Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

Some people may have found it an inspiring example of social conscience when various super-rich people, such as the Rockefellers, came out publicly against repealing the taxes that the federal government levies against the property left by people who have died. But it is a lot less than inspiring when you look at it in terms of how much damage death taxes do to others and how little damage such taxes do to the super-rich.

  When you have hundreds of millions of dollars—or tens of billions of dollars, in the case of Bill Gates—you are never going to be able to spend it all on your own lifestyle in your own lifetime. So this wonderful-sounding defense of estate taxes will cost the super-rich nothing in their own lives. Moreover, even if the government were to confiscate three-quarters of their wealth upon their death, their heirs would still never have to work a day in their lives, because the remainder would still be so huge.

  It is a very different story for an ordinary farmer or storekeeper or someone who owns a little automobile repair shop. What happens to what he has worked for and saved over a lifetime can make a huge difference to his widow and his orphaned children. By what right should what he has already paid taxes on be taxed yet again at a time when his family has just lost its breadwinner?

  Or do right and wrong no longer matter? Can we just say magic words like “social justice” and start confiscating? That has been tried in a number of countries—and its consequences have ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic.

  Forcing viable businesses out of business because the heirs cannot pay the estate taxes without selling off the assets is a loss to the country, as well as an unjust burden on the individuals concerned. Moreover, people have foresight and one of the reasons they work and sacrifice is to see that those who are dependent on them will be taken care of after they are gone. Destroying or undermining that incentive is sabotaging a virtue that is as important morally and politically as it is economically.

  Those who want a society where everyone depends on government for their needs may be happy to see yet another blow struck against self-reliance. But no one else should be.

  Talk about how various people have been “winners” in “the lottery of life” or have things that others don't have just because they “happen to have money” is part of the delegitimizing of property as a prelude to seizing it.

  Luck certainly plays a very large role in all our lives. But we need to be very clear about what that role is. Very few people just “happen” to have money. Typically, they have it because their fellow human beings have voluntarily paid them for providing some goods or services, which are valued more than the money that is paid for them. It is not a zero-sum game. Both sides are better off because of it—and the whole society is better off when such transactions take place freely among free and independent people.

  Who can better decide the value of the goods and services that someone has produced than the people who actually use those goods and services—and pay for them with their own hard-earned money?

  Luck may well have played a role in enabling some people to provide valuable goods and services. Others might have been able to do the same if they had been raised by better parents, taught in better schools or chanced upon someone who pointed them in the right direction. But you are not going to change that by confiscating the fruits of productivity. All you are likely to do is reduce that productivity and undermine the virtues and attitudes that create prosperity and make a free society possible.

  There seems to be some notion around that only purely individual merit can justify differences in income and wealth. But we are all huge beneficiaries of good fortune that we do not deserve. By what merit do we deserve to be living more than twice as long as the cave man and in greater safety, comfort, health and prosperity? We just happen to have been born in the right place at the right time. As Hamlet said, give every man what he deserves and who would escape a whipping?

  The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about “social justice” all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.

  PART II

  RACIAL ISSUES

  ROUTINE CRUELTY

  In a world where the media are ready to magnify innocuous remarks or a minor problem into a trauma or a disaster, there is remarkably little attention being paid to cruelties routinely inflicted on children by our laws and our courts. That cruelty is ripping children away from the only home they have ever known, to be sent away—often far away—to be raised by strangers.

  Such drastic action may be necessary when children have been abused or neglected, but kids have been seized from loving homes where there has never even been an accusation of abuse or neglect. As with so many irrational acts, race and political correctness are involved.

  One of the children who is currently being threatened with this fate is a little boy in California named Santos, who may be sent off to live on an Indian reservation in Minnesota, among people he has never known, speaking a language he does not understand. Moreover, the single woman who is trying to adopt him there has said that she plans to put him in day care, which he has never been in before. He has been cared for at home by a married couple since he was 3 months old. He will be soon be 3 years old.

  How could such an insane situation have arisen? Easy. It is called the Indian Child Welfare Act. And it began, like so many catastrophes, with good intentions.

  Back in 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to prevent Indian children from being removed from their families and tribes by outside know-it-alls and social engineers. So far, so good. But, once a law is on the books, it means whatever the lawyers and the courts say it means. That is how little Santos got trapped in a nightmare.

  Santos is part Indian, but neither he nor his biological parents has ever lived on a reservation or among an Indian tribe. When he was born and began suffering withdrawal because of his mother's cocaine addiction, the authorities took custody of him. He was put into a foster home with a Spanish-speaking couple whom he now regards as his parents and who want to adopt him.

  Santos' biological mother has shown very little interest in him—and even that little bit of interest has not been reciprocated by Santos. He has hung up on her when she phoned and cried when she visited. The woman on an Indian reservation did not even know of Santos' existence until informed by the tribal council, which wants to claim him under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Six months later, she saw the little boy for the first time.

  It gets worse. Two psychologists have become involved in the case. Shrink A has “spent approximately 10 minutes alone” with Santos, according to the California Court of Appeal in its ruling this past October 19th. She did not interview the couple with whom he has been living all this time, even though a Spanish-speaking social worker was available to enable her to converse with the boy's foster parents.

  Nevertheless, Shrink A has decided that Santos would be better off being “moved to be with his tribe and his family” on a reservation in Minnesota. This strained definition of “family” is based on the fact that the woman on the reservation is a distant relative of his mother. Incidentally, Shrink A has never interviewed this distant relative either. Undaunted, Shrink A has said that Santos would not be “catastrophically damaged” by the change because Santos has not “bonded” with his foster parents, but has “bonded to his birth mother, who is unable to care for him.” This strained definition of bonding is based on counting the time spent in his mother's womb, as well as the 9 days he spent with her after birth.

  A second psychologist based his conclusions on what he had actually seen, rather than on such speculations. What he saw was that little Santos clings to his foster mother and became distressed when his foster father was asked to leave the room, crying “papa, papa.”
At another time, when Santos was with his foster father and Shrink B wanted to see the little boy alone, Santos became “clingy” with his foster father and “hugged him tightly while exclaiming ‘papa, papa.’”

  Little Santos has not yet been sent to Minnesota. The appellate court said that the “matter is remanded for further proceedings,” which means a continuing cloud of uncertainty hanging over a little boy who has become a little pawn. How could anyone do this to him? Tragically, it has happened to many others.

  LOSING THE RACE

  Recently published studies have focused attention on the gap between the test scores of black and white school children. One study showed that the gap, which had been narrowing somewhat in years past, has now widened.

  Gaps between racial or ethnic groups in academic performances are commonplace around the world, though some discussions of the black-white difference in America treat it as if it were something unique, requiring a unique explanation—whether that explanation is genes or discrimination. An entirely different explanation is offered by a black professor at the University of California at Berkeley, John H. McWhorter.

  In a recently published book with the double-meaning title, Losing the Race (and the subtitle, “Self-Sabotage in Black America”), Professor McWhorter argues that most black students do not work as hard as white or Asian students, partly because the culture that they come from fails to give as high a priority to academic achievement and partly because many of their peers regard academic striving as “acting white.” McWhorter's arguments are fuller and more subtle than this summary can be, but that is the gist of it.

  Various other studies of time spent on homework, tough courses taken and other indicators of student effort support McWhorter's thesis. The examples he gives from his own experience teaching black, white and Asian students will ring true to anyone else who has taught all three. Yet there are other black academics, activists and politicians who denounce such candor as McWhorter shows, seeing it as washing blacks' dirty laundry in front of white people.

  McWhorter, however, clearly considers it less important to protect the image of blacks than to promote the education and advancement of blacks by facing reality and doing something about it. One of the things he wants done is putting an end to excuses and to the whole victimhood mentality which spawns excuses. To those who point to the poverty among blacks or to the inadequacies of ghetto schools, he replies by citing data which show that Asian American youngsters from low-income families have better academic records than black youngsters from affluent families—and that these Asian American youngsters do better even when attending the same inadequate schools as blacks.

  Such brutal truths are of course anathema to those who reject any internal factors among the explanations of lagging black achievements in education or elsewhere. In the longer view of history, McWhorter acknowledges the negative effects of external factors such as slavery, discrimination and poverty. But he refuses to go along with the current use of these external factors to excuse their own lack of effort on the part of those blacks who have grown up in affluent middle-class communities that are racially integrated.

  Although initially a supporter of affirmative action, Professor McWhorter now regards it as having outlived its usefulness and become counter-productive. Its main harm to blacks is in reducing incentives to do their best. Here McWhorter uses himself as one of many examples, admitting that he never went all-out to do his best work in high school, because he knew that this would not be necessary in order for him to be admitted to a first-rate college. Similar effects of affirmative action have been found in other countries around the world.

  One of the chilling chapters in Losing the Race covers the controversy over teaching “black English” in the Oakland schools. Because McWhorter publicly opposed this practice as educationally harmful—“depriving many black children of a ticket out of the ghetto”—he found himself denounced by many other blacks to whom “presenting a united front outweighs acknowledging fact.” Worse, those preoccupied with this united front against whites assume that a black person who goes against the party line “could only be doing so as either a mistake or as active treachery.”

  It would of course never occur to such people that it is they who are betraying the interests of the race by being willing to sacrifice a whole generation of black children, rather then let themselves be embarrassed in the eyes of whites. Among those publicly denouncing McWhorter were individuals who privately agreed with him that “black English” was a bad idea.

  This is one of a small but growing number of books which discuss racial issues honestly. It is about time.

  REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY?

  The first thing to understand about the issue of reparations for slavery is that no money is going to be paid. The very people who are demanding reparations know that it is not going to happen.

  Why then are they demanding something that they know they are not going to get? Because the demagogues themselves will benefit, even if nobody else does. Stirring up historic grievances pays off in publicity and votes.

  Some are saying that Congress should at least issue an official apology for slavery. But slavery is not something you can apologize for, any more than you can apologize for murder. You apologize for accidentally stepping on someone's toes or for playing your TV too loud at night. But, if you have ever enslaved anybody, an apology is not going to cut it. And if you never enslaved anybody, then what are you apologizing for?

  The very idea of apologizing for what somebody else did is meaningless, however fashionable it has become. A scholar once said that the great economist David Ricardo “was above the unctuous phrases that cost so little and yield such ample returns.” Apparently many others are not.

  The only thing that would give the idea of reparations for slavery even the appearance of rationality is an assumption of collective guilt, passed down from generation to generation. But, if we start operating on the principle that people alive today are responsible for what their ancestors did in centuries past, we will be adopting a principle that can tear any society apart, especially a multi-ethnic society like the United States.

  Even if we were willing to go down that dangerous road, the facts of history do not square with the demand for reparations. Millions of immigrants arrived in this country from Europe, Asia and Latin America after slavery was over. Are their descendants guilty too and expected to pay out hard cash to redeem themselves?

  Even during the era of slavery, most white people owned no slaves. Are their descendants supposed to pay for the descendants of those who did?

  What about the effect of all this on today's black population? Is anyone made better off by being supplied with resentments and distractions from the task of developing the capabilities that pay off in a booming economy and a high-tech world? Whites may experience a passing annoyance over the reparations issue, but blacks—especially young blacks—can sustain more lasting damage from misallocating their time, attention and efforts.

  Does anyone seriously suggest that blacks in America today would be better off if they were in Africa? If not, then what is the compensation for?

  Sometimes it is claimed that slavery made a great contribution to the development of the American economy, from which other Americans benefitted, so that reparations would be like back pay. Although slaveowners benefitted from slavery, it is by no means obvious that there were net benefits to the economy as a whole, especially when you subtract the staggering costs of the Civil War.

  Should the immoral gains of dead people be repaid by living people who are no better off than if slavery had never existed? The poorest region of the United States has long been the region in which slavery was concentrated. The same is true of Brazil—and was true of 18th century Europe. The worldwide track record of slavery as an economic system is bad. Slaveowners benefitted, but that is not saying that the economy as a whole benefitted.

  The last desperate argument for reparations is that blacks have lower incomes a
nd occupations than whites today because of the legacy of slavery. Do the people who say this seriously believe that black and white incomes and occupations would be the same if Africans had immigrated voluntarily to this country?

  Scholars who have spent years studying racial and ethnic groups in countries around the world have yet to come up with a single country where all the different groups have the same incomes and occupations. Why would people from Africa be the lone exception on this planet? Groups everywhere differ too much in too many ways to have the same outcomes.

  Slavery itself was not unique to Africans. The very word “slave” derives from the name of a European people—the Slavs, who were enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere. The tragic fact is that slavery existed all over the world, for thousands of years. Unfortunately, irresponsible demagogues have also existed for thousands of years.

  THE LESSONS OF INDONESIA

  Tragic as the lethal rioting in Indonesia has been, what is an additional tragedy for Americans is how few of us seem to have understood what went wrong there—and what could go wrong here.

  While the media depict the riots as being directed against Indonesia's corrupt and despotic President Suharto, the biggest victims are in fact members of the Chinese minority in that country. It is their stores that are being looted and burned, and it is they who are being assaulted and killed.

  One TV journalist on the scene referred to the Indonesian rioters as “the dispossessed.” Yet the very pictures his cameraman was taking showed the rioters looking far less like an enraged proletariat rising up against oppression than like happy looters toting home television sets and other goodies stolen from shopping malls.

  There are many legitimate grievances against the Suharto regime and that may be what set off the riots in the first place. But that is no reason to romanticize the ugly envy and resentment that Indonesians have long felt against the Chinese, who have not dispossessed them of anything.