Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Will the free market reward art and education? Plus: Gauging "the Philadelphia effect"; Americans are fat because we're lazy and eat bad food.
Nov 17, 1999 |
Black and right
BY RAY SAWHILL
(11/10/99)
Thomas Sowell has a point when he speaks about looking at public policy in terms of what is being rewarded rather than the benevolent intent of the law. However, Sowell is putting a polite face on what conservatives seem to have a magical belief in: the unregulated market. There are too many arguments that start out on "libertarian" principles speaking of lofty "choice" and then end up with the reason XYZ corporation should be able to do exactly as it pleases, with no regard for the public good, as that would limit "choice."
The market has its own system of rewards and punishments. The market doesn't have many rewards for people who provide health care for disadvantaged children, while the plastic surgeon to the wealthy will find rewards plentiful. The market rewards what makes money. What about culture, art, education, the environment? These might not find the rewards of the market but are surely desirable to create a civil society.
A civil society is one that would balance the needs of individuals and the public good -- not one in which "cosmic justice" is imposed from above (Marxism) or one in which some concept like "the market" or "choice" is held sacred despite what might be in the public interest. Isn't liberalism the middle ground between an unregulated market and a collectivist society? And don't we have democratic government to strike a balance between the two?
-- Stephen Sacco
Surprisingly, conservative Thomas Sowell offers a very strong argument against so-called welfare reform -- an argument so strong I'm surprised that nobody on the left seems to have used it. He states that only 1 percent of the American population remains in the bottom-fifth income bracket for 15 years, and only 3 percent for eight years. Welfare recipients, obviously, are in the bottom fifth. If so few of them remain in the bottom fifth after a few years, then the specter of widespread, long-term dependence on welfare must be a myth. And if so few people stay on welfare, there's no need for laws kicking people off it.
-- Tom Davies
Takoma Park, Md.
Does Sowell mean to imply that the owners of these units should admit the homeless at their own expense? If rent control is repealed, the landlords of buildings "that are boarded up as a consequence of economic protectionism" will upgrade them so that not only will the homeless not be able to afford them, but most New Yorkers will be shut out as well. What will that have accomplished for the denizens of the streets?
-- Bill Meyer
Thomas Sowell and Raymond Sawhill urge "young liberals," in the most condescending way, to value empirical evidence over ideologically inspired goals.
To emphasize this point, Sowell claims (with no attribution) that there are four times as many boarded-up housing units in New York City as there are homeless. He is offended by these facts (facts which I very much doubt, but let's give him the benefit), and seems to blame rent-control for homelessness. This is, of course, insane. Lots of factors contribute to homelessness, but the nominal increase in housing units and decrease in costs that would accompany abandoning rent control is far from a panacea. There's a case to be made that rent control hurts the working poor, but the idea that the homeless in New York City would substantially benefit from doing away with rent control is the flimsiest bit of reasoning I've ever come across -- a clear case of ideology trumping rational explanation.
Then Sowell claims that essentially nobody (or less than 3 percent of Americans) spends more than eight years in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, and asserts that "it's a tremendously fluid system." Again, he's wrong. All responsible studies in this issue show that closer to half of families starting in the bottom quintile are still there a decade later. Studies that give results that Sowell cites inevitably only look at individuals, and start tracking them very early in life -- often as early as age 16. Of course many of these people -- middle-class teenagers and college students -- experience tremendous gains in income as they age, switching from working at a college bookstore to full-time career employment. This isn't income mobility, it's growing up. Compared to other industrialized countries, America performs poorly (always in the bottom half) in terms of mobility of family incomes.
-- Josh Bivens
New York
The Sowell interview was a puff piece. I doubt that Salon readers, as the interviewer stated, believe that all Republicans are racists. I also give no credence to people who swing from far left to far right (or vice versa), those who claim to have been Marxists in their youth and now are conservatives as they gain wisdom. Maybe they have been wrong their entire lives as they flipped around the political spectrum trying to gain attention for their point of view. What they really seem to have gained is a personal bitterness for having been dismissed. It is the David Horowitz-style of politics for those who feel they have been politically and personally victimized by the so-called intellectual elite.
-- S. Bain
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