Author Archive | Walter Williams

The nation’s response to the scandal-a-day revelations about money funneled into Clinton’s reelection and the Democratic party’s fund raising is entirely mis-focused. Campaign finance reform measures such as full disclosure and dollar limits do not address the political rot and cancer underlying the scandals. Let’s begin by asking why would a person or corporation fork [...]

John Stossel’s ABC special “Freeloaders” which aired last week showed just how far we’ve come to being a nation of parasites. It featured people (thieves) who’d go to a restaurant, eat half their meal, and then place an insect in the remaining food in order to get the meal without charge. Stossel interviewed bums holding [...]

Dr. Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution’s distinguished senior fellow, delivered a lecture in New Zealand last year titled “The Quest for Cosmic Justice.” He discussed how often we observe tragic differences in the lives of people. Some live in luxury; others live in squalor; some people have food to throw away while others are close to [...]

For nearly four decades, the education establishment has delivered one failure and set of excuses after another. Education for blacks is nothing less than a catastrophe and education for white kids is nothing to write home about. People can and do make mistakes and produce never-worked-anywhere nostrums. In most cases, we fire them or run [...]

Soon I’ll write to Virginia’s Governor George Allen demanding that he keeps the faith with his predecessors who, in 1788, ratified the Constitution and brought Virginia into the Union. Let’s do some thinking out loud about this letter just to make sure my reasoning is correct. In 1788, when Virginia’s delegates narrowly (88 to 78) [...]

How about a mini-Williams autobiography? From exceedingly humble beginnings, I am now in the top one percent of income-earners. How did that come about? Did someone see me walking around North Philadelphia and say, “Williams, I’m going to make you well off.”? That would have been nice, but it didn’t happen that way. In 1960, [...]

Making our value premises explicit and clear can help untangle contentious public policy issues, or at least let us know where people stand. Let’s state my personal value premise. I cherish private property rights. “Okay,” you say, “but what are private property rights?” Private property rights refer to an owner’s right to acquire, keep, use [...]

At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton chastised those Americans who loved their country but hated their government. That’s a morally blind statement at best. After all would Clinton have said that to Germans who loved their country but hated the Nazi regime or the Russians who loved their country but hated [...]