In this short video, Prof Sowell again explains, with a concrete example, how government planning (which may or may not have good intentions) ends up hurting the people it purportedly aims to help. The example here is that of Wards Cove Packing, a company that was taken to court and charged with discrimination for having more whites working in its higher positions and and more non-whites working in its lower positions. Despite perfectly reasonable explanations (i.e. location of the company, the fact that lower positions are mainly seasonal etc.) the case was successful. The result (or the 'unintended consequence') was that lawyers ended up advising companies not to hire blacks (or non-whites) in lower level positions unless they could hire blacks in higher positions first. In other words, or as Prof Sowell puts it, if you can't find any blacks to be engineers or managers, don't hire any blacks to be janitors or assembly line workers, because it will look bad. It will look like discrimination.
Prof Sowell then discusses the various countries that he mentions in his book, most of which he visited, including Malaysia, India, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, to look at their governments' preferential policies. After that, he discusses differences in skills depending on where people come from. Germans, for example, are excellent at making pianos, regardless of where they live. Therefore, why do we expect different groups to do the same?
His favourite book is A Conflict of Visions, because in there he explains how people broadly fall into two categories of thinking, and thus if someone holds a certain view on one issue it is easy to predict what view they will hold concerning an entirely unrelated issue. For example, if someone is pro-abortion, they will most likely fall to the left ideologically, and therefore you can easily guess what their position will be regarding gun control or the welfare state.
The last segment of the video is the most interesting because therein he discusses what happens to those who go against the groupthink of the minority or group that they belong to, and this can apply to women, blacks, Muslims and so forth. These people are inevitably labelled as traitors, but in his case, Prof Sowell is not labelled as a traitor by all blacks but by the small class of black intellectuals and "community leaders" who portray themselves as spokesmen on behalf of their entire group. These people have huge invested interests in the various government programmes, and other deals, that are in place and therefore people like Sowell need to be demonised or at least ignored.
In the final minute, Prof Sowell draws the distinction between people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who puts their lives on the line and indeed died for the cause that they believed in, and the black leaders of today, who are, as Prof Sowell accurately puts it, professional hustlers. Right at the end, he even draws a comparison with religion. For example, the first Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire and it was clear that trouble was all they were going to get out of pursuing their cause. However, once Christianity became a state religion, the movement changed and you had an entirely different type of people leading it.
Prof Sowell also elaborates on it here, i.e. professional hustlers and how they benefit from the victim mentality:
In conclusion, we should learn and understand that just like the blacks, Muslims in the Anglosphere and particularly in the United States have a) governments who want to use them and take advantage of them as their own "pet minority" and b) professional hustlers (who often seem to be called 'reverend') who benefit from the status quo and have a vested interest in government programmes and other arrangements. But unlike blacks, who are a race, Muslims have to justify why they are living in such countries. If it is simply for a luxurious lifestyle or to "islamify" these countries from the top down, there will never be any help or success from Allah.
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