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
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