​It's A Saturday Morning Bonus Podcast For 08-16-25

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the Saturday Podcast, and
for the second week in a row, there will be
tomorrow a Sunday podcast we are delighted to bring to
you courtesy of Darryl Koond to the newest member of
our team. So we are adding now all seven days.
If you choose to download your podcast on the day of,

(00:21):
you will get our Sunday podcast tomorrow. But for today's
Saturday Podcast, we're diving into the sharp, uncompromising mind of
my favorite living economist, Thomas Sol, a man whose work
has challenged conventional wisdom, trained the mind of the keen

(00:45):
and curious, and been a great American patriot for longer
than I've been alive. A senior fellow at the Hoover
Institute and a former Marxist turn free market advocate, Thomas
Sol has built a legacy of cutting through political spin
with data, clarity and brutal honesty. I think Thomas Soule's

(01:09):
Basic Economics, a book he wrote one of many, is
the best primer for every person listening to me who
is trying to get a better understanding of what capitalism means.
It is simply written by a man who is writing
far below his intellectual level or his use of the

(01:30):
English language, because it's meant to be incredibly accessible. It's
called basic economics. And I know that sounds dry, but
I think you will find when I'm exercising I listen
to it. I listened to it at least once a
year as a primer to go back. It's just wonderful. Well,
in his book Social Justice Fallacies, he takes aim at

(01:55):
one of the most powerful narratives of our time, the
social justice this movement. He's not just an economist. He
talks about culture a lot as well, and he has
this just brilliant blend of historical insight. I mean he
could have been a historian, and in a sense he is.

(02:16):
But he also applies his knowledge and understanding of the
laws of economics. And he is unafraid, unabashed. And this
is a black man who wrote Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
He is unafraid to ruffle some foot feathers and to
speak truth. And I absolutely admire him. He won't be

(02:37):
with us forever. He's well into his nineties. So anyway,
here's Thomas Soul and reminder that tomorrow we will have
our second edition of the Sunday Podcast two.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Events in the Life of Today's guest. He just turned
ninety three, and he just published his latest book, Thomas
Soul on Uncommon Knowledge. Now, welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm

(03:09):
Peter Robinson. After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sole served
in the United States Marine Corps, then received an undergraduate
degree from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia, a doctorate
from the University of Chicago. After teaching at universities that
included Cornell, Brandeis and UCLA, Doctor Soul became a fellow

(03:29):
at the Hoover Institution in nineteen seventy seven. Thomas Sole
is the author of some forty books, including his newest volume,
Social Justice Fallacies, and this past spring he turned ninety three. Tom,
Welcome back to Uncommon Knowledge. Oh being here, you know
I can't help thinking reading your background, if only you'd

(03:51):
been a little bit more industrious, you might have been
able to make a name for yourself. Social Justice Doctor
Martin Luther King in nineteen sixty three, I have a
dream my.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Poor little children.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
One day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin, but by
the content of that character. I have a.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Dreamed and you right, Doctor King's message was equal opportunity
for individuals, regardless of race. In the years that followed,
the goal changed to equal outcomes for groups. What now
rose to dominance was the social justice agenda. If the

(04:43):
social justice those backing the social justice agenda, could have
everything they wanted, what would the country look like?

Speaker 4 (04:53):
We'd be killing each other?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
All right, can you give me intermediate steps? In other words,
what is the social justice agenda? What do they want?

Speaker 3 (05:07):
They want everybody to have equal, equal outcomes, or as
close as they can get to it. Unfortunately, you don't
have You don't have the preconditions for that, even in
the same family. One of the examples I use in
the book is, among among five child families, right, the

(05:33):
national merit finalist is the first born just over half
the time. That is more often than the other four
siblings combined. The fifth born is six percent of the time.

Speaker 4 (05:47):
And so it was.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Even where you have almost ideal conditions, they are born
to the same parents, raised under the same roof, and
they are not the same.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Because all kinds of things mattercluding birth order.

Speaker 4 (06:01):
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, all right.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
You take on various fallacies here. Let's take on a
couple of them. The equal chances fallacy, even in a
society I'm quoting you, social justice fallacies, Even in a
society with equal opportunity, people from different backgrounds do not
necessarily even want to do the same things. And American

(06:25):
sports blacks are very over represented in professional basketball, whites
in professional tennis, and Hispanics in Major League Baseball. Why
is that telling?

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Because the implicit assumption, and sometimes explicit assumption, is that
in a world where everything was fair, where everyone's treated fairly,
you would have things would be representative of the population
demographics as a whole in all these various activities. Imagine
a black kids born in Harlem and he's born with

(07:03):
a body identical that of Rudolphin Arrea, of the great
ballet dancer. There's there's the odds of one thousand and
one that he will become a ballet dancer, much less
another Rudolph and Arraya. I mean, he would be looked
at strangely by all his friends in the neighborhood if
he even wanted to do that, what you mean? But

(07:25):
he wouldn't even think about it, right, right?

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Right?

Speaker 2 (07:29):
So you mean to say that when you tried out
for theo. You tried out for the pitching position and
the Brooklyn Dodgers and they didn't hire you. You were
not being discriminated against.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
Actually I was trying out off for frace base. And
the real reason I messed up was that my position
was centered field. But in order to be a good
center fielder, I need hours and hours of practice, and
it was it was a very bad spring. I got
very little practice, and so I figured, at least I
won't to go out and make an idiot my self.
Incentive feelings left made an idiot of myself at first

(08:02):
base right.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Chess pieces fallacy. The Chess pieces fallacy explain that one well.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract serious
who imagine that they can control a whole society with
the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you
want them on a chessboard.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
And so.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
There's this notion of this inert, massive people down there,
and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who
ought to be telling them what to do. And there's
no thought that, first of all, those the top don't
even know the people's individual conditions, who are very different
from themselves, and when they try to help.

Speaker 4 (08:49):
They make things. They can make things disastrous.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
You discuss the theory of justice. This is under knowledge fallacy,
a theory of justice which is in certain call, certain
circles every university in the country, the philosophy department, political science.
You'll get it in sociology. This is the Big Book
on Social justice written by John Rawl's philosopher at Harvard.

(09:13):
I'm quoting you. Tom Rawles refers to things that society
should arrange. You quote him. Arrange, that's the word he uses.
And then Tom Sole says, the interior decorators arrange, governments compel.
It is not a subtle distinction. Explain that, Well.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
If you're going to try to get some kind of result,
you have to specify through what kinds of mechanism you
expect to get that result. And different mechanisms, whether it's
the government, the market, or the Red Cross, whatever, they
have their own individual things that they're good at and
not so good at. And so you can't get the
social justice result that you want unless you have the

(09:57):
kind of institution there's likely to produce that result. Politics
is not that kind of institution.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
And yet they all implicitly rely on government. Yes, redistribution
of wealth, adjusting using legal regimes to adjust the proportions
of various groups that get certain jobs. They all rely
on government. And what's distinctive about government is it's the
one institution that can send you to jail. Yes, all right,

(10:24):
And that's the point is that's dangerous. We shouldn't want
more government, more hands in the power of the politician.

Speaker 4 (10:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
One of the real problems is that you have people
making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong,
no matter how high a price other people pay. Right now,
the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around, let's say,
prior to nineteen sixty. And I mentioned nineteen sixty in

(10:53):
this case because that's when the Supreme Court remade the
criminal law. They discovered rights in the constant and no
one had noticed for over a century, and they were
impervious to evidence.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
So contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an
eight and nine and ten year old boy with what
we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Oh my gosh, people are astonished when I tell them
I grew up in Harlem. I can't remember ever hearing
a gunshot. And then I've checked with my relatives who
grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in
North Carolina. They never heard of s gunshot when they
were growing up.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
You know. I remember going back.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
To Harlem some years ago to do some researcher to
high school, and I looked out the window, and there's
this park there near the high school. And I mentioned
in passing that when I when I, when I lived
in Harlem, it was a kid, I would take my
dog for a walk in that park, and looks.

Speaker 4 (11:55):
Of horror came over the students' faces.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
People have no idea how much has retrogressed over the
years in the black community, and how much of what
progress has been made has not been made by politicians
or by charismatic leaders. If one of the things that
drives me crazy people who cite trends over time without

(12:24):
deciding where they're going to start the time period. For example,
it's I said that all sorts of wonderful things happened
in the nineteen sixties and beyond, and especially for the
minorities and the poor and so forth. So what I did,
I said, no, Well, you if you start the data
in nineteen sixty. We don't know how much was a

(12:46):
result of that and how much the results of other things.
That also applies in other things. One simple one. Many
people say, you know, we're off Native wrote this book
in nineteen sixty five, and as about the automobile safety
and so on. As a result, there were laws by
the government, and the death rates went down after that,

(13:07):
which is true in itself. But the death rate went
down at a far higher rate prior to his writing
the book. And this was the continuation of a trend
that went back another twenty or thirty.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Years because the market, because car manufacturers, when it came
right down to it, had very little interest in getting
people killed.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yes, you kill off your customers, your chances all, you
won't still as many cars.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
The big fallacy at least, I take this as in
many ways the heart of the book Racial Fallacies. Now
in this section, in this chapter on racial fallacies, you
begin Almost all of this book is addressed to the
current moment. But in Racial Fallacies you start by going
back about one hundred years to lay out the progressive

(13:55):
position in the nineteen tens and twenties for some years afterward.
I'm quoting you in addressing the massive increase in immigration
from Eastern and Southern Europe. This begins. This massive increase
in immigration begins toward the end of the nineteenth century
and carries on through the nineteen twenties. In addressing the
massive increase in immigration, progressives claimed that these new immigrants

(14:19):
were inherently genetically and therefore permanently inferior. So your argument
is that a century or so ago, progressives believed roughly
the same about Polish and Italian immigrants that whites in
the South had long believed about blacks. Oh yes, all right,

(14:41):
social justice fallacies. I'm going to read a quotation that
I'd like you to take us through this material. With
the passing years, more and more evidence undermined the conclusion
of the genetic determinists. Jews, who had scored low on
the nineteen seventeen Armymental Test, began to score above the
national average on various tests as they became a more

(15:04):
English speaking group. A study showed that black orphans, black
orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQs
than other black children. Close quote. So, in the century
since this, you call them genetic determined, which is one

(15:24):
way of putting that they were racists. They believe that
some races were permanently inferious.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Yes, and and and should be eliminated.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
And we've learned that's total nonsense. But even more than that,
we've learned that IQ is malleable. Is that correct?

Speaker 4 (15:38):
I'm not sure what you mean by malady.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Well, that that is to say that this ranking of
the ranking change stupid in nineteen seventeen because they score
badly on tests.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
But they started test written in English, written tests written
in English, and people who who spoke English did better
on those tests.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Or that or that, or that blacks have a certain
fixed IQ ranking, and then you have black orphans raised
by white families, in other words, a different cultural Yeah,
but even.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
Before that study wasn't done until nineteen seventy six, but
even as of the time where World War One, the
data showed that black soldiers scored below white white soldiers.

Speaker 4 (16:19):
And this is one of the reason reasons that sold
the theory.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
You need people with contrary opinions to be able to
be free to attack things. The people who believe that
that this is genetically determined, is that that's it, that's
the answer. And they moved on some other people said,
let's look at it more closely, and they discovered that
black soldiers from New York, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and

(16:45):
one or two other states scored higher than white soldiers
from Mississippi, Alabama, et cetera, et cetera. And as I
mentioned in the book, people's genies do not change when
they cross the state line. The problem is that when
you have people who are crusading for some idea, whatever
the idea is, and they find some data that fits

(17:07):
what they believe, that's the end of the story as
far as they concerned, which is fine if there are
other people with contrary ideas who will look closer for
something that.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Goes the other way and then get listened to.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
By the way, you describe in the book the Flint
effect discovered by your your friend, the late James Flynn,
can you describe that? That's fascinating? Well.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
The the idea of the genetic determinists is that you
had to rid the country of these these interior races,
because otherwise the national i Q would go down over
time because the poorer people had more children than the
richer people. And so that that went on for here
again the i Q data there that that the genetic

(17:55):
determinists were relying on looked like it supported what they said,
But Jim Flynn decided that, well, first of all, you
have to understand what an IQ score, how an IQ
scor has arrived at.

Speaker 4 (18:07):
Whatever a number of.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
Questions answered correctly is the average at a given time
is given the number of number one hundred. Because when
you do these tests, especially with children, if a six
year old child scores the same as a twelve year
old child, that means the sixty year old child is

(18:31):
either much brighter than usual or the twelve year old
child is a lot less than the usual. And so
you compare all the six year old children and whatever
the six year old children, how many questions they answered correctly,
That becomes one hundred, and then similarly for all the
other ages.

Speaker 4 (18:47):
So you can do.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
That and an adulthood at some point you simply say
adult and non adult. All right, Now, that sounds very,
very very innocent in itself, But what happens when people
start answering more questions correctly than before the next generation
answers more questions. Now the number of questions answered by
the second generation becomes one hundred and so over time,

(19:12):
as more and more people black, white, and whatever are
answering more and more questions correctly, the tests are renormed.
So having an IQ of one hundred in nineteen twenty
five is not the same thing as having an IQ
of one hundred and nineteen thirty five or nineteen fifty.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
And this is exactly what was going on. Yeah, people
of all different kinds were yes, and I'm smarter crudely.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
But once Jim Flynn decided to go back to the
raw data, not just take take take, to take the
IQs how many how many questions was this? And he
just discovers that the number of questions being answered correctly
was increasing by large amounts, roughly one statistical deviation from

(20:01):
from one generation to the next, which is big yes.
And so the the number of questions that the Blacks
were answering, saying around two thousand and having an IQ
of eighty five would have been an IQ of one
hundred and four back in nineteen forty seven. And so

(20:23):
all this information was being ignored because they people took
the IQ test as if that was the fixed number,
fixed number of questions I answered correctly.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
And so you take the lid off that one. The
Flint effect.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
Shows that the opposite was happening, that instead of the
national IQ going down, it was going up.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
It was going up. And so we have this fascinating
discovery that somehow or other, the conditions of modern life
that requires more abstract things, somehow it's bringing in the
whole group, right, the whole group rising, all right?

Speaker 4 (21:01):
All right?

Speaker 2 (21:02):
From the progressive position a century ago to the progressive
position today. Racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism
that we just discussed, which proclaims that race is everything
as an explanation of group differences, to the opposite view
that racism is the primary explanation of group differences. Yes,

(21:24):
how did this happen?

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Or it happened because a lot of people arrived at
the same conclusion and they had IQ high IQ's and PhDs,
and that was the end of the story as well
as far I've many people were concerned, all right. I mean,
a high IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
I have to be sorry, but you once told me
I'm talking to a Harvard man. Of course, I'm very
conscious of this, and you once told me, Peter, the
main advantage of earning a Harvard degree is that you
never again and all your life to have to be
intimidated by anyone who has a Harvard degree. Listen, Tom,

(22:07):
for the most as I read this book. For the
most part, it's objective, it's objective throughout, it's calm, it's analytical.
But when you take on this modern progressive position that
racism accounts for anything, there are passages in which you're angry.
I felt that there are passages in which there's a
motion that is very close to this. So let me

(22:29):
just read a little bit too. Median Black family income
has been lower than median white family income for generations,
but the median per capita income of Asian groups is
more than fifteen thousand a year higher than the media
per capita income of white Americans. Is this the white
supremacy we're so often warned about. For more than a

(22:51):
quarter of a century, in no year has the annual
poverty rate of Black married couple families married couple families
been as high as ten percent, And in no year
has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been
as low as ten percent. If black poverty is caused
by systemic racism. Do racists make an exception for blacks

(23:14):
who are married? I guess you're allowed to be angry?

Speaker 4 (23:21):
Yes, well, yes, So.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Do you have the feeling when you're addressing this notion
that racism accounts for everything? Do you have the feeling
that the arguments are subtle, it's persuasive, you can forgive
someone for buying that argument. Or do you have the
feeling that it's wilful, that the case is so clearly

(23:51):
mistaken that there's a wilfulness about it.

Speaker 4 (23:54):
No, I don't.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
I think that people don't look for certain evidence and
therefore they don't find it, and so from from the
on the basis of what they know at a given time,
this may be very plausible. The problem is that you
don't What you really need are other people with a
different orientation, who who who are who are skeptical, and

(24:16):
who will then look for things and find things that are.

Speaker 4 (24:20):
Very different from that.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
One of the one of the things that I found
interesting was the fact that there are various counties in
the United States which are among the poorest counties in
the in the country, and six of those counties have
a population that ranges from ninety percent white to one

(24:44):
hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
White Appalachian counties Kentucky. Yeah, take in Ohio as they recall.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
Yeah, and and but mainly it's it's it's it's the
hillbilly communities, right. And of course there was that great
book that was written The Hillbilly Elergy was on the
best for more than a year consecutively. And waits now,
Senator Fans, Yes, and and and there these are people
who have faced zero racism. They are white, and they're white,

(25:11):
and and and zero racism. And also they're there. Back
in the thirties when they did i Q studies, UH,
their i qs were not only at the same level
as those of blacks, they had the same pattern, namely
that that that the young, the young people, whether they
were black or hillbilly, would have an i Q very
close to the national average UH at age six, but

(25:34):
by the time they were teenagers, it kept going down
and down and down because it's relative to the other
other people of that age group, and they simply were
not worth falling behind.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
UH.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
So it was clearly not biologically, it was it was social.

Speaker 4 (25:49):
But UH.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Despite that, these these hillbilly counties had income incomes, they
were not only lower than the national average. They were
lower than the average of black incomes for a period
of half a century. It may have been longer than that,
because I only went through half a century, but in

(26:10):
every study that was done over that half century, they
scored lower. Their family incomes were lower than the family
incomes the blacks. So obviously there must be other things
that cause people to be poor other than racism.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
All right, people in low income American hillbilly counties already
face zero racism because they are virtually all white. Yes, yes,
they have lower incomes than blacks, just as you were saying.
In other words, some behavior patterns, yes, seem to pay off. Now,
this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in

(26:49):
premises and errors in analysis. It's not dedicated to an
alternative explanation. Nevertheless, you've got this argument lurking in here
that it's the way people live, it's the way cultural tests.
So what are the patterns that pay off?

Speaker 4 (27:07):
Well?

Speaker 3 (27:07):
What, ah, my heavens, that's a much much larger book
than those.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Well, you've got time on your hand.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
In terms of policies for public policy, what does not
pay off is having charismatic leaders depending upon government to
do things because if you look what has happened to
blacks before and after that, there was a massive government
effort on their behalf the poverty rate among blacks if

(27:41):
you start in nineteen forty instead of nineteen sixty, because
nineteen sixty is the magic number for people who are
saying the governments he did all these wonderful things, and
blacks advanced because of it. In nineteen forty, the black
poverty rate was eighty seven percent. By nineteen sixty it
was under forty seven percent.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
That's dramatic.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
From nineteen sixty or nineteen seventy, it went down in
US it went down to thirty percent, and in nineteen seventy,
affirmative action was now in place, it went down to
twenty nine percent. So the in the twenty years prior
to nineteen sixties, the black poverty rate.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Went down by forty points.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
In the twenty and in the twenty years after nineteen
sixty it went down by eighteen points. But again you
have the same thing you had with what was the
Ralph Nader effect.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
You see started in nineteen sixty. You missed this, miss
all of that. So you've got in this book this
is the point you make again and again in the
section on racial fallacies that I started thinking of it.
I don't think you use these terms, but this is
not an original thought with me. I started thinking of
it as a as a hidden century of black progress. Yes,

(29:00):
from emancipation, with the end of the Civil War through
to nineteen sixty five, let's say, the Civil Rights Act
of nineteen sixty four, sixty five through the early through
the mid sixties. You've got a century, and you argue,
Black educational attainment rises, Black property rate drops dramatically, and

(29:25):
these are people who started with no property, overwhelmingly illiterate.
This is from the moment the sort of the year
zero in eighteen sixty five for African Americans, and they climb.
And the other point that you make at a number
of places is that the black family is overwhelmingly intact.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yes, right up to nineteen sixties, most black Yeah. Not
only not only do people take credit for things that
were not they are doing, they overlook the negative things
that came in after the nineteen sixties as a result
of policy. In nineteen forty seventeen percent of black children

(30:10):
were raised.

Speaker 4 (30:11):
In single parent homes seventeen percent.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Seventeen at the end I forget the exact date. In
the twentieth century, but after these wonderful reforms were put in.

Speaker 4 (30:23):
That quadrupled to sixty eight.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Percent of black children were being raised in single parent homes.
Now there's a whole literature on all the bad things
that happened to kids who are raised by single parents,
whether they are black or white, American or British. The
studies showed the same things. One study said that followlessness
has a bigger effect than even raised in poverty. And certainly,

(30:51):
I think back in my own life I was. I
realized how fortunate I was because even though my biological
that died before I was born, I would and.

Speaker 4 (31:03):
I was adopted.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
I was adopted into a family where I was the
only child in a family of four adults.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
And and these are not people who are out having
an active social life, something that the life was there in.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
The home they gave you the time.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yes, yes, And I remember years later when I became
a parent, and like other new parents, I wanted to
know when it was the kids supposed to do this,
when he's supposed to do that? But I said, I said,
how old was I when I started to walk?

Speaker 4 (31:32):
And this the loan.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Surviving member of the family of raised me, said, Tommy,
And nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always
carrying you, you know.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
But so you had four adults donting.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
Yes, yes, yes, And that's that's what.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
And then part of the part of the rise of
blacks before was because the things that were done by blacks,
I thought. Example, I think of a lot was a
kid who grew up in Harlem at the same time
I did. We were in the same school, lived two
blocks from me, and we met many years later by

(32:13):
accident on the street in San Francisco, and we talked
about the old times. And one of the things he
mentioned to me because he had gone on he was
making more money than I was, and he would become wealthy,
and he.

Speaker 4 (32:25):
Lived overseas with servants.

Speaker 3 (32:26):
And he came back and moved out to the wine
country and all that stuff. But one of the things
that struck me he said that he could remember times
when he was growing up when his father would sit
at the dinner table watching the children eat and not
eat anything himself. Now it's not that's what.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
And now the father isn't even there.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
Yes, that's right, that's right. So that those kinds of
things of what do it right?

Speaker 2 (32:55):
Social justice fallacies. The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty
four was a major factor in ending the denial of
basic constitutional rights to blacks in the South, but there
is no point trying to make that the main source
of the black rise out of poverty. Nor can the
left act as if the Civil Rights Act of nineteen

(33:15):
sixty four was solely their work. A higher percentage of
Republicans than Democrats voted for the act. Close quote. So
this is this you're saying something here which is.

Speaker 4 (33:29):
Fact. It is.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
It's shocking, it's heretical. You're saying, well, you're saying the
Civil Rights Act insured equality before the law, that was overdue,
it was necessary, it was just that's an accomplishment in
American history. But at about the same time we get
the creation of a vast expansion of the welfare state,

(33:52):
and it does people harm. It harms the African American family.
It needs to fatherless. Have I got your argument right?
And you want to stand by that?

Speaker 4 (34:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (34:06):
And the other thing too, The Civil Rights Act was
not what got blacks into professional occupations in the decade
prior to the nineteen sixty four The number of blacks
and professional occupations doubles. So this is not the result
of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
All right, Tom, a few closing questions here. First of all,
may I read to you. This is a note to
readers from the New York Times. In twenty twenty, the
nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted a
renewed focus on a longstanding debate whether to capitalize the

(34:51):
term black. We here at the New York Times have
talked to more than one hundred staff members. The feedback
has been thoughtful and nuanced. Lot full of nuanced, mind you,
And we've just started to We've decided to start using
uppercase black to describe people and cultures of African origin.
Close quote. The New York Times capitalizes black, but you don't,

(35:15):
Tom Soul, How dare you engage in this active defense?

Speaker 4 (35:20):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (35:21):
It is amazing the things that people can can focus on.
It may seem to be a big issue in the
New York Times. I suspected the people who are being
murdered in these big cities like New York and Chicago
may have a somewhat different view of the importance of
what is capitalized and not capitalized.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Tom, let me read a few single sentences from Social
justice Fallacies. I'll read a sentence. You tell us what
you meant. Stupid people can create problems, but it often
takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
That so, my gosh, think of the catastrophes of the
twentieth century. You mentioned the genetic determinives. They drew the
conclusions from their reasoning that you had to put an
end to certain races because they had what they call eugenics,
but what was later called genocide. And so that idea

(36:23):
originated with the progressors. And there was a progressive who
wrote a book with that theme, which was translated into German,
and Hitler called it his bible.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
And so this holocaust, you draw a line from the
progressive eugenicists to Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
He drew the line.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
He drew the line and wrote a letter of a
fan mail letter to the author of that book and
saying that that book was his bible. And we see
what that led to. During the nineteen twenties, in reaction
to World War One, which was sowhat so bad, the
idea arose the intellectual elites that the way to prevent

(37:03):
war was to stop was to stop arming. You see,
you saw, disarmament was the avoid a war. No evidence
made the slightest impression on them, and they blundered the
West into a war that probably would never have happened
because the totalitarian dictatorships the start of that war were

(37:26):
well aware that the United States, Britain and friends had
an industrial capacity greater than theirs. And you know, you
wouldn't ordinarily attack countries that have greater industrial capacity than
yours unless you thought that they were gutless and were
foolish enough not to remain armed. And for three years

(37:46):
of that war, their access powers won every single battle.
The Western democracies lost in Europe and Asia wherever they fought.
In nineteen forty two, Winston Tracils had made a speech
and he said, we have a new experience.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
We have victory.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
And when they won that victory in l Alamine in
Northern Africa, that was the first battle won by the
Western democracies in a war that it was already three
years old. And from that point on, especially when the
United States came in and the American productive capacity was mobilized,
and then it turned around today, people who are trying

(38:28):
to say say, we need to disarm in order to
have you know, peace, don't understand the nuclear age. You're
not going to get three years to figure out what's
going on. You're either going to be ready on the
first day of that war or you got gonna lose it.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
In politics, the goal is not truth but votes.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
And why does that matter?

Speaker 4 (38:55):
Oh, it.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
Matters because if you can get peace to believe that
their problems are all due.

Speaker 4 (39:02):
To racist you will get their votes.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
But if you say, but if you look at a
lot of data on different things, you discovered that's not
the taste. It's very doubtful if all the races in
the country today have half the negative effect on blacks
as the teachers unions have, because the teachers unions keep
the schools lousing in areas where the people who send

(39:30):
their kids to school do not have the option to
send them to a private school if the schools are bad.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
You make the point that in Harlem there are charter
schools that rent space in public schools and there are tests. Well,
go ahead, do you know what I'm referring to you? Yes?

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yes, yes, In fact, that there's a school I thought
the way to figure out that the difference between the
public school and the charter schools really public schools and
the charter schools is to compare of them in the
same build when they're when both schools are located in
the same buildings, so you have comparability. It's the same group, neighborhood,

(40:09):
same building, yet so everything uh uh. And when you
do that, what I found was that the charter school
kids and these low income black neighborhoods past the math
test at a rate more than six times as high
as that of the public school located in the very

(40:29):
same building.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
And the main difference between the charter school and the
public school.

Speaker 3 (40:34):
Is the public school is run by the teachers' unions.
The charter schools do not have have unions at all
in most cases. One of the most extreme examples was
the school that I went to when I was in Harlem,
and in that particular school, only seven percent of the
regular public school kids passed the math test. In the

(40:57):
charter school one hundred percent pasted it that they proficient.
They have different levels. Proficient means you've passed, and there's
a level above that when you've done more than what
is necessary for that or in that particular school. Only
two percent of the charter school kids scored as low
as proficient. The other ninety eight percent we're in the

(41:20):
top bracket above proficient.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Last question here less quotation to one of many things
that no individual, no institution, and no society has any
control over is the past.

Speaker 4 (41:37):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Why does that matter?

Speaker 3 (41:41):
Because when we talk about groups and we talk about
their environment, we usually mean their tangible current surroundings.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
But of course all the groups have had different paths.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
When the when the Irish, the Jews, and the Italian
immigrants were coming to America, Uh, it was common for
Irish for Italian and Jewish neighborhoods on New York's Lower
East Side to be represented by Irish politicians. Why is
that because if you look at what happened before they

(42:15):
ever got to America, you can see that the Irish
had reasons to organize in a political kind of way.
The Jews and the Italians did not. Their circumstances, it
wouldn't have made any difference. And now when they get
to New York they were they may be living in
the same neighborhoods and so forth, and the tangible surroundings
are the same, but the whole past of.

Speaker 4 (42:34):
The three groups is very different.

Speaker 3 (42:36):
And even when it's the Italians and the Jews rise
at the prosperity, it's in different industries, it's in different occupations, and.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
The past means that we should never expect groups to
end up evenly distributed across the past.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
But even such a thing as age, people don't realize
some American ethnic groups are a decade older than others,
and some are more more than two decades older than others.
So the Japanese, the difference between blacks and white is
not the largest. The difference in the country. The Japanese
Americans have are well higher than the Mexican Americans by

(43:13):
even larger amounts. Japanese Americans have a median age of
fifty two. Mexican Americans held it somewhere in the twenties.
Fifty two year old people make more money than twenty
year old people.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Tom, would you close our discussion by reading a passage
from social justice fallacies?

Speaker 4 (43:38):
Well, if I.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Still still agree with it, do we want the mixture
of students who are going to be trained to do
advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic makeup
of the population as a whole, or do we want
students with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer

(43:59):
and Alzheimer's. Do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic
representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly
with pilots who are chosen for their mastery of all
the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely
at your destination. Consequences matter or should matter, more than

(44:23):
some attractive or fashionable theory. More fundamentally, do we want
a society in which some babies are born into the
world as heirs of prepackaged grievances against other babies born
the same day, blighting both their lives, or do we
want to at least leave them the option to work

(44:44):
things out better in their lives than we have in ours.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Thomas Saw author of some forty books, including Social Justice Fallacies,
Thank You, Thank You for Uncommon Knowledge, The Hoover Institution,
and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
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(45:24):
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(45:49):
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(46:11):
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