Thomas Sowell, age 93, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. With his usual fierceness and feistiness intact, Dr. Sowell returns to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson for a second round of discussion on his latest book (he’s published over 40 titles over his career), Social Justice Fallacies. In this installment, Dr. Sowell discusses in great detail the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and his decades-long friendship with Justice Clarence Thomas. Dr. Sowell also reacts to some YouTube videos of young people reacting to him.
To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
Peter Robinson: His fans include millions of viewers on YouTube and at least one Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Thomas Sowell on "Uncommon Knowledge" now. Welcome to "Uncommon Knowledge." I'm Peter Robinson. After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps, then earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Thomas Sowell, has written some 40 books, including his most recent book, "Social Justice Fallacies," and lived 93 years. In the last episode of "Uncommon Knowledge," Dr. Sowell and I discussed this book, "Social Justice Fallacies." Today we'll be discussing a few of Dr. Sowell's admirers and an issue that is very much in the news. Tom, welcome back.
Thomas Sowell: Good to be back.
Peter Robinson: Affirmative action. This past July, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. Although the court had permitted race-based university admissions ever since the 1978 Bakke case, now this past July, the court called such affirmative action unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts, "The Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause," close quote. And Tom Sowell responded how when you read that news?
Thomas Sowell: I was glad that they said what they did. I will wait and see how it will be applied. I was glad when I read the original Bakke decision because it said that we can't have quotas and so forth. But in there somewhere, there was a little opening, and it said that while you can do this and you can do that, which turns out to mean you can't have quotas if you call them quotas, but if you call them something else, you can. And in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, he's telling Harvard that, well, you can take race and you can have people write essays and mention race and so forth. Well, then what you're saying is you're offering them another escape hatch. And so only time will tell how big that escape hatch will be. For myself, I think that Harvard, with tens of billions of dollars in endowments, can afford to hire their own attorney rather than have the Chief Justice of the United States offer them advice on how to evade the decisions that's been made.
Peter Robinson: Alright, your oldest, one of your oldest friends, Justice Thomas, wrote a concurring decision in which he quoted you extensively. And I wanna come to that, but, first, if I may, affirmative action itself, as an issue. I just took the Wikipedia article on affirmative action and I'm quoting from Wikipedia. "Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them access equal to that of the majority population." Alleviate, opportunities, equal access. What could be wrong with such things?
Thomas Sowell: Well, there are always wonderful words to describe things that are not very wonderful.
Peter Robinson: Tom, again, on affirmative action as an issue in itself. Read up a little bit on the history of this. The first use of the term of affirmative action takes place in an executive order. John Kennedy, 1961, he's telling government contractors to take affirmative action to make sure that none of their employees is discriminated against-
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: On the basis of race. Johnson, President Johnson issues an executive order in '65 with almost the same wording. And in between these two, this executive order in '61 and the executive order in '65, we get the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Senator Hubert Humphrey was the floor manager of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he said the act, quote, "would prohibit, prohibit preferential treatment for any group." Humphrey added, quote, "I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas," close quote.
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: And so this is the mid-60s. By the mid-70s, racial quotas were the stuff and substance of affirmative action. Bakke comes along and says you're not allowed to have quotas, but you're allowed to take race into effect, into account in admissions decisions. So quotas get dropped out of the picture, but still it's preferential treatment. It begins with the notion of neutral treatment, just enforcing equality before the law, but quickly becomes preferential. Why? How did that happen?
Thomas Sowell: Well, I guess there are people who wanted to push this as far as they could, but it's also true that in other countries where they've had similar things, 'cause these programs are not unique to the United States. In India, for example, the courts said you can't have these kinds of preferences. You have to give everybody an equal chance individually. But they allowed them to take into account various subjective things. And of course, in India, what they would do, they would have a five-minute interview with each student. And the students whose scores were not high enough, they gave them high marks on the interview, and the others who were up at the top, they gave them low marks on the interview. And apparently, I gather from some things that I've heard, that Harvard, that the Asian students always get low ratings on these subjective things, which can't be checked.
Peter Robinson: At Harvard?
Thomas Sowell: Yes, and others get high ratings. So you can play these word games. And I just fear that this decision, which seems good and is certainly overdue, will not lead to that kind of thing. When people back in the '50s in the Northern states were trying to get rid of racial discrimination, one of the things they did was say you cannot submit a photo, and require applicants to submit photographs. When Woodrow Wilson first introduced this kind of thing into the federal system, he wanted photographs. So if what you're saying is you can't explicitly give preferences, but if you can find out the race of the people, then you can subjectively take that into account and the whole thing will be a farce. We'll find out whether they were serious or not. There's a wonderful book called "Mismatch" about the bad effects of affirmative action on college students. And then the authors, I agree with them with everything until they say that the Supreme Court should take into account this and that and the other thing. And my response is the last thing we need is nine more politicians in Washington.
Peter Robinson: So, but Tom, what are, why is it best? Let me quote to you Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, this is the Grutter decision in 2003. So there's Bakke in '78, there are various minor adjustments, and then there's another, this comes up to the court again, and the court says, well, all right, you're allowed to continue considering race as a factor in admissions, although Justice O'Connor writes in the majority opinion, "Race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." Okay, so the court doesn't like racial preferences. And you could even say, wait a minute, why is it that something that would be unconstitutional 25 years from now isn't unconstitutional today? But Sandra Day O'Connor, these are decent well-meaning people, weren't they onto something? Didn't it do some good even if it was the intention with the Constitution?
Thomas Sowell: Yes, and it did a whole lot of bad.
Peter Robinson: And what was the bad that it did, Tom?
Thomas Sowell: Well, it put many Black students with all the prerequisites for success into places where they were almost guaranteed to fail. I'll go all the way back to 1965 when I was teaching at Cornell. They suddenly brought in large numbers of Black students under special programs. And in an ultimately short time, half of them were on academic probation for academic deficiencies. And so I went over to the administration building and looked up their SAT scores. The average Black student at Cornell at that time was at the 75th percentile.
Peter Robinson: Which is good.
Thomas Sowell: Yes, better than three-quarters of other American students who took the SAT. The average student in the Cornell Liberal Arts College was at the 99th percentile. And so, one, you have the students who simply do not graduate. And so there's no great gain from flunking out of an elite institution.
Peter Robinson: Cornell University took really gifted Black kids and spent four years-
Thomas Sowell: Making failures out of them.
Peter Robinson: Making failures out of them.
Thomas Sowell: This is not unique to Cornell. Back when we had the, later on in the 20th century at Berkeley, they had Black and Hispanic kids who were admitted there. They had test scores just slightly above the national average. The White students had test scores far above that, and the Asian students had it above the White students. And the great bulk of those Black students, an absolute majority failed to graduate. So they came on campus, wasted some years of their lives, some opportunities they may have had somewhere else.
Peter Robinson: And they were talented people.
Thomas Sowell: And they were people who could have in some place else. The other fallacy is the notion you're getting a better education at a higher rated institution. Universities are rated according to the research output of their faculties. They are not rated according to the teaching qualities. No one in his right. Berkeley is one of the great universities of the world in research. No one in his right mind thinks that the education offered to undergraduates at Berkeley is anything to look up to. And so you send them not only to places where they cannot compete with the other students, but where the faculty really don't give much attention to that. The California voters voted to end preferential admission to the university system. There were dire complaints that this would mean no Black students would be able to get this and that and so forth. The actual data show that the number of Black students in the UC system barely changed at all. What happened was that they stopped going to Berkeley and UCLA. They went to the other campuses where their proficiency was like that of the other students. In the wake of that, over a four-year period, there were a thousand more minority students graduating from the system than there were under affirmative action. Moreover, well, the other thing that happens, even the ones who stay there and graduate, they may come in wanting to become engineers, mathematicians, scientists, they find they cannot possibly make it in that institution, and so they come out taking sociology, ethnic studies.
Peter Robinson: They go from the hard material to the soft stuff.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, and from material that'll provide you with a well-paying career to outcome that will provide you with nothing.
Peter Robinson: Alright. By the way, this brings us to the concurring opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas writes in Students for Fair Admission versus Harvard, "Affirmative action,” he writes, "fails to increase the overall number of Blacks and Hispanics in universities." Quote, "Rather, those racial policies simply redistribute individuals placing some into more competitive institutions than they would otherwise have attended. Studies suggest that large racial preferences for Black and Hispanic applicants have led to a disproportionately large share of those students receiving mediocre or poor grades. See T. Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World." I couldn't help thinking, you told me at one point, I think your first paying job was as a Western Union telegram delivery boy.
Thomas Sowell: Yes, yes.
Peter Robinson: Tom, you're now being quoted in Supreme Court decisions.
Thomas Sowell: Well, I'm not sure.
Peter Robinson: That's not a promotion. There were in these decisions, Chief Justice Robert wrote the majority decision, Justice Thomas wrote a concurring decision, Justice Jackson wrote a dissent. And Justice Jackson and Justice Thomas had at each other in their decisions. I thought it was a fascinating exchange. These are the two African- he went to Yale Law School, she went to Harvard Law School. These are both very bright people. Let me read a few quotations
Thomas Sowell: Okay.
Peter Robinson: From Justice Jackson, and then we'll go to Justice Thomas. This is Justice Jackson. "Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to health, wealth, and the wellbeing of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day. Yet today, this Court determines that holistic admissions programs," by which she means programs that take race into account, "are a problem rather than a viable solution as has long been evident to historians, sociologists, and policymakers alike," close quote. What do you make of that?
Thomas Sowell: Well, if what she said was true, it would have implications. None of it's true.
Peter Robinson: None of it's true.
Thomas Sowell: None of it's true. Well, it does have the support of the academic elite. It does have that. And some people regard that as the same as a documented fact. I'm not one of those people.
Peter Robinson: Alright. Justice Jackson continues, "To be sure Black people," incidentally she capitalizes Black.
Thomas Sowell: Oh good, good.
Peter Robinson: Which you don't do.
Thomas Sowell: Yes, yes.
Peter Robinson: All right. "Black people and other minorities "have generally been doing better in recent years. But those improvements have only been made possible," not helped, not enhanced, but only been made possible "because institutions like the University of North Carolina have been willing to grapple forthrightly with the burdens of history," close quote. Dr. Sowell?
Thomas Sowell: Well, I wasn't aware that the University of North Carolina is qualified to grasp the forces of history. Yes, I would like to see some facts about this. The same thing, similar pattern of the UC system you see in a place like MIT. One study show that the average Black student at MIT scored in the top 10% on the math portion of the SAT, and in the bottom 10% at MIT.
Peter Robinson: Oh.
Thomas Sowell: I mean, and MIT, it's only a question of which part of the 99th percentile you're in.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Thomas Sowell: And so. Again there've been actually empirical studies done with medical schools, law schools. And in every single case where the Black students are put in places where the other students have similar SAT scores of their own, they learn more. And professions like law and medicine, there is an independent test, independently of the institution that you was tested in, to see whether you can pass the outside test to get licensed.
Peter Robinson: Bar exams and so forth.
Thomas Sowell: That's right. And in these cases where the, in one case back East, there was a high test, high ranked law school and a lower ranked law school. The Black students in both places had very similar SAT scores. When they came to the bar exam, the Black students in the lower ranked institution passed the bar exam on the first try 57% of the time, and the ones in the higher ranked one passed it 30% of the time. You learn more in a place where they teach, the professors teach at the level of the students that they have.
Peter Robinson: That's their job after all.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, yeah, and when I was teaching, when I taught at Howard University, which is a Black institution, most of the kids have not had the top education up to that point. And I'd come to the concept of marginal cost and economics. I'd have some arithmetic examples to explain what marginal cost meant. When I taught at Cornell, I taught a class to engineers, all of whom had calculus. And I would say marginal cost is the first derivative of total cost and go on. Now there's no point in my, but so the guy who's not had that, these guys at Cornell had probably had calculus in high school.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Thomas Sowell: And the kid who's come out of the ghetto school doesn't have that. He doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Peter Robinson: Right, right. One more time, Justice Jackson, the majority, that is, the Chief Justice, Justice Thomas and the four others who joined them in voting to find race-based admissions unconstitutional. Justice Jackson says, "The majority seems to think that race blindness solves the problem of race-based disadvantage. But the irony is that requiring colleges to ignore race in admissions will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive regardless of race."
Thomas Sowell: And this is by who?
Peter Robinson: Justice Jackson.
Thomas Sowell: Not one spec of evidence. Not one spec of evidence.
Peter Robinson: All right. Now we go to Justice Thomas. Quote, "With the passage of the 14th Amendment," the amendment that was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. "With the passage of the 14th Amendment, the people of our nation proclaimed that it is the law that the government may not sort citizens based on race." He's making a constitutional argument rather than an argument on sociology. That's one point. "It is this principle that has guaranteed a Nation of equal citizens the equal protection of the laws," close quote. Well, isn't that a little cold and analytical? He's not concerned about the effects of the law. He's just concerned with the law.
Thomas Sowell: Well, I think it's wonderful when judges are concerned with the effects of the law. That's what they do. What has been tragic and so much social justice talk is people who think that because they are very well-qualified in certain areas, that enables them to make decisions for other people in other areas, where they may lack and probably do lack minimal confidence. I mean, the second-guessing of a police by people with PhDs is incredible, especially when things like how many shots did they fire? And this is said by people who've probably never held a gun in their hands in their whole lives. But because they may be the world's authority on French literature or Mayan culture, they think that they can talk about other things that they absolutely know nothing about.
Peter Robinson: So can I ask you just, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but I just wanna square it up and give you the chance to address it squarely. It's your view certainly that the Constitution correctly interpreted is colorblind, correct?
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Right, so we make no distinctions. Discrimination would suggest unfair distinctions. Affirmative action would suggest distinctions that are at least grounded in a will to be helpful. They're both unconstitutional. We make no distinctions based on race. Okay, that's one point. You've already made that point. You want to contend that this colorblind Constitution, if we behave as if we're going to obey it, and we don't make distinctions based on race, that that is best for African-Americans.
Thomas Sowell: Again if we turn to hard facts, the hard facts is that between 1940 and 1960, practically nobody was paying any attention to Black. Walter Williams used to say that he was so lucky to be born before White people wanted to be nice to Blacks. He traced his own career to when a White teacher in a school in Philadelphia ghetto chewed him out unmercifully. And he was very angry and so forth. But he traces his own progress from that point on to being chewed out. That doesn't happen anymore. Again, I mean, the hard facts, 1940 to 1960, there were no great riots and so forth. There were no great demonstrations. Most intellectuals weren't paying much attention to Blacks one way or the other. In the places where they were paying attention, the South, they were paying attention to enforce discriminatory law. Under those conditions, Black advanced better than under these new conditions beginning in the 1960s, which was supposed to be so favorable.
Peter Robinson: All right. Tom, are you aware that there are thousands of videos on YouTube that follow this format? It's people, one, two, three, four watching a video of you and then commenting on it. Are you aware that you're a YouTube star?
Thomas Sowell: I've seen that once.
Peter Robinson: You've seen it once. I'm gonna show you a couple, if you don't mind.
Thomas Sowell: Well.
Peter Robinson: I want you to see what people make of you. And then, let's go ahead, here's the first one.
[Video Clip]
Peter Robinson: What advice would you give a young Thomas Sowell? How do you make something of yourself as an African-American in America today?
Thomas Sowell: The way anybody else would. You equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for.
- I like how he talks. I'm telling you I like how he talk.
- Yeah.
- I'm telling you that it makes me smile. I like how he talks, come on. I feel like there's a lot of young kids, young teenagers, young adults that need to be listening.
[Video Clip]
Peter Robinson: "I like how he talks." And, "I can think of a lot of kids that need to be listening." How can it be that what you say, learn skills that people are willing to pay for, how can it be that that can strike people such as so many Americans as fresh, counter-cultural, heretical, something that kids need to hear? How can it be that in this day and age, it strikes people as-
Thomas Sowell: It's common sense. And one of the problems with many of the elites is that the very commonness of common sense does not serve their purposes. It's wonderful to believe that you have some insights that all the millions don't have, and that therefore you should be making their decisions for them. I think the minimum wage laws are a classic example of this. That we have people out there who think that, when there are jobs available at wages that the Black teenagers are willing to accept and the employers are willing to pay. They're third parties knowing nothing about either the industry or about the condition of the people themselves have a right to pass laws forbidding them from having wages that'll get them employed. And then when they discover, or in most cases they don't even check, that the unemployment of the teenagers goes up as you raise the minimum wage. One of the things I mentioned in the book in 1948, Black and White teenagers had virtually identical unemployment rates, and it was a fraction of what teenagers of all sorts have today. And the reason was quite simple. The minimum wage law was passed in 1938 and it hadn't been changed in 10 years. And those were 10 years of runaway inflation. And so for all practical purposes, there was no minimum wage law.
Peter Robinson: I see.
Thomas Sowell: And under those conditions, you got Black and White teenagers having unemployment rates of 10% and no difference between them. Now in come the wonderful people with the wonderful ideas, and they keep raising the minimum wage just to keep ahead of inflation. And now for a period of more than two decades, consecutive decades, the minimum wage rates for Black teenagers never falls below 20%, and in some years it's over 40%.
Peter Robinson: Unemployment, right.
Thomas Sowell: Unemployment, yes. And in the early 20th century, it hit 52% right after Obama was elected president. So presumably there was less racism in 2003 I think it was than there was in 1948.
Peter Robinson: And this is because, I wanna understand the concept, but I don't know how to put it other than crudely, that the market doesn't think that the 52% who are unemployed can provide value up to the level of the minimum wage.
Thomas Sowell: That's true, yes.
Peter Robinson: That's true. But the argument is that's nobody's business. Those kids need to get started someplace in life, and maybe you get started with a job that pays well below the minimum wage, but if you're willing to take that wage and do the work, it's a way of entering the workforce.
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Learning skill, isn't that right?
Thomas Sowell: Oh absolutely. But they never take into account the kid not only loses the jobs he could have had otherwise, he loses the experience which is even more valuable than the job itself. And so they act as if you take a job at McDonald's, you're gonna be at McDonald's 20 years from now. Now the hard data say that the people who are working with these hamburger stands on January 1st are very unlikely to be working at the hamburger stands on December 31st.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Thomas Sowell: That they have high turnovers and so forth. But again-
Peter Robinson: 'Cause they get better jobs.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, yeah, but the biggest institutional problem is the people who make these kinds of decisions with great confidence pay no price for being wrong no matter how wrong or how harmful that is to other people.
Peter Robinson: Did you get paid minimum wage when you were delivering telegrams for Western Union?
Thomas Sowell: Yes. No, no, I got more than that. The minimum wage was 40 cents an hour in 1938. I was paid 65 cents an hour. But of course 65 cents an hour in 1946, which is when I went to work, was less in value than the 40 cents in 1930.
Peter Robinson: Oh, so you were like Walter Williams. You got the benefit of entering the market when there was effectively no minimum wage.
Peter Robinson: Oh, that's right, that's right.
Peter Robinson: All right, all right. Tom, let me show you another video if I may.
[Video Clip]
- Where does the press fall into this as the minority group? Are they part of the-
Thomas Sowell: Oh, absolutely, they're a major part of it because one of the reasons that people don't get many of the facts that go against what's believed is that the press doesn't choose to publicize those facts.
[Video Clip]
Peter Robinson: So who are the anointed? You used this term and you wrote a book called "The Vision of the Anointed." Who are the anointed?
Thomas Sowell: These are the people who are crusading for all kinds of things like social justice and in other areas as well, who are trying to preempt the decisions of individuals and substitute what they think of as their higher understanding when in fact the people who are making their own decisions know a lot more about their circumstances than these third parties can possibly know.
Peter Robinson: Alright, one more video, one final video, if I may, Tom. They're looking at something we've already seen, but this is a somewhat different context.
[Video Clip]
Peter Robinson: Somewhere watching this interview, there's a young Thomas Sowell, there's an African-American who's smart and wants to do something with his life. Seems to me I thought we've already got one piece of advice you'd offer to him is stay away from the racist industries stay away from the, what advice
Thomas Sowell: Race hustlers
Peter Robinson: Race hustlers. What advice would you give a young Thomas Sowell? How do you make something of yourself as an African-American in America today?
Peter Robinson: The way anybody else would. You equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for.
- I like that, I want some more.
- All right, so yeah.
- I like Tom.
- Thoughts, thoughts?
[Video Clip]
Peter Robinson: "I like Tom." Now you're a professional academic, and yet all your, well, I've known you a good long time now, but I didn't know you when you were teaching at Cornell. But ever since I've known you and ever since I started reading your work, you had a column in Forbes magazine, you wrote "Basic Economics," which is clearly intended for a general audience, you have taken seriously, I'm just, I'm wondering how you think about your work, on the one hand as an academic, on the other hand as someone who takes seriously, this may be a high-flown way of putting it, but takes seriously the notion that we live in a democracy, that you need to bring people with you. Why have you, apart from anything else, why are you still at it, Tom? You haven't had anything to prove to anybody in about three decades, maybe half a century.
Thomas Sowell: Well, I think that if you see the other disasters around you, it's not surprising that you might think there could be some improvement made.
Peter Robinson: Alright, Tom, could you, back to Clarence Thomas, who's a friend of yours and I think would have no hesitation in describing himself as a disciple of yours really. Would you close this conversation by reading an excerpt from Justice Thomas's concurrence?
Thomas Sowell: He was not a disciple of mine. We met as a result of his own changes in his own mind. So someone once gave him a book of mine when he was in his more radical phase. And as he told me, he simply threw it in the wastebasket.
Peter Robinson: Well, as long as they paid full retail for it. As long as you got your royalty.
Thomas Sowell: And so-
Peter Robinson: So when did you meet him? When did you meet him?
Thomas Sowell: Oh heavens, I met him in 1978. There was a symposium on equality at Washington University in St. Louis. And I was there as a commentator on a paper being given by a professor of law at Columbia University named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Peter Robinson: Really?
Thomas Sowell: Yes. And I had a few critical things to say as a matter of fact. And on another panel, the main presenter was a professor of law from the University of Chicago named Antonin Scalia. And in the audience was an unknown young Black lawyer named Clarence Thomas. And that's where we met.
Peter Robinson: And he introduced himself to you?
Thomas Sowell: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Having had, at that point, had he read any of your work?
Thomas Sowell: Well, what had happened is he himself had thrown away the stuff that he had believed before. And he was explaining his viewpoint to a friend of his. And someone says, "Hey, do you know there's another guy who said the same thing?" And that's why, and so I did not, I was not the reason that he said that he reached his conclusion, he reached the conclusion, and that was the reason he came there to see me and the other people.
Peter Robinson: But this touches something really important, and we can see it in the YouTube video. If you watch some of the faces there, the faces are, they're hearing things they haven't heard before.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: And the question is it hopeless or can people change their minds? Clarence Thomas changed his mind.
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: You changed your mind.
Thomas Sowell: Oh yes, I was a Marxist.
Peter Robinson: Until what age?
Thomas Sowell: During the McCarthy era.
Peter Robinson: You were Marxist during the McCarthy era. At least you know how to pick your enemies.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Well, what changed your mind?
Thomas Sowell: Facts.
Peter Robinson: Alright.
Thomas Sowell: Whereas you get more and more facts, especially if you pay attention to it, you realize that this doesn't square with what's being said. And at that point-
Peter Robinson: And you were working for the government, wasn't that a formative experience?
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, that was it. I was a summer intern, I was still a graduate student, but during the summer I was an intern at the Labor Department. And I was concerned about minimum wages then as now. And the question was were the minimum wages causing poor people to get more money? Or was it causing them not to be employed at all, which means they got less money? It also means, by the way, for teenagers that they not only get no job. It means that they now have, if they want money, they have to do things that are illegal like selling drugs.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Thomas Sowell: Which has its own hazards.
Peter Robinson: Yes, it does.
Thomas Sowell: And but the people who are for minimum wages, they think that they are doing a wonderful thing for the poor, and it never occurs to them to ever check what they believe against hard facts.
Peter Robinson: Alright. Could you read us this excerpt from Justice Thomas?
Thomas Sowell: Where?
Peter Robinson: The whole thing.
Thomas Sowell: Oh, alright.
Peter Robinson: There are a lot of people who like your voice, Tom.
Thomas Sowell: Oh, well, I don't know about all that, but "The court's opinion sees the university's admissions policies for what they are, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our nation's equality ideal. In short, they are plainly unconstitutional. While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages, which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold that enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution of the United States that all men are created equal, equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."
Peter Robinson: Tom Sowell subscribes to every word?
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Thomas Sowell, economist, teacher, social critic, author most recently of "Social Justice Fallacies." Thank you.
Thomas Sowell: Thank you.
Peter Robinson: For "Uncommon Knowledge," the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
