You think most people are in here? Should we get going?
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, if you would please, thank you so much.
Microphone working okay? Everyone hears me? Okay, good, good.
I don't know if you've heard the rumors, but I'm a little bit under the weather.
under the weather, I don't know quite what's wrong with me and I've been having trouble
getting a good night's sleep so I'm going to do the best I can. Also, somebody left
his notes up here, maybe Paul Gottfried but you can get those later. Okay, talking about
this sort of controversial topic, ladies and gentlemen, issues pertaining to civil rights
I just kind of adapted that and made my own little medley out of it.
Okay.
Alright.
Okay.
Let's see, what else we got here?
And they get more evil as they go down.
They're not all, well, I don't know.
Starting here they get pretty, they get more evil as they go down.
This is a very long title. Oh gosh, this is ridiculous. Oh my gosh, it's a killer.
I'm abbreviating here. And finally, and there are other cases, obviously I could mention the Bakke case as an example,
But each one of them makes a point that I want to make, so I mention these.
All right, here we go.
Also 1971.
Okay.
Incidentally, I'm underlining these because you know court cases should be in italics.
One of my pet peeves is that you should never, I don't care what your second grade, fourth grade teacher talks,
you never underline a court case or a book title.
you italicize them when you underline that simply means that if you're sketching
something out for your secretary that your secretary will know the underlined
portion is to be in italics but you never leave it like that you never see
Time magazine underlining anything or any any reasonable book the only time you
see anything underlined in a book is when it's some underground press or
something and they don't know any better but anyway that's just a pet peeve of
mine all right let's start right here this is the key this is that this is a
This is a case that forms the precedent that is in the background when we get to this case, very, very quickly, because many of you probably know this, having learned it in high school.
This case of Plessy v. Ferguson has to do with an 1890 Louisiana statute having to do with segregated railroad cars, that you had to have separate cars for blacks and whites.
And a lot has been written on this. For our purposes, the reason that it's significant is that the court establishes the so-called separate but equal principle.
That is to say, there was some question, does this violate, does the Louisiana statute violate the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws?
And the court decided that it did not, because as long as the facilities, the separate facilities were equal in quality, then there was no, strictly speaking, unfair treatment taking place.
So it was legitimate, the so-called Jim Crow laws involving common carriers, private accommodations, government offices and so on, could have segregated facilities.
Facilities, and this would not be a violation of the 14th Amendment. So this is established in this case. That is just the background, my friend. Now we have this case. So we're going to say, boy, we are fast forwarding awfully quickly. Yes, we are. Now, there are a few relatively minor cases between these two that slightly begin to chip away at the precedent in Plessy. But for the most part, it stands until you get to 1954. Now, again,
I'm sure you probably all know about this one, but there's a lot that can be said about this.
For one thing, I would recommend, sort of recommend this book.
And David Gordon sort of recommends this book also, so it must be good.
It probably has, you know, seven inaccuracies in it that he's found, but let's see.
It's by Paul Craig Roberts and some other guy.
This book, The New Color Line, is useful because, among other things, it has several pages on documenting how, around the time of the Brown case, a move toward voluntary desegregation was apparent in many areas of the South and many areas of life.
And that's worth noting, that a lot of scholars have noted that if you favor desegregation, this case was not necessary in order to bring that outcome about.
Well, here's the case. It's actually a consolidation of several cases involving black children who, rather than being able to go to the school right down the street,
that being a white school, they have to go far away to go to the all-black school. And is this legitimate or not?
Now, the court is faced with this dilemma that, well, in my opinion, the court is faced with no dilemma whatsoever.
But we'll get to that later, but if you're a leftist on the court, you're faced with this dilemma that you're desperate to overturn school segregation.
Now, I assume, I don't know, some of our foreign guests may not know that there were segregated schools by race throughout the South and elsewhere de facto.
And if you're a leftist on the court, you want to abolish it.
I'm not necessarily saying that you have to favor a segregated school system,
but I am saying you have to pretty much mind your own business in these cases.
But you have this case breathing down your neck
because it says that there's nothing unconstitutional
about separate facilities for the races.
And likewise, there's another difficulty.
Because you might say, well, don't segregated schools in some way violate the 14th Amendment equal protection of the laws.
That was an argument that was going to be attempted at first.
The problem with that is that the very same Congress that adopted the 14th Amendment also approved segregated schools in the District of Columbia.
So they obviously didn't intend it to have that effect or to have that meaning.
So you have to come up with another way of arguing.
The other way of arguing they came up with has to do with so-called modern authority.
And modern authority, according to psychological and sociological studies, has this to say to us,
that a segregated school system is inherently unequal. It must be unequal.
Regardless of the funding that's given to either school, it is inherently unequal
because it has this scarring effect on the children.
It stamps them with a feeling of inferiority that is very difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of later in life.
And it's going to have a negative effect on their ability to learn and to advance educationally.
So these are the types of arguments that are going to be raised.
So therefore, since schools that are segregated are inherently unequal,
they do not satisfy the separate but equal requirement.
They're inherently unequal.
So this way the court can get away with not directly overturning Plessy,
because it would look, they did want to at least preserve the impression
that they were keeping in line with precedent and tradition.
But they were able to say, well, the people in 1896,
you know, they couldn't have been expected to know about modern authority
and what it has to say about children and self-esteem
and the damage that is done to children's self-esteem by segregated schools.
One of the pieces of evidence that was cited for this, again, as some of you may know about,
has to do with the famous doll studies done by black sociologist Kenneth Clark.
He had the children, he had black children, answer the question, looking at a white doll
and a black doll, say which doll the child preferred. And an alarming percentage of black
students preferred the white doll. And this was evidence that their self-esteem has been shattered.
by years of segregated schooling.
The difficulty with this evidence is that
black students in non-segregated schools in the North
chose the white doll in much higher proportions.
And that didn't come out until later, of course.
Or they have also repeated the experiment in all black societies.
And the proportion was still much higher than in the segregated South.
So what this proves is absolutely beyond me.
and interestingly in later years an NAACP lawyer when asked about what did you think of the Kenneth Clark doll studies replied I may have used the word crap so they recognized the difficulty with this as well okay well nevertheless this is these are the grounds on which the case was decided that segregated schools being inherently unequal were unconstitutional and the
The desegregation process had to begin, as they said, the following year, with all deliberate speed.
With all deliberate speed. Nobody knows what that means.
It's very, very unusual and surprising for a government document to be ambiguous and
unclear, but there it is.
So interestingly, by the way, the black author Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote The Color Purple
and many, many other things, was completely against the Brown decision.
And she lived in Florida at the time.
She wrote a famous letter to the Orlando Sentinel, which I read as an undergrad.
Professor Thurnstrom had reproduced it for us.
And, you know, because basically what Hurston didn't like about the case
is that she said that, well, what is this case saying to me?
It's saying that, you know, I'm going to have an inferior school
unless I'm sitting next to a white guy.
Well, you know, speak for yourself. I don't feel that way.
And that's one of the things. I searched a lot of websites.
There are a lot of websites on the Internet devoted to Hurston
and her writings and everything.
And every once in a while you get one of them that acknowledges
What about all the largely Asian schools in California, throughout the 20th century, that had been all Asian?
They had done extremely well academically, better than whites.
And there was no one around to tell them that their self-esteem was being damaged.
So it's founded on something that's factually incorrect, psychobabble instead of law.
But nevertheless, that is the key precedent that is now going to inform subsequent cases.
Because note this, there is, of course, as I'm sure you realize, the difference between desegregation and integration.
Desegregation means you open the doors and anybody who wants to come in is permitted to.
Integration means you bash open the doors and force your way in.
Now, strictly speaking, this is a desegregation decision.
But on the other hand, the logic of the case implies that it can't simply stop there.
Because if a segregated school system is inherently unequal, and is inherently going to damage the self-esteem of black children and their educational attainment, then we can't permit it to go on, regardless of the origin of it, even if it's completely voluntary, it has to be abolished by force, if it is going to be inherently unequal.
So here's what we get. Here's another case. This is Green vs. County School Board of New Kent County.
This has to do with, in Virginia, there had been a system in which, in compliance, they thought, with Brown,
A school district had simply opened up admission on a voluntary basis of schools.
So what ended up happening is that on this voluntary basis, all the white students stayed in the white schools,
and about seven-eighths of the black students stayed in the black schools.
Now, strictly speaking, according to some of the logic in here, that should be okay, as long as people have the opportunity.
And if they don't choose to exercise it, that's their choice.
That's their choice.
Nobody says at an opera house, you know what, darn it, there just aren't enough Hispanics
at the opera house.
We'd better go down to Spanish Harlem and load up a bus and throw them in there.
Or darn it, the Yankees are playing and they're only 6% blacks in the stadium.
You know, I can't get over this.
Nobody in his right mind would say that, except for some reason with schools.
With schools, you must integrate.
You must integrate.
So, what the court found here is that regardless of the fact that the Virginia Plan was voluntary
and that if blacks wanted to go to the white schools, they could do so, that was not enough because the desired outcome is a unitary, from a racial point of view, school system and yes, you can set up the system by which students are admitted any way you like as long as the result is integration, so anything you want to do as long as the result is integration, so that is a somewhat different principle because in effect,
In fact, there's a way in which you can say Brown is saying that race is not a legitimate category when dealing with education and you should simply admit people.
Whereas Green is saying that no, you ought to be obsessively concerned about race. You must have an integrated outcome.
But as I say, this in a sense does, you know, you can't be, you can't hold this neocon view that Green is a completely radical departure from Brown.
The logic of green is implied here, because if the problem with the education is precisely segregation and that it's inherently unequal, then it has to be ended by whatever means necessary.
Okay, the next, let's see, let me make sure I cover everything else, okay, next case is this, this one here, the swan, this is actually, actual title is something on the swan versus board of education of Charlotte Mecklen, Charlotte Mecklenburg board of education, but, you know, I was not going to be able to get that on the whole, on the, on the thing, and, and sometimes it's referred to as Char Meck, I remember being in college, and all the trendy, you know, black studies types,
This is North Carolina. This is the first case where you actually get the Supreme Court upholding a busing statute as a way of redressing past discrimination.
You will bus people to various schools in order to bring about racial balance.
That's obviously a significant precedent.
Now, I would note, as long as we're on the topic,
I have a bit of, I think, relevant information about this.
Oh, okay, yeah.
In 1983, you might wonder, in the midst of all this,
how was black achievement doing in these years?
Well, what good results do we see from a case like the Charméc case,
upholding busing as a way of rectifying racial imbalance and past discrimination?
Well, what do we see? Well, 1983, basically the key study is done in 1983.
The Department of Education did a lengthy study and found that there was no busing program
that seemed to have had any good effect whatsoever on black achievement.
and specifically in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area.
You might wonder, well, here's the great standard bearer of the whole struggle.
How did black students do there?
Well, at the time of this case, black students were about one and one-half school grades
behind their white counterparts in achievement.
Well, then they did a study around the end of the 70s or early 80s
when these students had been going to integrated schools their whole lives.
And the difference between whites and blacks? One and one-half grades.
Okay. Wonderful.
So we've destroyed communities, created all kinds of ill will and violence,
and we have zero to show for it.
Not to mention all the money that went into this and everything else,
and the undermining of the Constitution and everything else.
Well, then, same year, the Griggs case.
What case? The Griggs case. Fun.
This is a fun one, this Griggs case. So much destruction has come from this case. It's beyond belief.
Griggs versus Duke Power Company. Had to do with this question.
And I'm going to come back to this a little bit with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But the key thing that's significant about this, again for our purposes, is as follows.
During the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which as I say I'll get to a little bit later,
It had been made clear that discrimination in employment could only be a deliberate intentional act.
You couldn't accidentally discriminate against somebody.
It was made clear to people that you won't be hauled into court
because you don't have the right proportion of races in your job.
As long as you're not willfully acting to discriminate, you're off the hook.
Okay, well, that was really not very honest.
And as it turns out, in the Griggs case, Duke Power Company, it was found out even though they obviously were of goodwill and did not intend to discriminate, they're still guilty.
And this is done directly in contradiction to the understanding of the 1960 People's Rights Act, because what was said was as follows.
It had to do with how does the Duke Power Company promote people? What's the promotion process?
Process. And in order to get a promotion, the Duke Power Company required employees
to either have a high school diploma or to pass an intelligence test. Well, it turned
out that this had a disproportionately bad effect on blacks because they were much less
likely to have high school diplomas or to pass the intelligence test. So this meant
that in effect Duke Power Company was guilty of discrimination and the doctrine that comes
out of this is called disparate impact. If you're going to impose a requirement on people
that has a disparate impact on the races, it's going to hit blacks more than whites,
then unless you can prove the job relatedness of that qualification, it ain't allowed. You
can't do it. It's discrimination. So, the thing is half the time you can't prove a job
I mean, sometimes you want a high school diploma, not because you want to make sure the guy can do algebra,
but because somebody who's finished high school shows that this is a person who reaches goals, who...
Well, actually, I don't know what a modern high school diploma proves.
This is all theoretical.
But there are reasons for these things, but you can't always prove...
So, in many cases, employers have simply given up trying to use these particular ways of sorting out people for jobs.
Likewise, in many, many cases, now, employers are simply not bothering to ask about high school diplomas, arrest records, dishonorable military discharges and GPAs,
All of these are going to have a negative effect on black applicants, so they will not ask about these things.
There have actually been cases in which farmers have been sued for discrimination
because they've asked prospective farm hands if they're able to use a hoe.
See, blacks are more likely to have back problems than whites.
So if I'm asking you if you know how to use a hoe, that might be code for
I want to have an excuse not to hire a black guy, and you might have a back problem.
And in many areas, on basically this ground, on the grounds of disparate impact, many, many school systems have simply given up bothering having gifted and talented programs, because there won't be enough blacks.
And of course the only explanation for why there aren't enough blacks must be just evil on the part of the people setting up the program.
I love this idea that the leftists who run the public schools, nevertheless, in their heart of hearts, are trying every scheme imaginable to keep the blacks down.
So many wouldn't love to have a gifted program with all blacks in it, but it's always assumed to be bad will.
So many schools have just given up grouping students by ability, just giving it up, having heterogeneous grouping.
Unbelievable. Homeschooling continues to grow, by the way. That must be some unrelated coincidence.
Note to self, good applause line.
Okay, this is what's going on here.
And finally, you know, actually maybe there is one more I could mention,
and that is the case of Steelworkers of America versus Weber, 1979,
because that really goes to show the utter corruption of, in case none of this did, of this whole process.
Because what happened in this case, this Weber case of 1979,
And you've got a guy who is being passed over for a promotion in favor of less qualified
minority applicants. And he files a grievance with his union and the union refuses to take
up the case. I wonder why. So they refuse to take it up. So he goes and looks up the
actual language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and he says, just as I thought, it says no
No one can discriminate on the basis of race.
So he challenged this.
He said, you are discriminating against me because I'm white.
And the court decided in the Weber case that you don't find the real meaning of the 1964
Act in its language.
No.
No, no, no.
You're being silly and overly literal.
No, instead you find it in the spirit of the legislation.
And what was the spirit of the legislation?
To help blacks.
So basically if you want to do that, you can do anything now.
and you have no recourse. So have a nice day. Unbelievable. So you know, us silly people might actually want to read the legislation, but no, no, no, it doesn't matter.
Okay, well these are some things. Now I'm going to probably put some other things on the board, so we'll erase these.
Oh, that was just a recommended reading because it has to do with the question of whether...
This is actually a very, very minor point in the book, but there are a few pages about segregation and whether Brown was necessary to end it and so on.
Okay. A million other things to do. Let's see. 1964 Civil Rights Act. This is an extremely important piece of legislation, my friend.
and this is in fact before I even go into it I have to recommend of all the books I've recommended so far this is the one this is the one that I'm going to visit your homes in a few weeks to make sure you've purchased you have to buy this you have to buy to cost like nine dollars oh big freaking deal nine dollars right and yet this book in about a hundred forty pages contains the refutation of every ridiculous discrimination and civil rights
The Theory of Money and Credit
This is a great book. Holy cow, is this a great book. Smashes everything in here.
1985, I think. Still very relevant. Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality, and if you go and purchase it on Amazon,
you will find this is one of the only cases in which I couldn't restrain myself from posting my own review of it,
This book makes a million key points. For one thing, Sol is something of an expert on American ethnic groups, and that's very helpful.
But a few of the key points that he makes here, he sets up what he refers to as the civil rights vision.
He says, according to the civil rights vision, all statistical disparities have one cause only, racism, discrimination. That's it.
And he goes and makes a million points to show this is not necessarily so.
And he says, for instance, take, and he'll pick a couple of ethnic groups at random,
And he'll say, now, on average, group A is actually 25 years older than group B.
So just considering age alone, we would not expect, even in the absence of all discrimination,
we wouldn't expect them to have equal incomes.
Because obviously, a group of people 25 years older, they've got more job experience,
they're more mature, they're more settled, they have greater savings and so on.
You wouldn't expect that.
And then he goes on to say there are demographic differences in geographic location,
in Marriage Patterns
and he goes on and on and on making many, many points that are extremely useful
and he says when you drop these factors out of the picture
the disparities seem to disappear
but of course that's not what the civil rights establishment wants you to hear
they just repeat these simplistic slogans
beyond that he says that the idea of discrimination must lead to poverty
well, okay, he says well let's look around the world, is that always the case?
He gives many examples. For instance, he says in Malaysia, discrimination against the Chinese minority in Malaysia is written into the Malaysian Constitution.
And the Chinese minority is still dominating the economy. They still own many, many more various kinds of businesses. They're wealthier.
He's not saying anything proves anything, but the fact that discrimination and poverty go together is simply not established.
Likewise, the Japanese in America were discriminated against so badly that 120,000 of them were relocated during World War II.
And yet by 1959, Japanese-American households had equaled white households in income.
And ten years later, they were earning one-third more.
So again, you cannot explain this this way.
And finally, the old canard that, okay, if you want to improve your condition as a minority in the United States, you have to use the political process.
You have to grab hold of the reins of power in the state, and that will improve the lot of your group.
And Sowell says that has not historically been what has happened in the United States.
Groups that have focused on politics exclusively have generally lagged behind other groups, and he uses the Irish as an example.
on Common Carriers and accommodations like hotels, things like this.
But the key, the key, and this is, you know, the federal government will oversee this.
The key provision of it though that everybody has focused so much time and attention on
is Title VII, which has to do with employment discrimination.
Employment, discrimination in employment will be made illegal by this legislation.
And everybody says, ain't that wonderful.
Well, let's see what the outcome is. First of all, now this is something that you may have heard before, but I have to do this.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly says that there will be no such thing as racial quotas under this legislation.
And don't worry if you're afraid that I'm going to go on a neocon rant here. I'm not, but this has to be mentioned.
It would never have passed without the following statement in there.
This is a long sentence, but bear with me.
Usually American legislation doesn't have much elegant phrasing, beautiful turn of phrase or anything.
Nothing contained in this title, Title VII, shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency,
labor organization or joint labor management committee subject to this title to grant preferential
treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex
or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist
with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex
or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any
employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization
or admitted to or employed in any apprenticeship or other training program in comparison with
the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex or national
origin in any community, state, section or other area.
We also probably are familiar with Senator Hubert Humphrey's remark that if anyone can
quote find in Title VII any language which provides that an employer will have to hire
on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion or national origin,
I will start eating the pages one after another because it is not there.
Oh, we never got a chance to see that, my friends.
And he goes on to say, contrary to the allegations of some opponents of this title,
there is nothing in it that will give any power to the Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees
in order to meet a racial quota or to achieve a certain racial balance.
And you can just keep citing this honor on everybody who supported the legislation,
So, you know, went out of his way to say, this will not happen.
Even the New York Times said, misrepresentations by opponents of the civil rights legislation
are at their wildest in discussion of this title.
The bill would not require anyone to establish racial quotas.
To the contrary, such quotas would be forbidden as a racial test.
The bill does not require employers or unions to drop any standard for hiring or promotion
or membership, except the discriminatory standard of race or religion.
Well, you could go on, and that book, The New Color Line, cites just about every statement imaginable assuring people about this.
OK, well, obviously, we know that's not what happened.
But there is something to be noted about this.
And this is the great thing, in my opinion, about the Mises Institute.
Because one of the 500 million great things about it is that the Mises Institute doesn't just sit around and say,
Oh gosh, what a mystery that we ended up getting quotas as a result of this legislation that told us we wouldn't.
And oh my gosh, let's return to the spirit of the...
Okay.
Because first of all, how are you going to prove discriminatory intent on the part of some guy?
Most people who are going to discriminate are not going to sit around saying,
I'm only going to hire Eskimos.
You know, no one's going to sit around and say that or leave memos, you know,
Memo from the boss to you guys, please, please make sure you hire only lesbians or something, right?
It's not going to say that. So instead, what are you going to do?
Well, you have to just look at the proportion of people they've hired.
There's no other way. There's no other way.
So unless the government is going to read minds, there's no other way to determine whether somebody intends to discriminate.
So it follows. The quotas have to follow from the 64 Act.
They have to follow.
Well, I would note that the state,
as you may have picked up on,
tends to portray itself as the great font of justice
and wisdom and prosperity for everybody.
So you see the 1964 Civil Rights Act
portrayed as a wonderful advance
without which blacks would all be eating dirt somewhere
and whatever, slavery would probably come back.
You get all these things
And yet, if you actually look at the outcome of it, it's really not all that impressive.
Now, mind you, I'm not saying if it were impressive, let's have it.
I'm completely against this. It should be repealed. It's evil.
It leads to untold wealth destruction with the constant litigation.
It's impossible to prove your way out of it. Unbelievable.
Incidentally, by the way, by the way, one more thing I want to mention has to do with...
This is a great thing that Lew Rockwell has written on.
Banks have been accused of racial discrimination in lending
This must be discrimination. The banks just don't want to make money. They don't want to lend to the blacks because they don't want to make money. We don't know why, but that's how racist they are.
Now it turns out, well, gee, let's see. Do blacks have credit ratings that are as good as whites? Well, no. Could that have something to do with it?
and also the great fact that that Lew Rockwell has pointed out is that well look at the default rates the rates you know according of people defaulting on their loans now if blacks are being held to a higher discriminatory standard they should have a lower default rate than whites but in fact the default rates are equal so in fact they are being given loans according to rational standards but again it's it's a statistical disparity so therefore we have to assume bad will that's all over this this legislation well anyway
Let me let me know a little bit of what Thomas Sowell has to say about the 1964 act, because he suggests that some of this, look at how much blacks prospered after the act, he says he implies there's sort of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy going on there, he says in the period from 1954 to 1964 for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical and similar high level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s when there
There was little or no civil rights policy than during the 1950s when the Civil Rights
Revolution was in its heyday.
The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years
from 1964 to 1966, after the Civil Rights Act, was in fact less than in the one year
from 1961 to 1962, before the Civil Rights Act.
If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead
of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented
had no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years.
The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers
rose less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964
than in the five years preceding it.
The percentage of employed blacks who were managers and administrators
was the same in 1967 as in 1964 and in 1960.
Nor did the institution of goals and timetables at the end of 1971
mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations.
And then he goes on and talks about the case of Asians and Hispanics and says that there are similar numbers there.
So, okay, there's that. I think I'm going to say a little something about Martin Luther King.
Now, he's a figure you've probably heard of and we hear a lot about him.
And I'm going to recommend another book to you, and this is a book that really I wouldn't rap fish with this book,
The author is a complete leftist, but sometimes that's good because the leftist doesn't realize why his book is useful.
He's saying, oh, look, he's great with all these great ideas and we get to read it and say, no, he's a kook with all these kooky ideas.
This just came out last year. Now, if you can put aside the author's comments, and the subtitle is The True Martin Luther King Jr., if you can get past the author's comments, for instance, that King's, shall we say, sexual improprieties were really just the result of a man trying to
and release the built-up tension created by white racism.
If you can get past that, you'll find this useful.
Because the whole purpose of Dyson's book is to say that the neoconservatives are wrong
about King.
And on that point, he's right.
And the last person, the last people you should go to look for an accurate description of
King, would be neoconservative, Newt Gingrich, all these types who are going to claim king
for themselves because really all he wanted was a colorblind society where nobody gets
any special privilege and we all live peacefully together. And isn't that because didn't he
say that in his I Have a Dream speech? Didn't he say that expressly? Okay, he did say that.
He did say that in one thirty-four word sentence ripped out of context from the rest of his
This guy shows that King did favor compensatory measures for blacks and was, in fact, a so-called democratic socialist.
that King did favor compensatory measures for blacks and was, in fact, a so-called democratic socialist.
For instance, King expressly condemned the following statement.
If the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of slum conditions,
if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself.
The roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.
The nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past.
Moreover, he said, no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries.
Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill, yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages.
The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another.
This law should be made to apply for American Negroes.
The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government
of special compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement
in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.
Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation
based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.
I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans,
America launched a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged,
and he also states as if to answer directly the neoconservative view that that all King was fighting for he was simply fighting for the abstract right of of equal opportunity and not for any specific any specific compensatory measure he said this the Negro today is not struggling for some abstract vague rights but for concrete and
and prompt improvement in his way of life.
Likewise, King said,
For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society.
A little change here, a little change there.
Now I feel quite differently.
And incidentally, I won't even get into the grammatical difficulties here.
I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society,
a revolution of values.
I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans
Dislocations are racists, either consciously or unconsciously.
And then here we go with his economic acumen.
Dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination
thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against
their will.
The movement civil rights must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole
of American society.
was raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth and
was questioning the capitalist economy. Incidentally, just like Maxine Waters, he said after the
Watts riots, he said, a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. The looting in
Watts was a form of social protest very common through the ages as a dramatic and destructive
February 1968, he called for a redistribution of economic power, and even in 1966, in a speech to his staff, he said this,
We are now making demands that will cost the nation something.
You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars.
You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums.
You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you're messing with folk then.
You are messing with the captains of industry.
Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters,
because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth,
and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
According to one of his aides, King's usual practice
was to demand that they turn off the tape recorder when he would speak about democratic socialism.
Socialism, and he would say, I can't say this publicly, and if you say I said it, I'm not going to admit to it.
And he went on to say, according to his aid, that he didn't believe that capitalism, as it was constructed, could meet the needs of poor people,
and that we might need to look at what was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.
And finally, I don't know if this is my favorite or not, finally there's this.
Let's see. There are 40 million poor people here.
And one day we must ask the question, why are there 40 million poor people in America?
And, of course, I would wonder, you know, how many poor people have actually, in history,
have owned telephones, televisions, automobiles, flush toilets, but anyway.
And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system.
Questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question,
You begin to ask the question, who owns the oil?
You begin to ask the question, who owns the iron ore?
You begin to ask the question, why is it that people have to pay water bills
in a world that is two-thirds water?
These are questions that must be asked.
Now, you know, there's no real point in, I think, unpacking all the difficulties here,
but you are aware that less than a third of 1% of all the water in the world
World is Drinkable. So that might explain the... And if you look at, especially in early America, where the cities are located, they're near a source of water. It is a scarce... Although interestingly, in New York City, where I lived for a while, where the water is actually better than in most cities, they use the same high grade of water in the toilet bowls. I found this is a really weird thing, but most cities probably don't do that, so I would check that before you dunk your glass down here. Anyway, that was just a...
A little bit of a digression.
Well, finally, I've got a little bit of time left.
I want to say a little something about women in all this.
And there's a whole chapter in Sowell's book called The Special Case of Women.
Now, before saying this, I want to just review with you,
very often the left is not really altogether honest or straightforward.
Yeah, no, I'm afraid it is so, my friends.
And it seems that one case after another of a false or misleading statistic you can find.
Gloria Steinem, who argued once and many times, and then everybody uncritically picked this up,
that 150,000 American women die every year from anorexia.
And what she was trying to say was, you see, in this oppressive western society where we have an emphasis on beauty,
Women are going to, you know, they're practically killing themselves in order to appear beautiful.
Well, it turns out that it's about a hundred women per year,
who, not a hundred thousand, a hundred, who are dying from anorexia.
Now that's a tragedy, but it's really not a hundred fifty thousand.
That's really not at the same number.
Or that forty percent, that on the day of the Super Bowl, domestic abuse increases by forty percent.
Now that was just made up. There's absolutely nothing to support that.
And I was saying to somebody earlier, somebody was saying,
In fact, you would think it would go down on the Super Bowl, right?
Look, just get away, I'm watching the Super Bowl, right?
Or how about the statistic in the 80s, we kept hearing,
there are three million homeless in the United States.
They got that figure from serious and lengthy study.
Homeless advocate Mitch Schneider just threw it out there.
They asked him, how many? Ah, three million.
And then later I started hearing four million,
And I think the reason for that was they thought, well, we've been saying 3 million for so long, there must be another million out there on the streets desperate.
And, you know, again, 3 million figure is an exaggeration of at least 10 times, but that's to raise awareness.
You know, we'll lie to people in order to raise awareness.
And it just goes on and on, all the environmental scares, again and again and again.
Well, one of the cases of misleading statistics has to do with women in the labor force.
I hear things like women only earn 72 cents for every dollar a man earns. Isn't this terrible?
It means that there must be something awful going on.
Now, there is something called the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which means you can't pay people a different amount for doing the same work.
But the implication of... so that's already there. Whether it's good or bad, it's there.
The implication of that 72% statistic is that they're doing the same work, the women and the men,
and the women are mysteriously getting only 72 cents on the dollar.
Now, you would think that eventually one businessman would say to himself,
I'm just going to fire all my male employees and just hire women and just pay them 72 cents on the dollar.
I mean, so you know this can't be right. There's no way this can be right.
And Sowell demolishes this in his book.
But for one thing, and there are a million reasons, for one thing, you know, women are much more likely to give birth than men are, consistently.
And that plays a role, my friend, because if you're going to leave the labor force, and women quit about eight times more often than men, largely for this purpose,
If you're going to leave the labor force and take care of your children, that has a lot of consequences for the types of jobs you'll take.
For instance, it's very difficult. It's more difficult for a woman than for a man, for that reason, to go into high-paying jobs like lawyer or doctor,
because it's very difficult to leave those professions and then just jump right back in in 10 years.
There have been a lot of advances and a lot of new information, so they're going to look for jobs with slow obsolescence rates.
So that's one factor. Married women are going to look for jobs with specific requirements.
Flexible hours, near my home, and so on. There are a million reasons. In fact, if you look at just single unmarried women and single unmarried men,
there basically is no, practically there is no differential. And women also tend to work part-time a lot more often than men.
So you can just look and break this down and you realize that this is another fallacy.
Now, what they're doing... I was just telling Jeff Tucker about this and don't write an article about this because I've already written one and...
Oh, you write it for something else, but I've already written one that I want to give to the free market, so don't even write an article on this, please.
But I'm going to let you in on this. I used to think that comparable worth was a thing of the past.
Remember this trendy feminist economic thing? Comparable worth was this idea that, well, okay,
we'll accept that women are going to tend to be in lower paying jobs anyway.
for various reasons. They're going to tend to be librarians more often than they're going to be chemists.
Fair enough. But isn't that proof of discrimination that chemists earn more than librarians?
Chemists are mostly men, and librarians tend to be women. That's discrimination too,
because they're doing a job that's basically of equal worth and value to society.
How do they know it's of equal worth and value to society?
Because the U.S. Civil Rights Commission determined, according to its little questionnaire,
that each of those jobs earned 493 points on its scale.
So they're both equal. We've determined it scientifically.
So librarians should get, you know, salaries increased.
And you might think this is the stupidest, most destructive, inane thing you've ever heard.
And I thought, well, they were so embarrassed by this that this just fell away and nobody brought it up again.
It's back.
A week ago, one week ago today, the state of Maine became the first state in the United States to issue regulations pertaining to salaries for men and women on the basis of comparable worth.
And within about 180 days, every Maine businessman will be subject to lawsuits in which people can sue for unlimited damages
If they believe that they are doing an equal job to that of somebody else and yet not getting as much...
Now, we all think we're doing more than somebody else, right?
I mean, I think I publish a lot more than anybody in my department, whatever.
I'd like to go and say, hey, why don't I get paid what that full professor gets paid?
Eh, well, maybe not a bad idea.
As long as everybody's destroying society, why not jump right in?
Imagine this! This is going to lead to endless litigation.
It's going to mean that instead of having a free society, which is sort of what we're working toward,
We're going to have a society in which everybody rushes to the bureaucrats to argue about why his occupation is worth more than it's earning.
It's beyond belief. And I don't know how this managed to sneak back in, because we had routed it in the 80s,
and then it managed to sneak back in somehow, and in many other states, at least two dozen other states, and I think more,
similar bills are pending. It's beyond belief, my friends, and it's all based on a misleading statistic.
But even if these people, you know, basically it's not really based on that,
because even if they knew, which some of them must know, that the statistic is misleading,
they hate the capitalist economy and they want to wreck it and they want to get stuff for themselves.
The most, this is the last point I'll make, the most ironic feature of comparable worth is this,
and it just goes to show how utterly irrational so-called feminist economics is,
is that feminist claim on the one hand, we want to get women out of traditionally female occupations
and have them compete with men in traditionally male occupations.
Well, comparable worth will have exactly the opposite effect because you're going to raise
salaries for librarians and secretaries, so women are going to want to do that, or at
least they're going to tend to stay in those occupations where the salaries have gone up.
They're not going to tend to look around for, hey, I'd rather be a construction worker.
They're going to stay in that secretarial job.
But again, it goes to show that there is no reason here, and if you're looking for it,
you'll be looking a long time.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.