What’s the true test of one’s commitment to free speech? It does not come when he permits people to be free to say or publish ideas with which he agrees. Not by a long shot. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits others to say and publish ideas he deems offensive.
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Tag: Walter E. Williams
(1936 – 2020) American economist, commentator, and academic.
Power to the people?
Black leaders stress the importance of political power and getting out the vote, but we might ask how important political power is to the ordinary black person.
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Morality of taxation
A thief is more moral than a congressman; when a thief steals your money, he doesn’t demand that you thank him.
Ordained to rule
People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.
Black political standards
In my opinion, there appear to be no standards of performance low enough for blacks to lose their loyalty to their black political representatives.
Racial preferences forever
If the civil rights establishment and the progressives have their way, blacks will have to rely on special privileges in perpetuity.
It starts with the centralization of power
The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ’30s and ’40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of ‘social justice.’ It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of ‘social justice.’ But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers — people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law.
Civil rights
Obama’s electoral success further confirms what I’ve often held: The civil rights struggle in America is over, and it’s won. At one time, black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.
Western values
Western values are superior to all others. Why? The greatest achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights.
Black and White Standards
I’d like to ask people who approve of Obama’s performance, ‘What has President Obama done during the past four years that you’d like to see more of in the next four years?’
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