A Moving Target

Thomas Sowell – The Man Who Asked for the Evidence 📚 He was born in 1930 in North Carolina, in a house without running water. His father died before he was born. He grew up in Harlem, left school at sixteen, delivered telegrams, worked in a machine shop and served in the Marines. Then he went to Harvard, Columbia and Chicago. He started as a Marxist. Books did not cure him. A summer job did. In 1960, at the U.S. Department of Labor, he studied the minimum wage in Puerto Rico's sugar industry. Each time the wage was raised, employment fell. He proposed a simple test to find out why. Nobody in the building wanted it run. The department's budget depended on the law being good; whether the law was good was not its business. That summer, he understood that an institution has interests of its own, and that the truth is rarely among them. Everything else followed from there. For sixty years, he has asked the three questions that no ideology survives: compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence do you have? He put the whole of economics in one line, observing that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And he put the whole of politics in another, noting that it is hard to imagine a more dangerous way of making decisions than putting them in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. He gave the planners their true name: the anointed. People who judge themselves by their intentions and everyone else by results, and for whom every failure of their policy is proof that it was not tried hard enough. He was a black man from Harlem who said that culture matters more than grievance, and that the policies made to help the poor had hurt them most. For that, the people who claim to speak for the poor never forgave him. He kept writing anyway – more than forty books, without a single slogan in them. He is ninety-six. He has never held power, never led a movement, never raised his voice. He only asked for the evidence. In the age of the Lie, that turned out to be the most radical thing a man could do. — America has one honor that fits: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, its highest civilian award. 🏅🇺🇸 He should receive it now, while he can still walk up and collect it. 🗽