Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books, 2023)
Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that terrible menace to freedom and prosperity, namely the Left’s demand that we transform the country to conform to its concept of “social justice.”
The obsession with equality
The central obsession of the Left is with equality. Their complaints about a free, truly liberal society usually stem from the fact that freedom doesn’t result in equality, therefore requiring that government employ coercion to bring it about. In the past, those people, who misleadingly call themselves “progressives,” insisted that government power be employed to ensure equal opportunity for individuals. But after decades of government efforts aimed at that, the progressives have taken to demanding equality of outcomes for favored groups. To that idea, Sowell responds,
In the real world, there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone…. People from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into development the same kinds of skills and talents.
He’s right, of course. The world is not geared for equality, and most human beings are content with that fact. As he always does, Sowell supplies plenty of evidence to support his point. For example, in 1912 in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by Turks, there were no Turks among the city’s stockbrokers. That “inequality” was not because Turks were kept out but because the field didn’t appeal to them, so it was dominated by “outsiders.” No one minded that.
What about inequality between men and women? Statists have successfully demanded equal-pay laws, but as Sowell argues, no such laws were ever needed in a labor market with free competition. “As far back as 1971,” he observes, “single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since leaving school were earning slightly more than men of the same description.” Such facts, however, never deter statists from insisting on coercive “solutions.”
The excuse of “institutional racism”
One of Sowell’s biggest targets is the claim that racism is the cause of many of the disparities we see in society. He calmly argues that racism is rarely the reason for the problems that are blamed on it. For instance, we today hear that Black students in public schools are doing poorly because of “institutional racism.”
But if that were true, how do we explain the fact that Black students in the 1970s managed to get into and graduate from New York City’s elite public high school? Has “racism” become much more pronounced since then — or is there another explanation for the declining academic performance of Black students?
Sowell finds other factors to be responsible, especially the unionized schools that have been steadily abandoning academic rigor in favor of “feel-good” fads and ideological indoctrination. Naturally, that explanation is not one that “progressives” are willing to examine because control over public education is their pride and joy.
Sowell points out that culture explains backwardness far better than race does. White Americans living in Appalachia are just as educationally and economically depressed as are many American Blacks, but racism and “the legacy of slavery” is obviously not the reason.
The constant harping on racism as the obstacle to success for Blacks has adverse consequences for them by undermining their sense of personal agency. Sowell recounts an encounter between then-president Barack Obama and a young Black man who told him that he wanted to become an Air Force pilot but gave up that idea because, he said, “they would never let a Black man fly a plane.” Sowell’s retort is piercing: “Whoever indoctrinated this young man did him more harm than a racist could have done.” Just so. Progressives apparently would rather have poorly educated and disaffected Blacks who look to government for things than capable ones who rely on themselves.
The Progressive mindset
Perhaps Sowell’s most devastating critique is aimed at intellectuals who regard themselves as superior to regular people and are therefore positioned to make decisions for them. He cites many of these arrogant people, such as President Woodrow Wilson, playwright George Bernard Shaw, and Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound. Those know-it-alls were supremely certain about their ability to reshape and improve society, always through the coercive intervention of the state.
Wilson disliked the Constitution’s limits on federal authority and argued that the freedom it sought to protect was illusory; true freedom, according to him, came from the receipt of government benefits so people could thereby accomplish their goals in life. To Wilson, “freedom” didn’t mean the absence of coercion: rather, it depended upon government coercing some to give to others. Similarly, Pound was dissatisfied with our common law and constitutional traditions, advocating that judges set aside precedents and instead decide cases with “social justice” in mind.
Sowell abhors that “progressive” trait. Humanity has always had plenty of arrogant busybodies who are eager to rearrange society — to make decisions for other people. They are only dangerous when they can harness the power of government to implement their utopian schemes. A point he drives home is that the “reformers” are not the people who will pay for the cost of their errors. If readers learn nothing else from this book, they should understand that when decision-makers bear no cost if they are wrong, we will have a lot of bad decisions. Increasingly, that is exactly what’s going on as government power expands.
For example, intellectuals push for minimum-wage laws, claiming that such laws help to lift poor workers out of poverty by ensuring a “living wage.” They are wrong about that. Minimum-wage laws make many low-skilled workers unemployable because employers cannot afford to pay the mandated minimum hourly wage. But the intellectual crusaders don’t bear the cost of their unemployment: the hapless workers do.
Another good illustration Sowell gives is laws against payday lending. Payday lenders make short-term loans to people who are desperate for immediate cash. The borrowers are people who don’t have other ready sources of cash or credit and they pay what is a high interest rate for short-term loans. Progressive busybodies have managed to outlaw payday lending in some states, and they say they are protecting the poor against “exploitation.” But as Sowell points out, this deprives the poor of one option they could turn to when they’re badly in need of cash without providing them anything better. You can’t make people better off by taking options away from them. This is another case where intellectuals don’t bear the price of being wrong.
Another of Sowell’s targets are the social justice zealots who seek to suppress the natural tendency to choose people based on merit because that is supposedly unfair. He writes, “In the social justice literature, unmerited advantages tend to be treated as deductions from the well-being of the rest of the population.” Thus, we hear again and again about how “the rich” are “taking” too high a percentage of “national income.” The reformers want people to think that they are being victimized by greedy plutocrats, thereby engendering support for more governmental activism. What they don’t want people to understand is that when highly productive people earn (not “take”) more, they are adding to prosperity, not depriving others of anything.
If you want to be well-equipped to spar with our Social Justice Warriors when they demand government expansion, you should read and absorb the wisdom of Thomas Sowell. You’ll be able to stop them in their tracks.
This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
