know, I mean what I want, one of the things that moments I remember very well when I was in school in Harlem for some reason maybe doing research and I looked out the window and said, you know, when I was a teenager I used to walk my dog ​​in that park. and look, look, horror came over the students' faces because that was a different world and so and when I tell you that I used to sleep on a fire escape on hot summer nights, who could afford to have air conditioning and they think I'm a man of all the people who did that all over New York, they did it in Washington, they did it in North Carolina, their relatives were in Washington they used to go and Haines would point near the Jefferson Memorial at night hot summer and they slept there, so you know. sometime after midnight when they didn't win when it was hot it wouldn't be so bad they would go home at that time you would be crazy to do that today it would be too dangerous yeah so how do I do it?

We somehow unraveled some of this, so my sister now lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from Harlem, and is in a rent-controlled building with half a rent stabilizer and a market rate of 10 1 /2, it's at market rate, so she's paying for that two-bedroom apartment in New York City. I don't even want to tell you how expensive it is, but basically there's half the building that pays next to nothing and that, of course, incentivizes people not to get off the dole because If you live in a nice area on the Upper West Side, it's very cheap, why the hell would you get off the dole?

How do we begin to solve these problems? And I know, I know, the facts are your basis and yes, but what? Can we get people to understand some of these things because it's C? It seems very basic to understand if someone was giving you something you didn't earn back. It's always difficult to do it again. This is

common

and in Europe and in England especially, it's a special problem because you have the hat, you have this place where you are subsidized and you say you are in London and the work is disappearing in London and now they are opening in Manchester if you go to Manchester , you know, you know, you have a waiting list for that kind of job and if you stay in London you're unemployed but your rent is low, so Peter, so you slow down the movement of people, you slow down the turnover of people. in these apartments, but again, most people who talk about this don't even talk in terms of this or that, they talk about this, this is how the world should be.

Well, hell, I have all kinds of things about how I think. the world should be like this, but unfortunately most of those things involve a cost, a trade-off, do you think there is a system or a government that is doing it better, doing freedom better than us here, despite all the flaws that we have in this? In this system, is there anyone who does it better than us, althoughmaybe it's marginally? But I think most of the Western world is less free than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago, by what measures do you consider that, oh, just the amount of regulations, things that you could use and also by the consequences, whether it was reading Milton Friedman's joint autobiography, he and his wife had a joint autobiography and she's looking at one moment and she says she's remembering the days when she was riding the IND subway in Manhattan and what a joy it was and she said that in those days gone by and on the The IND subway passes through Harlem and Oakland Freeman and his wife and they were still dating they used to go dancing at the Savoy Ballroom very few people want and they already know Duke Ellington's famous theme song, they take the A train, the train passes through Harlem. in the I in these lines and then Friedman, who was only five feet two inches tall, was not afraid of being assaulted or even of a disguise, and there they were and this was

common

, it was not where there was a black actress who usually ended up with play and socialize afterwards and at one in the morning he said he would take the subway to 1055th and st.

Nicholas Avenue alone and what I'm walking home nobody does that these days so you have to look and search what the facts are how they changed and and you don't just say the other thing is that they are saying the No child left behind thing with Bush, Yes, yes, there are children who go to school to raise hell and a handful of them can prevent the entire class from learning something. Now the logical thing would be to separate those children from those who wanted to learn. something learn something that you can't do because the ideology says no and again so and so you sacrifice entire generations of poor and minority children for this ideology and this utopian notion, yes, and we end up in a strange dystopia, you probably already know what I am Please can you say that the best is the enemy of the good and of course it would be better if everyone could be educated at the same time.

You can't do it like that as someone who has survived the arrows and the poison that the I can throw at you because I see a lot of this these days. I see you even what they tell me. I get a lot of emails from people saying, well, how can I be brave enough to do it? And I think it's particularly a unique situation for minorities who consider themselves conservative or libertarian or a little bit on the right, so I mentioned Larry Elder earlier and of course you, my friend David Webb and I know that there are more black conservatives than the ones that maybe there used to be.

There's no question what would happen if someone was watching this right now and just needed a little more courage to start saying no, no, no, you have to look at these circumstances. I mean, I have advised some young people not to enter public school because the odds are against you and people can write bad references about you especially when you are young and what they say about you is all anyone sees. Now when I was teaching in some of these schools I remember one place where the department used to threaten one of my colleagues to correct the good Rabb references he had.

You know, I published things when I was still in grad school. It had Milton Freeman and Joy Stay. with the right references for me what this guy said there another department wouldn't matter at all but most people don't have that situation yeah so you have to choose yourself still to choose your face so I want that time is limited. I want to mention one thing that you say right at the end of the book: really what we need more than anything else maybe is common

decency

, yes, and in some ways we've lost, that's not common anymore.

I mean, when I went to school and we had fights in the schoolyard, when one time a guy was clearly beaten, whoever was the toughest kid in the crowd would just step in and stop him, the other guys would say: "If you want to fight, you can." fight me, yes, we need him in the public square now, yes, but by that I mean the pool is the only thing the police can do if he, if you don't have the common

decency

that the police don't have, they're not going to be able to handle it, especially when everyone is in second place.

Yeah, I love it when people who have never fired a gun in their lives say why cops shoot so politely now at the same time. I taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, didn't I. Surprise me in the least about a shot that fired so many things under those conditions, but people, you, cannot have knowledge of everything, but you can have knowledge of the extent of your own ignorance, even if you have doctorates, sir, this has been a real an honor and a pleasure, and I know I can see it in your eyes, even the kind of humility that you have in humility, but you have affected so many people and continue to affect so many people, and I hope that we could have done that.

Since there was a little extra push today, I'm really honored that they took their time. Thanks guys.