Walter Williams

Harvard Professor Henry Gates’ arrest has given new life to the issue of racial profiling. We can think of profiling in general as a practice where people use an observable or known physical attribute as a proxy or estimator of some other unobservable or unknown...

President Barack Obama won an unprecedented 96 percent of the black vote. That’s not much of a news story since blacks typically give their votes to the Democratic candidate. Blacks are probably the most politically loyal people in the nation and it is almost...

How can political commentators, politicians and academics get away with statements like “Reagan budget deficits,” “Clinton budget surplus,” “Bush budget deficits” or “Obama’s tax increases”? The only answer is that...

Here’s what I wrote in last year’s column titled “Global Warming Rope-a-Dope” (12/24/2008): “Once laws are written, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to repeal. If a time would ever come when the permafrost returns to northern...

Last month, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Senate Resolution 26 “Apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.” The resolution ends with: “Disclaimer. — Nothing in this resolution (a) authorizes or supports...

Why a Bill of Rights? Why did the founders of our nation give us the Bill of Rights? The answer is easy. They knew Congress could not be trusted with our God-given rights. Think about it. Why in the world would they have written the First Amendment prohibiting...

“Live Free or Die” is the title of author and columnist Mark Steyn’s speech at Hillsdale College, reproduced in Imprimis (April 2009), a Hillsdale publication that’s free for the asking. Canadian born, now living in New Hampshire, Steyn has had...

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students...

President Obama’s articulated criteria for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is: “We need somebody who’s got the heart to recognize — the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what...

A civilized society’s first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry rattled cages when he suggested that Texans might at some point become so disgusted with Washington’s gross violation of the U.S. Constitution that they would want to secede from the union. Political hustlers, their media allies and others,...

Democracy and majority rule give an aura of legitimacy to acts that would  otherwise be deemed tyranny. Think about it. How many decisions in our day-to-day lives would we like to be made through majority rule or the democratic process? How about the decision...

When we think about government spending, and the taxes needed to finance its spending, we should also think of the effects of taxation. Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will...

Ask the average person which is the correct answer to the following question: Which president gave the biggest tax cuts for the rich — Reagan or Bush? I would bet the rent money that you would not get the correct response, which is: Presidents have no taxing...

Most Americans accept the continuing attack on tobacco companies and smokers, but how do they feel about the massive government deception? In 1998, 46 state attorneys general and major tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement. The major tobacco...

Most of our nation’s great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values. Whether we have the stomach to own up to it or not, we have become an immoral people left with little more than the pretense of morality. You say,...

Our Colonial ancestors petitioned and pleaded with King George III to get his boot off their necks. He ignored their pleas, and in 1776, they rightfully declared unilateral independence and went to war. Today it’s the same story except Congress is the one...