The Tom Wood Show Hey, everybody, welcome back for another episode of The Tom Wood Show, episode 24101 with our old friend Keith Knight, Managing editor at the Libertarian Institute, where I sit on the board, by the way, so they have impeccable tastelibertarianinstitute.org.
Is the website Keith, You Are. And again, I maybe I've said this before and my middle-aged brain is not good at at remembering things I've said and done, but I I do not mean this in a patronizing way that that you are a genuine up and Comer in the movie. In fact, maybe you have already arisen in in the movement. But I mean the work you do, the amount of work you do that the reading you do, the study, the the time and care that you put into everything you do.
You are always trying to learn more, master more of the material, be able to respond to more criticisms. Thank goodness you have that energy because this guy no longer does. I mean, I, you know, I, I got the Tom Wood show, I'm doing my various things. But man, you are like a a guy with a mission on fire.
And and I'm really glad to see it because, you know, after the Ron Paul movement, I thought because of all those young people who flocked to him that we were going to have like a renaissance of all these young articulate people defending our ideas. And frankly, that never really panned out. I was surprised and disappointed at that, but you, my friend, are an exception to the rule. So welcome back. Tom, thank you so much for having me along with the very kind intro.
I I think the thing that keeps me so motivated is just knowing once I learned about opportunity cost and I really understood the cost of me going to school for free was actually 12 years of my life, 5 hours a day. I thought, gosh, when I get on at the institute, I got to make sure that anytime someone clicks on my stuff, they Start learning things I wish I would have learned when I was in facts class, history class, English class, etcetera. So I'm glad to know that it's
paying off. That's exactly what I try to do, exactly what I try to do, and I try to meet them where they are by saying, look, I I realize that what I'm about to tell you probably sounds a little bit out there, believe me, I understand that. I think if you acknowledge that you're saying things that run contrary to what they expect you
to say, you sound less crazy. I I it it kind of bothers me sometimes when people just jump right in to, you know, blowing up people's brains, prepare them for that and say, look, I I used to be where you were sitting now saying, oh, come on, you're full of it. But, you know, when you start looking at the world the way the way I do, the way I think you ought to, you'll see things quite differently.
Also, there's no fluff in what you're doing and we're going to get to the substances stuff here in just a minute here. But it's very important. I I want Keith to be an example for the world. There's no fluff in what he does. I was just listening to the talk you gave at Pork Fest and there's no fluff it. If anything, it might need a little extra fluff because it it is just, it is overwhelming the amount of data and the the arguments you're making. I mean, it's irresistible.
I mean it's like you're taking a baseball bat to every bad argument in the world and just relentless. Just when it tries to come out for air, you're just smashing it and smashing it and smashing it. I I like that because I don't. I have limited time. You know, as you say, opportunity costs are many other things. I could be learning another language. I could be, you know, vacationing and doing a lot of
things. So I want my time to be used value, you know, in a way that is of highly value productive for me. And when I read your stuff or listen to you, there's no wasted time. Now it is it. There's a funny irony about this that I'm talking about, how there's no wasted time in your material and yet I've completely wasted the 1st 4 minutes of the sentence. Lucky. Let's jump in here. So Thomas Soul, do you have to know offhand how old he is now? He's in his 80s, right, 93.
Oh, he's 93. I think it's that I just don't want him to be 93. So I have it in my head that he's perpetually in his 80s because, oh, I know what it was. I think when he discontinued his column, his newspaper column, he was in his 80s and then at that point he kind of froze there in in my mind. So he just released a new book. Now, Doug Gunnit, if when I'm 93, I release a new book, I
expect serious congratulations. But anyway, congratulations, Thomas Sowell. I don't want to bother you when you're 93. Just just relax. So I have Keith Knight here. We're going to talk about it. It's called social justice fallacies. And man, there are many of them. And and he's like you, Keith. I mean just brutal, brutal beat downs of these things and apparently it just came out so you've read the whole thing.
The great thing about this book is, as you were saying before we started recording, it's a great summary of Souls work, so, so explain how that is the case. So what Soul does is he sort of merges 3 books from what I gather all. One is a book titled The Civil Rights Rhetoric or Reality where he talks about the implications of the civil rights vision.
This is generally the claim that we know that the Civil Rights Act was beneficial to blacks because after the passage of the Civil Rights Act we saw an increase in black incomes. After the right Civil Rights Act was enacted, what Soul says is that is the worst year you can pick because that's the very
year that it starts. In order to actually see if this was something that grew out of the civil rights movement or the Civil Rights Act, what we have to do is look at the two previous decades and ask whether or not this was a trend that was already occurring or not. So I'd actually asked Larry Elder at Freedom Fest. I said, you have so many stats, just always at the top of your head. What's 1 statistic that you would give to people?
And he said, I think I would say to people that black poverty from the year 1940 to 1960 decreased from 87% to 47% before any civil rights legislation, before any affirmative action took place. That's the most important thing. So that is civil rights rhetoric or reality. He then merges it with two other books, Basic Economics and A Conflict of Visions. That's why social justice fallacies are so good. In 140 pages you get like 50
years of research and wisdom. Well, I am quite fond of civil Rights Rhetorical Reality. It's a book that's not mentioned that much. When people talk about souls work, they talk about a conflict of visions, they talk about knowledge and decisions, and those are great books. But Civil Rights Rhetorical Reality is a fantastic book and the fact that this summarizes that argument and and brings it up to date, because that's an old book from the mid 80s is
very, very valuable. And incidentally, I have a review of civil Rights Rhetoric reality on Amazon from 2001 that I'm very proud of and I just went recently and and looked at other reviews on there and there's a review from 2022 who the entire review is. The package was open when I received it. That is can you. Why is it that in this day and age people still don't understand what the point of an Amazon review is? I don't care what condition the book was.
I mean what kind of a boomer are you That is not an Amazon review is about the contents of the book, the substance of the book. But anyway, so so let's let's dig into to some of this. I mean Seoul by the way. Seoul had a late talking child and so he wrote a book called Late Talking Children. He was just that kind of guy. He would become intensely interested in something and then he could just write a whole book on it like he was the world's foremost expert.
He's and I also think if that he's a great model. If you want to become a good writer, read a lot of Thomas Sowell's prose and you will absorb what it means to be a good writer and to be able to explain complicated things very clearly and simply. Yeah, definitely. What I love about his ability to summarize in this book is he really gets to it. So he'll say that there's basically three reasons we should be skeptical of the civil rights world view that first, all disparities are proof of
discrimination. Second, these disparities justify surrogate decision makers, which he calls them also does make the point that it's not just you delegating to a surrogate, it's a coercive surrogate on your behalf. So that is really important. He says that there's three things that we need to look at in order to really refute the idea that the problems of today are the result of what's referred to by social justice advocates as the legacy of
slavery. He says the first reason we should be skeptical is a lot of these problems that are attributed to the black community do not apply to blacks who are immigrants to America. Now, I'm well aware that there's
a selection process. People don't immigrate through lottery or anything random, but if the problem was the white racists in America, you would have to then claim that they pick and choose which blacks to be racist against, whether or not they are immigrants or were born in America, before choosing how to interact with them. So Seoul is not surprised to see that we see a 30% income difference between native blacks
and immigrant blacks. Critical theory Social justice advocates cannot explain this disparity. Now people like Ludwig von Mises obviously could in his book Planning for Freedom, where he says wages rise is the result of capital investment, competition, and people acquiring skills.
That is is very clear. The second reason we should be skeptical of the social justice vision is that a lot of these problems, such as high homicide rates out of wedlock births, high rates of poverty and diminished homes, all of these riots that we see, We did not see these problems when racism was much worse. This would be the 1920s, thirties, 40s, and 50s in America.
You actually saw blacks going into high skilled, highly paid professions at a faster rate the decade preceding the Civil rights movement than you did in the decade after third. You also The third reason to be skeptical is we see a lot of these problems among poor whites when it comes to an increase in single parent households. When it comes to an increase in
homicide rates, So what? Those are the three pillars that Seoul says we should be very skeptical of the social justice movement because the problems don't apply to black immigrants as much they do apply to poor whites. And historically, when racism was much worse, the problems didn't exist or were much smaller than they are today.
He gives the example of of married black couples, and he says that the rate of poverty of married black couples the United States has never risen as high as 10%, so much lower than for the general black population is Now. If racism were the explanation for everything we see and all the disparities, why would this matter? Did you think racist go around asking if blacks are married or not before they begin to mistreat them, that they probably don't even know or care?
So why would why would this have? How could that? Why would that happen? And then secondly, he says that if you look at single parent household, whether headed by men or women, but particularly by women, they have a they have at least twice the poverty rate of of households that are headed by black, a black married couple. Now, well, how could if white supremacy were everywhere, how
would that be possible? Why have the white supremacists been so unable to do anything about that particular disparity? So his point is, you know, there's a lot to be said for behavior. There are behavioral differences that can actually help you get ahead or or make you fall behind. And so, again, not everything can be explained with this comic book level explanation.
But then also, one of the great things about his, his earlier book, replicated to some degree here, is that he'll go through and remember he also wrote the book Ethnic America. He was very good friends with the late Stefan Tharnstrom at Harvard, who was the editor of the American psych, the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. He was very interested in these sorts of things. He knew all about different disparities.
And he would say that, you know, look what we're not allowed to say that Germans are known for being hard workers. But yet when we have, when we have anecdotal data from all over the world of everybody in South America and Asia and everywhere around the world saying the Germans are very hard
workers. Like, what does this mean Or that that the Germans or other groups like the Armenians, in some cases you have groups that own, you know, more, you know, more mills than the native people or or or have more than twice the income of the native people. Over and over and over. This is replicated time again. He gives the example of the Ottoman Empire.
And he says if you just look at the early 20th century, like 100 years ago, well, I guess sort of before, a little bit more than 100 years ago before, well, they still had the Ottoman Empire. None of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul was a Turk, even though Turks ruled the empire. None of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul was a Turk.
Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms of the Ottoman Empire that employed 5 or more workers, 50% of these firms were owned by Greeks and another 20% owned by Armenians. This is not unique. It said there have been many cases in where racial or ethnic minorities have owned more than half of entire industry. So the Chinese and Malaysia, the Germans and Brazil, Lebanese and West Africa, Jews in Poland, Italians and in in Argentina. And he goes on and on and on and
on and says show. But in effect, he says, show me anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world where you have had exactly the same representation in whatever it is, an industry, a particular, a course of study, or whatever, that is exactly proportionate to a particular minority groups representation of the population. Can't fight it. You won't find it. There are 1,000,000 reasons why you won't, and virtually none of them are sinister.
Exactly the example that he uses of when it comes to places like democracy. Now will say we know that discrimination occurs because we see a difference between white incomes and black incomes. So what Seoul says is well, can I find similar disparities between two other groups in
America? So what he does is he finds almost the same exact pattern when you compare Japanese Americans to Mexican Americans. And when it comes to median income, it turns out in this white supremacist Society of ours, whites come out roughly 11th. If you look at, I believe, Seoul sites, both the New York Times along with current population review, these people get their
statistics from the census data. So Seoul says that there's a number of groups that have a higher income than whites on average and these include Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Filipino, Taiwanese, Chinese, Hmong and Japanese American immigrants. Again I concede the selection process that people don't come here at random, but when they got here wouldn't the racist hate them even more and then
discriminate against them more? So that is a another fallacy that the social justice advocate will do point to 1 disparity. It's generally summarized as the Asians don't exist problem. So when it comes to whites versus blacks when it is in regards to being less likely to get loans, turns out well Asians are even less likely to get denied for loans than whites. When it comes to student discipline, you also get the
same thing. Seoul uses the example of Japanese Americans coming to America speaking very little English in the 1940s, being sent to internment camps and having their property stripped from them. By the year 1959 their incomes were relatively equal to whites, and by 1969 the amount of wealth they had on net was roughly 1/3 higher than the average person who was white in America.
None of the social justice advocates could explain such a thing, nor could they explain Thomas Hull citation in the New York Times, where it turns out six out of the 10 poorest counties in America have a population that is between 90% and 99% white. This is generally the area in the Appalachian Mountains in of Kentucky. So on the racial issue, there is just basically nothing left.
The only thing I wish he would have gotten into, just because it's at the heart of the social justice movement, are the major claims of Black Lives Matter recently. Well, not too recently. This would have been July of 2017. Roland Fryer, who has a PhD at Harvard University, one of the youngest professors to get tenure there, actually dug into the research of 18 cities when it comes to the central claim of Black Lives Matter. Blacks are disproportionately targeted by police, Fryer says.
Well, the first thing is that we see huge disparity when it comes to men and women. Men are 95% of those killed by police. But before looking into that, is there even a disparity between the races when it comes to those who are killed by police? So Roland Fryer's research papers titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. And after studying 18 cities Across America, his claim is that on the most extreme use of force officer involved shootings.
We find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. And even when you have, you know, individual examples like a white woman, Justine Damond, who was murdered by a black officer, Mohammed Noor in Minnesota, she was unarmed, got no attention. Ashley Babbitt, unarmed white woman murdered by a black officer. Michael Bird. He gets on NBC and just explains the situation and there's no
talk of a trial at all. So yes, there are people who out there who are racist, who judge by skin color as opposed to the content of character. It's basically all Democrats and progressives at this point. The book is excellent.
I highly recommend it. Well it's in connection with that I might mention the case of Eric Stewart who is a professor at Florida State who was recently fired because it it turned out that he, well he was accused of of of being guilty of extreme negligence in his scholarly work.
And he he was he did work that was disproportionately influential in making people think that there was systemic bias racially among the the police and the people have you know wildly inflated numbers in their heads of of what the police have done and and so so on and so forth.
So he was. He was removed recently, and the Provost at Florida State said that Stewart demonstrated extreme negligence in basic data management, resulting in an unprecedented number of articles retracted and numerous other articles now in question. And then said the damage to the standing of the university and in particular the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and its faculty approaches, the catastrophic and may be unalterable. So that's now. I don't.
I don't think that many people know this even happened that way. I mean, could you imagine if there if Heather McDonald, who has spent quite some time trying to debunk some of these claims, if she'd been fired from an institution, well, the whole country would know all about, you know, we'd never hear the end of it. But this guy, one of the key architects of of the BLM theory of life, was actually fired as a professor. And to be fired as a professor, you almost have to.
I mean, you could probably murder somebody and they would look the other way and sometimes with some of these systems, but it was that bad. His level of negligence was that bad. So you're right that that is an area where Seoul's book would have benefited a bit more. But you've definitely covered this. And it like if you were to ask people, maybe you know the numbers off hand. If you were to ask people, let's let's say you categorize people into quote liberals and quote
conservatives. Now we know that's an oversimplification. But let's just say if you ask self identified liberals and self identified conservatives, what do you think the number of unarmed black men killed by the police is in a given year? They have wildly crazy answers for that. Now that doesn't mean that I'm an apologist for the police. It just means I I I want the truth to be told. You know, I I don't want to believe a lie. Yes, I believe it was Skeptic
magazine. This is a Michael Shermer's magazine. They had surveyed liberals and conservatives and asked them how many unarmed blacks a year, I mean George Floyd we have, You know the case of Eric Garner as well. How many in total? And it turns out 44% of self identified liberals said between 1010 thousand unarmed blacks per year are killed by the police. The number in 2019, according to the Washington Post, was there were 41 unarmed people killed by the police that year.
Nine were black and 19 of them were white. This total, including armed and unarmed, came to 1004 people killed by police. So the total number is not 110th of what a portion of liberals think unarmed blacks are killed. It's just so wildly out of proportion. I had an intelligence officer Chase Hughes, on my show some time ago and he said Heath. I've researched MK Ultra and I've done thousands of hours of research into mind control.
And if I had to describe mind control in one word, it would be repetition. That is how you were able to control people's minds. And I thought, you know what? That probably is the reason why people will just automatically associate child labour with capitalism. Because child labor never existed until Andrew Carnegie and they've done this research. No, it's literally just been repeated again and again and again.
America's racist, America's racist so many times it's been repeated without a single shred of evidence. So that is how the corporate press is able to get away with such a lie without ever going to the direct evidence. Well of course I have this book coming out on the COVID craziness and it's it's situation is analogous there because if you were to ask exactly the same people if you were to be diagnosed with COVID what is the likelihood that you
would need to be hospitalized. They're off by orders of magnitude that they have absolutely no way of assessing the risk level involved there none whatsoever. I mean dramatically off. Even the the self-described conservatives are generally were vastly overstating the likelihood of that. I want to. I just. I love Seoul style so much and so I want to share, if I may, just another example from this early section in the book and he quotes a a headline in a San
Francisco newspaper. The headline reads Why are black and Latino people still kept out of tech industry? And what gets Seoul is the kept out like people are actively instead of there are firms that would they would slit the throats of their own grandmothers if they could manage to hire more black and Latino people. They're they're desperate to do that. But. So the idea that actually they're trying to keep them out is utterly preposterous.
But so Seoul's response is, look, are Asians being kept out of professional basketball or Californians kept out of the National Hockey League? And he says, look, there are ethnic differences in educational qualifications here. He says Asian Americans have more college degrees in engineering than either blacks or Hispanics, each of whom outnumbers Asian Americans in the population.
And he says at the PhD level, Asian Americans engineering degrees, even though they as a percentage of the population are very, very small, outnumber in raw numbers the engineering pH. DS of blacks and Hispanics combined. And he says, and by the way, such disparities and engineering degrees are not peculiar to the United States. And he gives a favorite example of the the Chinese minority in Malaysia. In the 1960s, the Chinese minority of Malaysia received 408 engineering degrees.
The the Malaysian majority received 4 engineering degrees. And so this is not a matter of keeping anybody out. And he says there is no way the Chinese in Malaysia could keep out Malaysian students in universities that were run by Malaysians and subject to the authority of the Malaysian government, which was also run by Malaysians. I mean, it's just, it's a brutal, brutal, brutal beat down. It's just like 11 young Keith
Knight might give. Yes, and he also gets into with the culturalist aspects of things. So first we have critical theory of three general ideas to explain disparities among groups. Critical theory disparities are the result of discrimination, genetic determinism. The races evolved in different climates, or God has designed the races in different ways, with different benefits and different costs.
What Saul says is if you actually look at different cultures embrace, this actually explains things like disparities in IQ. The examples he uses of we see a big disparity in IQ starting in the First World War between blacks and whites. But when you look at blacks in the North versus blacks in the South, you actually see less of a disparity between the races and a blatant disparity between those in the North and those in the South.
He also uses the increasing IQ of Jews within a generation or two, citing the research of James Flynn, and he looks at how different areas of Europe evolved at different times. So if it was just one race is better and other races are worse, it's hard to explain why the Chinese were the earliest civilization to have things like writing.
It's hard to explain why Greece and Rome came onto the scene much sooner than places in Britain, yet the British started the Industrial Revolution. If all we have are these deterministic aspects, we would see all the races at different parts in in history and then more or less stagnant and increasing or decreasing at the same rate, But we don't see that
at the end of the book, he says. We have tons of poverty in Singapore, and the Singaporeans, thanks to people like Lee Kuan Yew, were able to drastically increase their wealth as a causal result of increasing the amount of free trade. And private property saw the same thing in Hong Kong. The example of South Korea. China, after Mao and Deng Xiaoping brought in some free market reforms. He uses the example of India in 1991.
So the social justice mindset gets you into the idea that there's basically nothing you can really do until you overthrow the entire system, until we have more of a global acceptance of social justice. If there's ever an injustice somewhere, if there's ever one or two racists sort of lingering around, then the entire system's corrupt and there's nothing you can actually do. Well, he actually shows us not only on a large scale, on an individual scale.
So he gets into the idea that wages have stagnated and all the benefits in the last 50 years have all gone to the top 10%. So says it's important to know that the 10% is actually just a category, and it doesn't actually specify individuals who move in and out of this category. The example I use is it's like you're looking at the average age of a freshman in the year 1980, and you say, OK, the average freshman is 18 years old.
And then 40 years later you go back to that college and the average age of a freshman is still 18 years old. So it turns out people aren't aging at this college. Well, that is just a group of people that is not those are not actual human beings. That's just one demographic people move in and out of. So he finds that about 5% of people after 20 years are still in the same income bracket.
This is why we see vast disparity in the median income of the average 20 year old and the average 45 year old in America. He also uses the example of Canada because there is income mobility, when people get more on the job skills, they get their foot in the door and they're able to increase the wage that that they demand.
He also mentions in 1948 there was a higher white youth unemployment rate than black youth unemployment rate, which throws another wrench into the social justice world view that disparities today are the result or legacy of racism. So says why did it take more than 150 years for the legacy of slavery to actually have this effect, which the social justice advocates are telling us We have so, just so many examples of
that all throughout the book. I want to go back to something you said about given the way social justice people would would have us think no progress can be made until the entire system is overthrown. Well, you know, I think some people are probably a little more too impatient for that. So let's give them some happier news. And. And in Seoul recalls a story that Barack Obama told about a maybe you remember this about a black young man he was talking to who had wanted to become a
pilot. And he thought of joining the Air Force, but he decided not to because he decided there's no way the Air Force would ever let a black man fly a plane. Now, this is decades after there was a whole squadron of black American fighter pilots in World War 2, you know, and then beyond. But he has become so convinced, and who can blame him, given what he's told 24 hours a day, that this was impossible, that he wasn't even going to try So.
So. And it, you know, reminds me when I had Wanjiro Njoya on the show from the University of Exeter And she was saying kind of something along the lines of what soul is saying. Soul is, is saying, look, it's not that there are no people who treat others unjustly on the basis of race. It's not that there's nobody
like that. It's that in this day and age, given that you have limited time, given the concept of opportunity, 'cause you have limited resources, is it better for you to expend that time and those resources on an increasingly leading amount of, quote UN quote racism, or is it better just to spend it on building up your skills?
Or as as she said, we have so many people who in effect can't read, could we just get them to read when it go ahead and change the name of their high school because it was named after an oppressive person if you want to. But the problem is the kids in that school still can't read anything you know. So maybe you could just focus a a little bit on that that they can't read and then later maybe do other things. But starting with getting them reading, you know, might make more sense.
That might make more sense. Unfortunately, there's very little incentive to to do so. Corey Deangelis is an excellent school choice advocate. He cites the National Institute for Educational Statistics and finds that there's been a 280% increase, adjusted for inflation, since 1960 when it comes to per student spending on education. And they're so explicit that even the teachers don't brag about their results. They go, you know what kids, basically everyone needs to go to college.
Now would they be saying that if they were so proud of what they just had the kids doing for the last 12 years, it they'd say get you don't have to go to college. We've done so much with all this money and all this time you've given us. If you want to go to college, I bet there's nothing else you'll learn because we did such a darn good job. No, they are constantly conceding that no matter how much money you give them, they don't have.
It's never a management problem. It's never an incentive problem. It's always a matter of of dollars and cents, and this is just very classic. You have people like Jonathan Haidt doing research that the average person will have an intuition that they want more money, they want more power, they want to hire social status and then come up with justifications as to why those things should happen.
We see it everywhere. There's no reason we shouldn't think people like professors or politicians or members of the media do the exact same thing. You know, there's a, there's a study in here that I I have to mention a couple of studies that even though they're somewhat tangential to the thesis, they're so interesting that I want to bring them up to you.
And with the listening audience. And it it's in the context of Seoul saying that yet another contributor to let's say a a prosperous stable society is a level of social trust of honesty in the society. And that's something that is hard to measure or it's not something that we normally would, would try to place a number on. And so it's easily overlooked by historians and statisticians and and and social critics, let's say, but it's very real.
And so he gives the example of a study from about 10 years ago in which a dozen wallets were placed in various, you know, obvious, you know, very obvious and open spots in different cities. And the, the, the, the, the, the test was to see how many of these wallets would be returned with the cash inside them still in there. And so they found was in Helsinki.
So in Finland you had eleven of the 12 wallets return in Portugal. In Lisbon, only one of the 12 wallets was returned, and that was returned by a couple visiting from the Netherlands. So no Portuguese person returned any wallet at all. So another study found that in Norway, all the wallets were returned every last one. In the US, 2/3 of the wallets were returned, in China 30%, and
in Mexico 21%. Now this doesn't mean that genetically people in Finland return wallets, you know, but but it does mean something though, right? It does. And then this. It's a very surprising, a very interesting result, let's say. Maybe it's not entirely surprising, but it's an
interesting result. And it goes to show if if even something like this could be so drastically different in in the way people think or the way they interact with others, then why would we think that all other aspects of human endeavor would wind up being exactly equal? If if even on something as simple as being a decent enough person to return a wallet, we we get these drastically different results, then probably going to get drastically different results in everything.
You know, it's just give up. You're never going to get equality on those things, ever. You've never, ever had, as Seoul says, perfectly proportionate results racially in any society on a measurement of anything in the end. Not to mention, he also points out all the groups that have
surpassed whites. And all the, as you say, the disparities between some ethnic groups in the US and others that are larger than the white black differential, even though the factors that are alleged to account for the white black differential are not present in those cases. So it's as I say it's a it's a brutal, brutal, brutal beat
down. But I just, I had to mention that's because I instantly I I memorize those statistics because I'm going to share this study with everybody I know about the wallets, because I just found that so interesting. And he also uses in his honesty example the number of parking tickets paid at the United Nations. So they don't have to strictly pay them because they have diplomatic immunity, but they could pay them anyway. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great example.
Yeah, we constantly see these disparities everywhere. A guy in I think 1912, his last name is Michaels or Mckell's came up with the Iron Law of Oligarchy, saying that any organization, whether it's democratic or but no matter how democratic, it starts out because of domineering personalities and for the sense of efficiency and oligarchy will
be created. So This is why we see drastic inequalities in every society since Aristotle was very unequal to the average person in Greece. The greatest champions of equality today, Alexandria, Ocasio, Cortez, have more money and institutional power than 99.99% of her constituents ever will, because we constantly see this everywhere. The example he uses is of a union that not everyone goes to the union meeting. Not everyone speaks at the meeting. Not everyone has as equally as
good ideas. Not everyone is equally good at communicating those ideas and getting people on board. So you end up with Jimmy Hoffa and a few of his pals running the entire union for 10s of thousands of people. So anytime people organize examples that Seoul uses as what percentage of golfers are as good as Tiger Woods? What percentage of comedians are as funny as Chris Rock? Oh, the example he uses is the Manning family. Archie Manning, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning are three of the
greatest quarterbacks ever. What percentage of people are as good athletically as as they are so? And we constantly see these disparities everywhere. It's an iron law within every institution, within every society, so we should expect nothing different. That's why he calls it the invincible fallacy that no matter what, people assume that in the absence of discrimination, we'd see total equality among the ages, the races and the genders and the nations.
But we don't see equality between North and South Korea, where there's a large amount of similarities within their history. Racially, they're more or less the same, but we see a disparity and it is because of cultures and institutions that that people embrace. I I want to elaborate on that point about the the parking tickets the tickets at the UN. So the idea is they don't strictly have to pay these tickets because they have diplomatic immunity, so nothing's going to happen to
them if they don't pay. And at the result, at the end of a five year study, it was found that Egyptian diplomats had thousands and thousands of unpaid tickets, whereas the Canadian ones had none, the British ones had none, the Japanese had none, even though they had twice as many diplomats as Egypt. And another thing I I I do want to get, I I want to in a minute I want to read a passage to you and get your commentary on it. But before I do that, I want to
point out that in this day and age in 2023, given the technology we have given the Internet, the amount of capital you need to start a business has been drastically slashed. In the same way that the amount of money you need, let's say, to become a musician is drastically slashed. You you don't, you know, you you can or the connections you need. I mean, yeah, you might not be world famous instantly, but you don't have to be signed by Capitol Records to get your
music out there. Likewise, to become a documentary filmmaker, you can you see people making documentary films on a shoestring budget all the time, because the technology has made that possible. There's been a tremendous leveling of opportunities for people, and it seems so, it seems to me.
If I were a leader in the black community, I would say, look, whatever it is, whatever we think there is out there that's holding us back, there's no excuse for not teaching our young people how to harness the resources they have right now to build things for themselves, to build businesses and incomes in ways that our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of and white ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, We have these possibilities. Most people are, are, you know, pissing their days away
unproductively. Now I I I'll get, I'll get yelled at for that. But you know what I mean There there are opportunities everywhere and most people are instead just complaining and woe is me. And I can't believe I have to pay back my student loan or whatever. But a really ambitious person in this day and age has many will be alert to the many, many opportunities out there. And I would be training young
black people. I would say, here's how you build a business, you do the following things, and here's how you find a niche to get yourself into. And here's how you find out what the market wants. And here's how you find out what what you are particularly suited to produce, or how you can get yourself suited to produce it.
Or that instead of sitting around complaining that you're not earning enough, you think, all right, well, what have you been doing during your your time at home to make yourself a more desired employee? You know, where have you carved out that extra hour? Yeah, I know it's hard. I know it means you won't get as much sleep, but that's what it takes to get ahead. You know, I would be doing that. And instead, it's all political agitation, which is a complete,
total dead end. Now let me read this to you and I want to get your comment on it. This is from Seoul. There have been many examples of peoples and places around the world that lifted themselves out of poverty in the second-half of the 20th century. These would include Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the huge nations of India and China had vast millions of poor people rise out
of poverty. The common denominator in all these places was that their rise out of poverty began after government micromanaging of the economy was reduced. This was especially ironic in the case of China with a
communist government. And here's the here's the key With social justice advocates supposedly concerned with the fate of the poor, it may seem strange that they seem to have paid remarkably little attention to places where the poor have risen out of poverty at a dramatic rate and on a massive
scale. That at least raises the question whether the social justice advocates priorities are the poor themselves, or the social justice advocates own vision of the world and their own role in that vision. What do you think of that? Well, this is what we inevitably get when people in high positions of power pay no price for being wrong. Has so likes to put it so they don't actually have a huge incentive to say, all right, so it's the poverty and the injustice I'm against.
What is it that could what sort of processes or what sort of general institutions could we as a society embrace to increase the likelihood that people will have income mobility and will have more justice than we otherwise would? So instead of embracing the ideas of say, Booker T Washington, they've embraced the ideas of Al Sharpton just because they're more likely to arouse the passions of the
feeble minded, so to speak. So when it comes to things Alexandria Ocasio, Cortez could say when she has a microphone in front of her, she could say things like, you know, I was watching Keith and I don't tread on anyone the other day. And it turns out he did a ton of research when he worked at Walmart and found out the primary reason people got fired at all Walmart locations was as a causal result of a lack of attendance and showing up on time. This is something within our control.
We could leave earlier, We could bring books to places and get there and work early. You can also see that there's a great deal of correlation between people who get early on the job experience, get their foot in the door, start networking, start asking questions, start being more ambitious on the job and looking for opportunities. Those people will have higher incomes than they otherwise would. So just those two things, gaining on the job skills and asking questions and having your
attendance in line. By the way, that happened at Walmart and Dish Network when I worked at both places, attendance was the number one reason people lost their job. Those are much more within the control of the average person. Then you know what? I can't control what time I get to work, but I can end systemic racism by voting once every four years. So the fact that they don't have the incentive to do that is one thing.
But the fact that they constantly avoid such obvious, much more productive avenues of how to actually teach people to do things effectively does get to the question as to how really sincere they are. But then again, they don't have much incentive to, to be sincere when they're not generally held accountable. Because it's not that you know, people, you win elections based on how much truth you tell. It's how many emotions you rile up and get people to vote for
you. So yeah, Sola's definitely correct. And how could we falsify whether these people are really, really well intended? I mean the the example of AOC is just so bad, She posts a picture saying, look, my Abuela's home in Puerto Rico has been devastated. She needs money. We need to pass this law to give them more money. So Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire says, you know what, If you, Tesla, driver, congresswoman in America aren't going to help her, I'll raise a bunch of money.
And the Daily Wire raised $100,000 and AOC campaign got ahold of the Go Fund Me Indie Go Go People and said that we won't be accepting the money now when we get something like that. How is that possibly seen as having some sort of innocent explanation? Are you telling me Barack Obama, Harvard graduate president of America, believes that corporations pay men 25% more just because they're male? I mean, there's just almost no innocent explanation for for any
of this. And I think that's a great way. That's all sort of nudges people into saying if you really cared about this, here's how I'd be able to tell. So you can change and you can admit you're wrong. And that's how I can differentiate the good people from the bad people, the well intended from those who don't really care about the effects of their policies. So yes, that was an excellent part of the book.
You know, Ian Ram gets criticized for being selfish and not caring about the poor and all that, but her argument was, look, obviously these people don't care about the poor. If you cared about the poor, you would look around the world and say, what is it that makes the poor better off? Answer a market economy. Period.
There's no argument about this. A market economy and that is the one thing they are dead set against and that they try to put as many obstacles in the way of is a market economy. So therefore I I'm sorry, they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt that they're just dumb and they just don't know any
better. If they cared, they would pencil into their busy schedules the 5 minutes it would take to survey the world and notice that the more economic freedom of society has, the less the fewer deprivations, the poor their suffer. It would take 5 minutes to find that data. You know, you just do a search for it, you can find it. So therefore we can rule out that that's what they care about.
Now I I don't mean to to absolutely exclude the possibility that there are some people who are so lazy that they haven't even bothered to look into how places become rich and why they stay poor. I'm sure there are intellectually lazy people, but then those people are so contemptible that they can't even look into the very thing that they're supposedly passionate about that I just don't care about their opinion. It's certainly hard to do to
care about the opinion. When I was doing research for a speech, I found out that something like a billion hours of Netflix is watched collectively by Netflix users. And I go, there's just no way that I could still excuse us things. If it's like people spend 99% of their days working in the minds of the greedy capitalist and they only get a few minutes a day to sleep, then I could say, well, maybe you could be ignorant of these things. There's just no excuse at this point.
Yeah, start with East Germany and West Germany. And then social justice advocates get back to me on which side was wealthier. The great example that Niall Ferguson uses is he uses the example of the Chinese inside and outside of the Republic to determine whether or not. But we can see why some people are wealthy and others are
impoverished. And I love what Seoul does, where he says that if it's true about the economic social injustice, that the wealth of the rich comes at the expense of the cost of the poor, the wealthier wealthy, as a result of impoverishing the poor, what we could actually find a way to falsify this? And the second he throws that line at you, you know you're in trouble.
So he says, let's look at where the most billionaires are in the world, either as a total number, absolutely, or on a per capita basis. It turns out that America has more billionaires than all of Africa and the Middle East combined, and the average American has a higher standard of living than the average person in Africa or the Middle East. So the entire exploitation narrative, just based on that irrefutable metric, is one way you can refute the social justice narratives he then gets
into. How did places fare once they kicked out the Jews, The Lebanese, the Egyptians, and all of these other demographic Asians in Africa? Asians in Africa, yes, the Chinese in the Philippines is the other examples he uses. He goes once we kick out these parasites and once we confiscate all the wealth from the rich, well then we could have this prosperity.
But turns out once all the wealth is taken, turns out you killed the golden goose, you have less golden eggs that someone's going to have to look into that and and see why it is. And he also has a great section on the amount of money that's confiscated from the state and a lack of appreciation from the social justice advocates. So first he says that just 'cause you have higher tax rates doesn't automatically equate to
more revenue. But also in years like 2022, the federal government got $6.27 trillion to spend. And people aren't like, oh, government's 30% better than it was previously, you know, four years earlier when they only got 4.2 trillion, you know, because of COVID and the CARES Act. So even when they get all the power that they beg for, they still have nothing to brag about.
You know, there's so many of these little Nuggets, and I'm going to let you go in a minute, but there's so many of these little Nuggets of information that you wouldn't ever think of. And and then as soon as you learn them, you realize that it explodes. All these bumper sticker slogans that substitute for thought. And so, for example, in Sweden, we're we're well, the Swedes do well because they have the, the
giant welfare state. But what's interesting is if you follow the Swedes around the world, they have a low poverty rate. Wherever they go, wherever they go, for whatever reason, it doesn't matter if they're in a welfare state. They do even better when they're in a more market economy. So I mean, again, if you know only one fact, then sometimes that's not, I mean, usually they don't even know one fact. They have a distortion. But even sometimes, if you know only one fact, it's not enough.
You need to know the other complementary fact that then explains and conceptualizes the first fact, like the the example of the Swedes. So you know, this is a very unusual episode. I have one other time I did an episode on a Thomas Soul book. Well, actually I'm not. I might have done a solo episode on one of his books, but I did one with Michael Malice on a Conflict of Visions, which I like very much. But so here we are. You and I have been talking about somebody else's book.
It's Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. I'll link to it in the the description of this video. I'm doing video now, but unfortunately I've just I've completely destroyed my YouTube following because for years and years I wasn't releasing any video on here, it was just a still shot and the audio of the show. So now I've got like 75,000 YouTube subscribers, none of whom bothers to look for videos by me anymore.
So I burned them all out. Now here I am, you know, trying to do it. But anyway, but also on the show notes page, which is tomwoods.com slash 2401. But for you, Keith, what should we link to? Because I bet we have some new Keith Knight fans as of today.
I would say my recent speech at Port Festa took me probably six or eight months of reading tons of books, including Hebron Mex candy, including the 1619 project by Matthew Desmond and Hannah Nicole Jones. I summarize all that research in a speech that I titled 3 Social Justice Lies, Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia. That is a probably a good place to start to if you're looking for videos.
If you're looking for something to read, the Volunteerist Handbook is always free as a PDF at libertarianinstitute.org. Those are the 50 essays that I read that took me from being a progressive to being a libertarian. People from the right like Joe Sobrin are in there. People on the left like Sheldon Richmond are in there. It's a very good compilation to introduce people to in a very time efficient manner to our ideas. Yes, I I agree completely. That is a terrific book.
So I will link to that as well. So check out the description or also tomwoods.com slash 24 O1. Thank you, Keith. This was pretty intense. Like I'm exhausted after this conversation. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure talking. Always a pleasure, Tom. Thank you. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day. Visit tomwoods.com to subscribe to the show for free, and we'll see you next time like the sound
of the Tom Wood show. My audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at podsworth.com.