Walter Williams

There are only a handful of products that Americans import that cannot be produced at home and therefore create jobs for Americans. Let's look at a few of them.We import cocoa from Ghana and coffee from African and Latin American countries. We import saffron from...

Patrick Buchanan's recent syndicated column titled "New Deal for U.S. Manufacturers" stokes the fires of misunderstanding and panic. Mr. Buchanan, my longtime friend, is right about a lot of things, but he's wrong about trade. First, he laments, "Europeans, Japanese,...

Democrats plan to trumpet the income and wealth gap for political gain in this year's elections. According to The Wall Street Journal article "Democrats' Risky Strategy," Democratic candidates blame Republicans for economic inequality. This strategy might sell...

My previous columns have attempted to reduce confusion by suggesting operational definitions of discrimination and prejudice. Discrimination was defined as the act of choice, and prejudice was the act of decision-making on the basis of incomplete information. Good...

In recent weeks, I've offered operational definitions for some of the terms used in the discussion of race. The first was discrimination, which can be broadly defined as the act of choice. When one selects one activity, good or person, of necessity he must...

There's so much confusion and emotionalism about discrimination that I thought I'd take a stab at a dispassionate analysis. Discrimination is simply the act of choice. When we choose Bordeaux wine, we discriminate against Burgundy wine. When I married Mrs. Williams, I...

Does the United States have the power to eliminate terrorists and the states that support them? In terms of capacity, as opposed to will, the answer is a clear yes. Think about it. Currently, the U.S. has an arsenal of 18 Ohio class submarines. Just one submarine is...

Grove City College publishes an excellent newsletter titled "Visions and Values." Its July 2006 edition features an interview with Dr. Richard Pipes, acclaimed Russian historian and Harvard University professor of Sovietology. The interview was conducted by Grove City...

One of the great contributions of Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek was to admonish us to recognize the insurmountable limits to human knowledge. Why? Not even the brightest minds, and surely not the U.S. Congress, can ever have the knowledge to shape an...

Let's look at the recent "Nation's Report Card," published annually by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Nationally, in reading, only 13 percent of black fourth graders, and 11 percent of black eighth graders score as...

John Stossel, ABC's "20/20" anchorman, has a recently released book about the various untruths we accept, many from the media and academic elite. The book is appropriately titled "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity." Being a longtime media insider, Stossel is well...

According to some pundits and political hustlers, free trade has led to a loss of "good manufacturing jobs." Let's look at it, but before doing so, let's first see whether we should work ourselves into a tizzy over other job losses. In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S....

Let's push back the frontiers of ignorance about the federal deficit. To simplify things, I'll use round numbers that are fairly close to the actual numbers. The nation's 2005 gross domestic product (GDP), what the American people produced, totaled $13 trillion. The...