Walter Williams

Last month, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported its findings on income and poverty. Median real income remained constant between 2002 and 2003 at $43,000; the official poverty rate rose slightly from 12.1 percent to 12.5 percent for a total of 36 million Americans;...

The truly rich don't deserve all the political hype we hear; they're only a tiny percentage of our population and not that important. According to recent U.S. Treasury statistics, the top 1 percent of income earners have an adjusted gross income that starts around...

President Bush's foreign-policy critics at home and abroad share characteristics and visions that have previously led to worldwide chaos and untold loss of lives. These people believe that negotiation, appeasement and caving in to the demands of vicious totalitarian...

Positive reader response to “Socialism Is Evil” was quite surprising.

Economic ignorance allows us to fall easy prey to political charlatans and demagogues, so how about a little Economics 101? How many times have we heard "free tuition," "free health care," and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly free, we can...

During the first Reagan administration, I participated in a number of press conferences on either a book or article I'd written or as a panelist in a discussion of White House public policy. On occasion, when the question-and-answer session began, I'd tell the press,...

What is socialism? We miss the boat if we say it's the agenda of left-wingers and Democrats. According to Marxist doctrine, socialism is a stage of society between capitalism and communism where private ownership and control over property are eliminated. The essence...

Let's start out by not quibbling with America's socialists' false claim that health-care service is a human right that people should have regardless of whether they can pay for it or not and that it should be free. Before we buy into this socialist agenda, we might...

Bill Cosby rattled the cages again a fortnight ago in his address before Jesse Jackson's 33rd Annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference in Chicago. Let's look at some of his remarks. Cosby told the audience that being poor had a different meaning to older generations...

Ever since Rachel Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring," environmental extremists have sought to ban all DDT use. Using phony studies from the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental activist-controlled Environmental...

Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful natural resources? That has to be nonsense. Africa and South America are probably the richest continents in natural resources but are home to the world's most miserably poor people. On the other...

Suppose you saw a fat, old, ugly, cigar-smoking man married to a beautiful young lady, what prediction would you make about the man's income? If you're like most, you'd predict that this guy has a lot of money. In effect, that fat, old, ugly, cigar-smoking man is...

Bill Cosby's May 17 remarks at a Washington, D.C., gathering commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision continues to draw controversy and debate. That's good. Some of the debate highlights a point made by my colleague...

May 17 saw several gatherings commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. But the event held in Washington, D.C.'s Constitution Hall will be the one to be remembered because of Bill...

Imagine you're a head physician faced with a large-scale disaster such as the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing or battlefield casualties. The first thing that must be acknowledged is that you have limited resources. That means...

Several weeks ago, my column on teacher ineptitude was about the sorry state of teacher quality and concluded that while teacher ineptitude is neither flattering nor comfortable to confront, confront it we must if we're to do anything about our sorry state of...

Drs. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom's new book "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" shows that the government education whites receive is nothing to write home about, but for blacks, it's no less than a disgraceful disaster. According to National...

What is racial profiling, and is it racist? We can think of profiling as using cheap-to-observe characteristics as indicators or proxies for more-costly-to-observe characteristics. A person's physical characteristics, such as race, sex and height, are cheap to...