Dismantling America: and other controversial essays
Thomas Sowell
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0465022510
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
These wide-ranging essays—on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues—have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than an erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must over-ride both the traditions of the country and the will of the people.
Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University rape case, the underlying concern is about what these very different kinds of things say about the general direction of American society.
This larger and longer-lasting question is whether the particular issues discussed reflect a degeneration or dismantling of the America that we once knew and expected to pass on to our children and grandchildren. There are people determined that this country's values, history, laws, traditions and role in the world are fundamentally wrong and must be changed. Such people will not stop dismantling America unless they get stopped—and the next election may be the last time to stop them, before they take the country beyond the point of no return.
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Higher default rates and the collapse of financial institutions that bought these more risky mortgages or securities based on them. We have seen and heard the same kinds of things when statistics about other racial differences have been cited in the same strident voices when other statistics showed blacks laid off more than whites during economic downturns or the children of black women having higher infant mortality rates than the children of white women. What we have very seldom seen or heard.
There is of course no reason why they should be expected to understand. But, even after confessing their ignorance, such people often proceed to spout off, just as if they knew what they were talking about. It is very easy for a pistol shot to miss, even in the safety and calm of a firing range, much less in a desperate situation where a decision must be made in a split second that can cost you your life or end someone else’s life. In a life-and-death situation, nobody counts how many bullets.
$729,000, that raises some questions that ought to be asked, but are seldom being asked. Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand—for the very good reason that he could not afford it—why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway? Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be.
Your home and give it to somebody else, if judges don’t think your property rights “balance” whatever politicians choose to call “the public interest.” When deciding which candidate you want in the White House for the next 4 years, it is worth considering what kind of judges you want on the federal courts for the next generation. The Duke Rape Case People who were not within 1,000 miles of Duke University have already taken sides in the case of a stripper who has accused Duke lacrosse.
Imitate those countries. But some of the most valuable lessons from other countries can be had from seeing the disasters their policies have produced—especially when our own intelligentsia are pushing ideas that have already been tried and failed elsewhere. We need to pay attention to these sneak previews of coming attractions, even if they consist of doing nothing. Whether in the United States or in other countries, the purpose of all this nothing is of course to pacify public opinion by.