Sunday, May 28, 2017

THOMAS SOWELL, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, THE LEFT AND THEIR POLITICS





A favorite strategy of the Left is the blame strategy. It contains these three steps:

1.    The ruling elite and their system to control wealth are corrupt and oppressive.
2.    These have caused tremendous suffering for their own benefit.
3.    They must be removed at any cost.

This has also become the strategy of the universities and the media. Divide and conquer. Divide the world into the good and the bad, the oppressed and the oppressors, which must be removed. However, black conservative and economist, Thomas Sowell, points to the fact that so many left-leaning interventions have actually damaged the “oppressed”:

·       None of the most popular political panaceas for helping black communities has a track record of making things better, and some have made things much worse.

This should raise the question, “Who really cares, who is truly our friends, and who is just using us are a pawn to support their political agenda?”

According to Sowell:

·       Many things that are supposed to help blacks actually have a track record of making things worse. Minimum wage laws have had a devastating effect in making black teenage unemployment several times higher than it once was.

·       In later years, as the minimum wage was repeatedly raised to keep up with inflation, black teenage unemployment from 1971 through 1994 was never less than 3 times what it was in 1948, and ranged as high as more than 5 times the 1948 level. It also became far higher than the unemployment rate of whites the same age.

Ironically, the Left continues to unfold their charges of “systemic racism” and the alleged undercover attempts to maintain “white privilege,” creating hatred, distrust, and polarization However, the Left’s attempts to control the legal and economic systems might have done more to un-privilege the black community than anything else:

Sowell charges:

·       The relations between the police and the black community are another issue that has gotten a lot of attention, and produced counterproductive results. After all the rhetoric and all the efforts towards more tightly restraining the police, the net result has been that murder rates have soared in cities where that policy has been followed — and most of the people killed have been black.

Our culture of blame and shame refuses to compare the status of blacks before and after the institution of their liberal policies. However, Sowell wants us to see the larger picture:

·       In my own life, I was very fortunate when I left home in 1948, at age 17 — a high school dropout with no skills or experience. At that time, the unemployment rate of black 16- and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For white males the same ages, it was 10.2 percent. http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell091316.php3#4KH2HlYyLYYSVZxU.99

Other black conservatives, including Frederick Douglass, have called upon white society to leave them alone:

·       “Everybody has asked the question. . .’What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

Why did Douglass call upon the prevailing society to “Let him alone?” Today, it is easy to see why. The various entitlement programs have served to disempower the blacks and to destroy their families and their traditional values, banishing them to oblivion in favor of State aid.


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