Thomas Sowell – praag.org

Apartheid South Africa: Reality vs. libertarian fantasy

by Ilana Mercer

[followbutton username=’IlanaMercer’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

One needn’t propagate lies about the state-enforced segregation that was Apartheid in order to condemn it.

Yet in defiance of fact, one prominent libertarian economist has gone so far as to assert that apartheid was “a version of Castroite socialism.”

How can one credibly say that about a country that in its heyday had a gold-backed currency, enjoyed the confidence of investors the world over, sported low to no government debt and similar rates of inflation, the most opulent and spectacular shopping malls, the freest, finest medicine I’ve experience in life on three continents, near-unfettered legal access to handguns (for whites) and relatively secure property rights for the same minority? You can’t. Not if you wish to retain intellectual credibility.

Racial segregation, inequality under the law, injustice: yes, yes, and yes. But “Castroite socialism”?

Not quite as embarrassing, another wag asserted the following: “Apartheid was a system of government control and regulation to artificially keep South African blacks from competing against whites in the marketplace.”

This is only partly true. The problem with half-truths is that the conclusions that flow from their premises will likewise be deficient.

Dogma without data

Distorting the facts about Apartheid’s raison d’être does nothing to promote the truth.

“Hermann Giliomee – whose grand historical synthesis and primary source exegesis (“The Afrikaners: Biography of a People”) is referenced extensively in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” – has concluded that Afrikaner anxieties were overwhelmingly existential, rather than racial. Leading thinkers at Stellenbosch University devised a system for the National Party to ensure “the security of the Afrikaners as a dominant minority.” (More about Apartheid as “A Strategy for Survival,” in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” pp. 67-70.)

As noted in the same book:

Anybody who lived … among Afrikaners during the apartheid era can testify that crime and communism were foremost on their minds. To rationalize the cruel, Kafkaesque laws of Apartheid, Afrikaners spoke of the Swart Gevaar (which meant the “Black Threat”), and of the Rooi Gevaar (the “Red Threat”). My Afrikaner neighbor would regularly admonish me for my incipient liberalism: “You want black rule so badly, look around you at the rest of Africa! Anglos like you simply don’t understand what’s at stake.” (P. 70)

The sweeping non sequitur that follows from the partial truth aforementioned has it that “black poverty” and misery stemmed solely from Apartheid’s “suppression of free market forces.” This is economic reductionism, typical of the impoverished analysis of South Africa, offered so authoritatively by libertarian economists stateside.

Apartheid is a necessary explanatory variable in the “black poverty” equation, but never a sufficient one.

As expounded in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” “the maze of racial laws that formed the edifice of Apartheid” had been dismantled by the offending National Party almost a decade before the transition to democracy; by 1986, the party had already brought down Apartheid’s pillars, the “pernicious influx control laws,” for example.

In all, South Africa has now been racially desegregated for almost 28 years.

Documented in the same book are these immutable facts: “Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India. From the 8.6 million recorded in the 1946 census, the black population rose to 17.4 million in 1974 and 28.3 million by 1991. [In-migration from the north was just about non-existent.] From the 1940s to the 1990s, life expectancy for blacks soared from thirty-eight to sixty-one years!” (P. 178.)

“Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, life expectancy has plummeted by nine years. Crime has reached crippling levels … and is certainly much higher than in the Old South Africa. … unemployment had jumped from 19 percent in 1994 (before ‘freedom’) to 31 percent in 2003 (after ‘freedom’), steadily rising until, in 2005, it stood at 38.8 percent. The trend is consistent and persistent.” (P. 178)

These stubborn facts collapse the politically pleasing but reductive theory, promulgated by libertarian know-nothings, that holds Apartheid to be the sole cause of black South Africa’s dysfunction, economic and other.

As the pesky facts attest, black dysfunction in racially desegregated South Africa is way worse than it was during state-enforced segregation. In fact, it now resembles that of the rest of Africa.

Apartheid was reprehensible. But dogma denuded of data does nothing to bolster this uncontested, incontrovertible position.

Lite libertarianism vs. the right kind

Herein lies the difference between the paleolibertarian analysis and what this column has termed the lite libertarian one, philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe being the finest example of the former. The rest fall into the latter, lite category.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional – a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values.

Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. “The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” explained Catholic philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., “is the pursuit of an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.”

‘The color of money’

Indeed, the truth about the Old South Africa is far more nuanced. As this writer tried mightily to explain during an RT broadcast (embedded), “The color of money” did speak loud and clear to enlightened self-interest in Apartheid South Africa.

“‘The market is color-blind,’ said Milton Friedman. ‘No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or atheist; by whites or blacks.’ As Thomas Sowell put it so well, ‘prejudice is free, but discrimination has costs.’ Added South African academic, Steven Farron: ‘[P]eople demand that their governments restrict the economic and occupational success of specific ethnic or racial groups. However, when the same people act as individuals or business owners, they actively resist and/or circumvent these restrictions.’” (P. 127)

All people do this. Apartheid South Africa was no different.

During Apartheid, white industrialists – miners especially – “put continual pressure on the South African government to allow them to use more black labor.” Afrikaner farmers also chose overwhelmingly to ignore racial job quotas, despite their own racist predilections, and also despite high unemployment among rural Afrikaners. Well before the official dismantling of Apartheid laws (carried out, as mentioned, by the white minority government), the agricultural sector, skilled and managerial jobs included, came to be dominated by blacks. As was the semi-skilled labor market – clothing, furniture, millinery, sheet metal, construction, mining, baking. Clearly, whites, acting as individuals, chose to subordinate ethnic advancement to optimize their livelihood. (P. 126)

Those half-truths again

“Free market economists (the only kind worth consulting) have long since insisted that the rational, self-interest of individuals in private enterprise is always not to discriminate. Arguably, however, the good economists, while certainly not wholesale liars as are their Keynesian counterparts, are still offering up a half-truth. Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But to state simply that ‘discrimination is bad for business’ is to present an incomplete picture of reality. This solecism stems from the taint the word ‘discriminate’ has acquired. The market, by which we mean the trillions of capitalist acts between consenting adults, is discriminating as in discerning – it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity hurts the proprietor’s pocket.” (P. 127)

Thus, we can be fairly certain that, absent racist affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity. In other words, what the good economists are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.” (P. 128.)

Freedom vs. egalitarianism

Contra the economic reductionism of the lite libertarian, free-market capitalism is a necessary but insufficient condition to sustain freedom in a country of South Africa’s complexion.

The truth absent from the phantasmagorical formulations critiqued is this: Economic freedom does not necessarily reduce so-called wealth inequality. Inegalitarainism is a feature of a free economy. If history is anything to go by, certain minorities will achieve prosperity from poverty, no matter how gravely the state and society impede them. Jews did it in Europe. Levantines and Indians in Africa and the Middle East. Chinese in southeast Asia and everywhere else they go. Europeans in South Africa.

Moreover, “While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike and envy to peacefully pursue the same.” (P. 4) Free-market capitalism is not enough to safeguard ordered liberty in racially riven societies like South Africa, where the majority will always covet the possessions of immensely wealthier minorities and associate these riches with racial privilege.

Ultimately, the rights to life, liberty and private property will forever be imperiled in a country whose constitution has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights,” and where redistributive “justice” is a constitutional article of faith. (P. 101)

This, paleolibertarians (all three of us) know too well.

In “The Cannibal” chapter entitled “Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” secession is explored as one solution, it being a species of the private-law society delineated by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe, of course, has never been afraid to speak to the “unequal civilizing potential” (in James Burnham’s coinage) of different people and peoples.

Against dog-ate-my-homework argumentation

For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state.

In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s “the-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual and aggregate group dysfunction.

In the New South Africa, the left’s “argument” has been taken to a new level of abstraction: “The legacy of Apartheid” is said to explain the unparalleled depravity of Nelson Mandela’s dominant-party mobocracy.

While the state is a worthier culprit than society, both are analytical equals in as much as they absolve the individual of responsibility for his actions. For the philosophy of freedom is predicated on individual responsibility.

“Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions.” (P. 4) If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society – then Mandela’s South Africa is uncivilized in every way possible.

The unvarnished truth about democratic South Africa is that it is “now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain.” (P. 4)

Although absolutely essential, free-market capitalism is insufficient to the task of tackling this tide of sinecured criminals.

[followbutton username=’IlanaMercer’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

The race-hustlers among us

By Thomas Sowell.

Years ago, someone said that according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees cannot fly. But the bumblebees, not knowing the laws of aerodynamics, go ahead and fly anyway.

Something like that happens among people. There have been many ponderous academic writings and dour editorials in the mainstream media lamenting that most people born poor cannot rise in American society anymore. Meanwhile, many poor immigrants arrive here from various parts of Asia, and rise on up the ladder anyway.

Often these Asian immigrants arrive not only with very little money, but also very little knowledge of English. They start out working at low-paid jobs but working so many hours, often at more than one job, that they are able to put a little money aside.

After a few years, they have enough money to open some little shop, where they still work long hours, and still save their money so that they can afford to send their children to college. Meanwhile, these children know that their parents not only expect, but demand, that they make good grades.

Some people try to explain why Asians and Asian-Americans succeed so well in education and in the economy by some special characteristics that they have. That may be true, but their success may also be a result of what they do not have; namely, “leaders” who tell them that the deck is so stacked against them that they cannot rise, or at least not without depending on “leaders.”

Such “leaders” are like the people who said that the laws of aerodynamics showed that the bumblebee cannot fly. Those who have believed such “leaders” have, in fact, stayed grounded, unlike the bumblebees.

A painful moment came for me years ago, when I was on the lecture circuit, after a talk at Marquette University, when a young black student rose and asked: “Even though I am graduating from Marquette University, what hope is there for me?”

Back in the 1950s when I was a student, I never encountered any fellow black student who expressed such hopelessness, even though there was far more racial discrimination then. We knew that there were obstacles for us to overcome, and we intended to overcome them.

The memory of that Marquette student came back to me, years later, when another black young man said that he had wanted to become a pilot, and had even planned to join the Air Force in order to do so. But then, he said, he now “realized” that “the Man” would never allow a black guy to become a pilot.

This was decades after a whole squadron of black fighter-plane pilots made a reputation for themselves in World War II as the Tuskegee Airmen. There have been black generals in the Air Force.

Both these young men — and many others — have learned all too well the lessons taught by race hustlers, in their social version of the laws of aerodynamics, which said that they could not rise.

You don’t hear about racial “leaders” such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson among Asians or Asian-Americans. Here and there, you may see some irresponsible academics peddling that line in the classroom — some of whom are of Asian ancestry, since no race of human beings is completely lacking in fools.

But they do not get the same attention, or draw the same following, as race hustlers operating in black or Hispanic communities. By and large, Asian youngsters rise and fly.

Other groups in times past also arrived on these shores with very little money and often with very little education, at least during the immigrant generation.

A poem by Carl Sandburg, back during that era, referred to a Jewish fish peddler in Chicago: “His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to whom he may call his wares from a pushcart.”

This fish peddler probably had not gone to college, and so had no one to tell him that he couldn’t make it, and that his children couldn’t rise, because this was such a terrible country.

No one can claim that there was no anti-Semitism in America, any more than they can claim that there was never any anti-Asian discrimination. There was plenty of both. But that is very different from following “leaders” whose message would only keep them grounded, after the skies were open to them as never before.

This piece appeared in the Washington Times. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Quintessential liberal failures: Affirmative Action

by Deon van Rensburg

In this series of opinion pieces I will attempt, and more often than not, succeed, in highlighting liberal failures. In the process I hope to shine a very bright light on the inherent hypocrisy associated with every liberal preconception, ideological turnip and bias ever uttered in the public or private sphere

In my opinion piece Liberalism – True Political Ideology or a Mental Disease I contended that there are two types of liberalism:

Classical liberalism as defined by those that espouse freedom for everybody – freedom from invasive government, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom from oppression, freedom to trade and be relieved of the master and serf condition, freedom to own property, freedom to till the earth, freedom, freedom and more freedom…All whilst keeping to the confines of what is considered civilised, moral and ethical;
Modern liberalism or “progressive” liberalism yearns for the Nanny State, where a god-like government will be the saviour and mater of the individual, collectively looking after all from cradle to the grave, where equality is the pinnacle of achievement and inequality is deemed to be a deadly sin, where man and woman are the same despite glaring biological and psychological differences, where cultural differences have been wiped from the face of the earth despite thousands of years of poles-apart development, where abnormal is the new normal by undermining morals, ethics and values, where people who do not think like you are abhorrent.

There seems to be a definite correlation between “progressive” liberalism and Sociopathic Personality Disorder – immediate gratification of the self, a feel good ideology, damn the consequences. There are also elements of Hyper-vigilant Narcissistic Personality Disorder as diagnosed by psychiatrist Dr. Glen Goddard of the Mayo Institute.

Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviours that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization. Evan Sayet

I often refer to the obvious infusion of Socialism on the modern version of liberalism termed by these liberals themselves as “Progressive Liberalism”. The palpable similarity between “progressive” liberalism and the Socialist ideology seems to be a bridge too far for “progressive” liberals to understand. I contend that “progressive” liberalism is a grouping of churlish individuals too indolent to think for themselves and will repeat, verbatim and in parrot-like fashion,quasi-intellectual “socio-political” discussions of excrement – disguised as opinion pieces in the Lame Stream Media – after bourgeois gatherings in comfortable homes situated in upmarket gated estates. Logic, reason and fact will immediately take a week-long vacation on some South Sea Island just to get away from the pure absurdity of circular reasoning.

Vladimir Lenin quite rightly referred to them as “useful idiots” who will champion the Marxist cause throughout the world. If only he knew how right he was.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Henry Ford (1863-1947), American founder of the Ford Motor Company

“Progressive” liberals are not averse to implement ideological dogma that has been proven as a failure over and over again. Collectivism, equality, atheism, feminism and a great favourite of the slavering white-guilt-ridden useful idiots – Affirmative Action.

In South Africa it goes by many names – Employment Equity, Affirmative Action, Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, Quotas. It remains in essence Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action has its natal origins in the United States of America where President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 on the 6^th of March 1961 in a misguided and naïve attempt to stem racial discord in the US. A monster was created which pleased Socialists to no end as racial discord has been amplified by this bestial attempt at social engineering. It is invasive in schools, universities, sports, business and government – in fact, all spheres of society like a cancerous growth on the body of a mangy dog.

“Progressive” liberals will repeat ad infinitum that Affirmative Action is necessary to “right the wrongs of the past”, how “selective discrimination” is fair, how “previously disadvantaged” people must get an equal opportunity at success and how it is aimed at rectifying “white privilege”. Except that there is nothing fair about any type of discrimination – the whole notion is a contradictio in terminis. Nature has an immutable law that only the strong survive, which “progressive” liberals wishes to subvert but that cannot be subverted. White privilege is a Socialist myth, which could as well have been the brainchild of Saul Alinsky himself – which it probably was in its modern form although credit for this academic excrement must go to W.E.B du Bois. I will discuss the subject of “white privilege” in later articles.

White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way – and if they don’t, they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying their policies destroy blacks. – Dr Ben Carson

I have to agree with Dr. Carson here – who just happens to be a very successful paediatric neurosurgeon and who also happens to be a person of colour. “Progressives”, through Affirmative Action, are telling people of colour that they cannot succeed without the social engineering and the help of Socialist policies on their own. What is more racist than that? To be told that you are incapable of any success on your own, that no achievement can be reached by one’s own effort but whitey liberals will help you along by crying “racist” at everybody that dares stand in your way.

But even more damning is that Affirmative Action is a failure – everywhere it was instituted

When cornered with the glaring failure of AA and BEE in South Africa the vitriolic retort would be that it is being wrongly applied – as if there is a right way of applying any piece of doctrine that has at its heart social engineering? “Progressives” will invariably mention Malaysia as a success story, America is a beacon of success in Education, and the caste order in India is all but destroyed, yet they are not. Here is why.

Affirmative Action had its inception in Malaysia in 1971 and initially was a success by uplifting poor rural people to middle-class entrepreneurs. However, in 2001 the New York Times – a mouthpiece for liberal propaganda and a target for the social group Rage Against the Media due to various biased articles aimed at the Republicans, the Tea Party and hiding the true nature of Obamacare – published an article entitled ”Criticism of 30-Year-Old Affirmative-Action Policy Grows in Malaysia”:

But as the country prepares to mark three decades under what is called the New Economic Policy, the program’s failures are becoming increasingly apparent. Affirmative action, critics say, has morphed into cronyism. The government transferred wealth to a small pool of politically well-connected businessmen.

Sounds familiar?

But as the Television ad goes – but that’s not all. Ten years later, in 2011, a study by The Centre for Independent Studies titled “ Malaysia still held back by Affirmative Action” found that Malaysia’s Affirmative Action social engineering project had been a total failure with many businesses on the brink of bankruptcy looking towards the government to bail them out. Air Malaysia is just one small example(). This does not tell a success story but rather one of abject failure. Why then deploy it anywhere else?

In America the Cato Institute published an article titled “The Affirmative Action Myth” and focuses on Affirmative Action in Education specifically Universities. It concludes that Affirmative Action policies do not help the AA candidate one iota and that it too is a miserable failure. This is then followed up by a piece in the LA Times in August 2013 about the miserable failure of Affirmative Action (courtesy of NationalReview as I am not a subscriber to the LA Times ) of a particular student at Berkeley that was admitted not because of his academic excellence but because of Affirmative Action.

Enter my favourite author on all matters economic and political – Dr. Thomas Sowell who is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and also a person of colour. In his book entitled “Affirmative Action around the World: An Empirical Study” he disproves the ideology, the practice and the expected consequences of Affirmative Action in the United States, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. He delivers a stinging indictment against Affirmative Action. In his book he states:

…this discussion has been informed by theories, rationales, and debates over semantics but has been insufficiently attentive–if at all–to the actual consequences.

He finds in every country examined, the negative consequences far outweighed any positives that may have been generated.

The same consequences that we see in South Africa today. Cronyism, a ruling oligarchy, corruption, jobs for pals, a shrinkage in economic activity, a bloated civil service filled with incompetents, lowered education levels …ad infinitum.

In the minds of their original architects, affirmative action policies were temporary arrangements, which would be phased out when real gains in education and employment among the minority were made. But, in the absence of those gains, affirmative action has often become a permanent policy of “preference” and has unfortunately incited animosity and hatred among the “non-preferred,” leading to ethnic conflict and violence.

So if Affirmative Action is such a failure – everywhere – why do “progressive” liberals (and their affiliated political parties) champion and defend such a lost cause? Because reason and rationale does not form part of the thought process, because “progressive” liberalism is a socialist construct and modern liberalism is a “feel good” ideology – as I indicated, some marked similarities with sociopaths.

Affirmative Action has been proven on numerous occasions to be a failure, pandering to the wishes of a small elite – the recipients who garner an income they are unqualified for and who for all intents and purposes are completely incompetent to add anything productive or constructive to their work environment, the ruling oligarchy who receive riches and power beyond their wildest dreams and the white bourgeoisie who do not want their little Utopias disturbed and who are still able to live in their comfortable environments with their tenured and management positions earning obscene amounts of money every month.

Here comes the hypocrisy part. With Affirmative Action being a proven failure, the “progressive” liberals mounted a concerted campaign of vitriol-filled idiocy against a small group of people of non-colour who held a peaceful non-violent protest march to object to the discrimination and social engineering that is at the heart of Affirmative Action – amongst other issues, I will add. I would bet my house that these same “progressive” liberals would not bat an eyelid if people of colour mounted protest marches about any issues they consider important – such as service delivery. Oh wait, that happens on a daily basis, yet there are no articles in the Lame Stream Media decrying such events as “racist” but rather a heart-felt compassionate sympathy decrying the plight of the poor. Once the article is written and the opinion given – they leave for their pubs, clubs and houses in comfortable neighbourhoods. Once more to have quasi-intellectual discussions with like-minded sociopaths over a glass of good malt whisky or maybe Johnny Burger’s best wine.