Hillary 2.0

Hillary 2.0
Thomas Sowell |
Oct 27, 2015





Many people may share Senator Bernie Sanders' complaint that he was tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton's e-mails. But the controversy is about issues far bigger than e-mails.

One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration's foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

An even bigger issue is whether high officials of government can ignore the law and refuse to produce evidence when it is subpoenaed. If they can, then the whole separation of powers -- the checks and balances in the Constitution -- gives way to arbitrary government by corrupt officials who are accountable to no one.

This is not the first time Hillary Clinton has defied the law to cover up what she had done. When Bill Clinton was president, back in the 1990s, both he and Hillary developed the strategy of responding to charges of illegal actions on their part by stalling and stonewalling when either courts or Congress tried to get them to produce documents related to these charges.

Hillary claimed then, as now, that key documents had disappeared. Her more recent claim that many of her e-mails had been deleted was just Hillary 2.0. Only after three years of stalling and stonewalling on her part has the fact finally come out this year that those e-mails could be recovered, and now have been.

By this time, however, Hillary and her supporters used the same tactics that both Clintons used back in the 1990s -- namely, saying that this was old news, stuff that had already been investigated too long, that it was time to "move on."

That was Hillary 1.0. More recently Hillary 2.0 said, melodramatically, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

One of the things that the former Secretary of State was now trying to cover up was the utter disaster of the Obama administration's foreign policy that she carried out in Libya.

Having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Muammar Qaddafi, who was no threat to America's interests in the Middle East, the Obama administration was confronted with the fact that Qaddafi's ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were now able to operate freely in Libya.

Just how freely was shown in September 2012, when terrorists stormed the compound in Benghazi where the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was staying. They murdered him and three other Americans who tried to defend him.

Moreover, the terrorists did not even have to go into hiding afterwards, and at least one of them was interviewed by journalists. That's how chaotic Libya had become.

Meanwhile, there was an American presidential election campaign in 2012, and Barack Obama was presenting himself to the voters as someone who had defeated Al Qaeda and suppressed the terrorist threat in the Middle East.

Obviously the truth about this attack could have totally undermined the image that Obama was trying to project during the election campaign, and perhaps cost him the White House. So a lie was concocted instead.

The lie was that the attack was not by terrorists -- who supposedly had been suppressed by Obama -- but was a spontaneous protest demonstration against an American video insulting Islam, and that protest just got out of control.

Now that Hillary Clinton's e-mails have finally been recovered and revealed, after three years of stalling and stonewalling, they showed explicitly that she knew from the outset that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and others was not a result of some video but was a coordinated terrorist operation.

Nevertheless, Hillary 2.0, along with President Obama and national security advisor Susan Rice, told the world in 2012 that the deaths in Benghazi were due to the video, not a terrorist organization that was now operating freely in Libya, thanks to the policy that got rid of the Qaddafi government.

Yet that key fact was treated by the media as old news, and what was exciting now was how well Hillary 2.0 outperformed the Congressional committee on television. If the corruption and undermining of the American system of Constitutional government eventually costs us our freedom, will the media say, "What difference does it make now?"

Politicians' Words

Politicians' Words
Thomas Sowell | Oct 21, 2015



At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats' nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared that "the wealthy pay too little" in taxes and "the middle class pays too much."

Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.

It is one of the many signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that "the rich" are not paying their "fair share" in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either "the rich" or "fair share."

Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory -- and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.

What a "fair share" of taxes means in practice is simply "more." No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their "fair share."

Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate "about $157 billion" a year in additional tax revenue for the government.

This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues -- and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.

When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues FELL by $257 million.

There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves.

Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.

Conversely, there have been some reductions in high tax rates that brought in more tax revenues at the lower rates. This happened as far back as the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. It also happened in the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, the Reagan administration in the 1980s and most recently in the Bush 43 administration. There was a similar reaction in Iceland.

There is nothing inevitable about either a higher or a lower amount of tax revenues, whether the tax rate is raised or lowered. The government can only set tax rates. How that will affect the tax revenues actually received depends on how people react, and you can know that only after the fact. Sophisticated projections have often been laughably wrong.

Contrary to the way some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood, to be moved about like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design from on high.

Even outright confiscations of people's wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity, and have even led to collapsing economies.

But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future. Plans to "soak the rich," who are not paying their "fair share," have worked politically, time and time again -- and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.

Charlatans and Sheep

 Thomas' anectdotes about Hispanic baseball players and Indian spelling bee champions is thought-provoking.  The fact that some groups over-index in certain populations is never attributed to discrimination (nor should it - that would be ridiculous).  Why is it different in any other performance-based population (school & work)?

Charlatans and Sheep

Thomas Sowell | Oct 06, 2015




One of the many painful signs of the mindlessness of our times was a recent section of the Wall Street Journal, built around the theme "What's Holding Women Back in the Workplace?"

Whenever some group is not equally represented in some institution or activity, the automatic response in some quarters is to assume that someone has prevented equality of outcomes.

This preconception of equal outcomes requires not one speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary. Even in activities where individual performances are what determine outcomes, and those performances are easily measured objectively, there is seldom anything resembling equal representation.

For 12 consecutive years -- from 2001 through 2012 -- each home run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S. National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the 7th consecutive year in which the U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Asian Indian.

We all know about the large over-representation of blacks among professional basketball players, and especially among the star players. The best-selling brands of beer in America were created by people of German ancestry, who also created China's famed Tsingtao beer. Of the 100 top-ranked Marathon runners in the world in 2012, 68 were Kenyans. The list could go on and on. Although blacks are over-represented among professional football players, even the most avid National Football League fan is unlikely to be able to recall seeing even one black player who kicked a punt or a point after touchdown.

Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Black Kickers Back in the NFL?" Could it be that blacks are more interested in playing positions where there is more action and -- not incidentally -- more money?

Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Back Whites in the National Basketball Association?" Or an article titled: "What's Holding Back Non-Asian Indian Kids from Winning the Spelling Bee?" Lawsuits claiming discrimination have been won on the basis of statistical disparities far smaller than these.

Among the many reasons for gross disparities in many fields, and at different income levels, is that human beings differ in what they want to do, quite aside from any differences in what they are capable of doing, or what others permit them to do. Observers cannot just grab a statistic and run with it, though that is what is done too often in the media -- and even in courts of law.

Particular opportunities are seized by some groups and used to rise from poverty to prosperity. But, for other groups, those same opportunities might as well not exist, because other groups are oriented in different directions, and those opportunities might not even catch their attention.

As regards statistical disparities in the representation of women in various occupations or at different income levels, a number of outstanding female scholars, including Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, have shown many ways in which women's circumstances and priorities differ from those of men.

Men, for example, don't get pregnant. And where children are raised by a single parent, that parent is a mother far more often than a father. You cannot work the 60-hour weeks that are needed to reach the top in some fields when you have children to raise.

But we seldom hear about such facts, while we constantly hear charlatans loudly proclaiming numerical "gender gaps" in employment or pay, and suing for discrimination.

Charlatans are only half the story. The other half includes people who are gullible enough to be led around like sheep by those exploiting the prevailing political correctness dispensed in our schools, colleges and the media.

Moreover, the sheep in both high and low positions often also implicitly believe that the cause of statistical disparities must have originated wherever the statistics were collected, and therefore must be the fault of the employer -- even though the factors behind those disparities may have originated far from the employer and long before the people involved reached the employer.

So long as there is widespread gullibility, there will be charlatans ready to exploit it for their own benefit, either politically or financially.

The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud

The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud
Thomas Sowell | Sep 29, 2015




Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.

A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.

It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.

One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.

Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."

Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.

Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."

Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.

One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.

This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries -- and so have many other people who never studied economics.

Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.

Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving "open space," and "open space" has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices.

Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.

How "complex" is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of "open space" would keep housing from becoming "unaffordable"?

Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of "open space," "saving farmland," or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?

When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the "complex" question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom "open space" is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.

Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How "complex" is that?