Walter Williams

What’s so good about democracy — generally understood as having trust in the general will of a democratic people, as expressed by a vote of the majority, to make all important decisions? If a majority of our 535 congressmen votes for one measure or...

There are six-person and there are three-person families. So is it fair that a six-person family live crowded in a 1,500 square foot house, while that three-person family enjoys 5,000 square feet? It’s the same thing with cars. I’ve seen five-person...

How often do we hear politicians, labor bosses, business leaders and other Americans expressing concern about the nation’s children and their children? I generally dismiss such concern as disgusting hypocrisy because their actions don’t begin to match...

The Enron case made headlines because fraud and deception of such magnitude is fairly unusual in the corporate world. Washington fraud and deception of a much greater magnitude doesn’t make the headlines because fraud and deception in government is standard...

Europe has been at peace for an unprecedented nearly six decades. Why? It surely is not because of peace treaties between enemy states, and it’s surely not because of disarmament. All that was tried before and failed. The best explanation for Europe’s...

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed Loyola University (Maryland) professor of economics Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln,” a book that presented abundant evidence that most of the Founders took the right of state secession for granted. Despite that...

Do states have a right of secession? That question was settled through the costly War of 1861. In his recently published book, “The Real Lincoln,” Thomas DiLorenzo marshals abundant unambiguous evidence that virtually every political leader of the time and...

How many times have we heard people being applauded for “giving back”? People seem to believe that, if you’ve been successful and made a lot of money, you’re somehow obliged to give back by making donations to this or that cause, program or...

Most Americans were pleased with the legislative attack on cigarette smokers, not to mention confiscatory tobacco taxes. We reveled in the EPA’s dishonest study concluding that second-hand smoke causes cancer. And, by the way, I’d like to hear whether the...

The never-ending battle of the left to keep people from being held responsible for the consequences of their own actions is now in the Supreme Court of the United States, where the justices are being urged to exempt murderers from the death penalty if they score below...

In 1996, California’s voters passed Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas for college admission. That didn’t mean the end of the quest for racial quotas and the euphemisms for it: affirmative action, diversity and multiculturalism. The diversity...

Since the 1960s, academic achievement scores have plummeted, but student grade point averages (GPAs) have skyrocketed. The Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that at Harvard, for instance, A’s were awarded to 46 percent of students in 1996 (versus 22 percent...

Racial preferences, quotas and affirmative action in university admission practices have lost political and, increasingly, legal support. As a result, states such as California, Texas and Florida have implemented a substitute practice called “percentage...

“Battered woman syndrome” — the politically correct legal rationalization for letting cold-blooded female killers off the hook — is now an issue in the California governor’s race. Are both Democrats and Republicans really so desperate to...

Diversity is simultaneously an important and contemptible term in today’s climate of political correctness. According to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, diversity means: diverseness, multeity, multifariousness, multiformity, multiplicity, variousness. Its...

“The shift from personal autonomy to dependence on government is perhaps the defining characteristic of modern American politics. In the span of barely one lifetime, a nation grounded in ideals of individual liberty has been transformed into one in which federal...

Worrying about bacteria, New Jersey banned restaurants from serving eggs sunny side up. The ban has since been lifted. Some New Jersey localities have a ban on people pumping their own gasoline. Policemen issue citations for driving without a seatbelt. By law, new...

Webster’s Dictionary defines harm as: to hurt, damage, injure. People who don’t or can’t think believe that government should step in to prevent one person from harming another, such as in the case of tobacco smoke. But harm is a two-way street, and...