Archived Columns From 2001

by Walter Williams

2001 January

Black slavery is aliveJanuary 03, 2001

Black slaves are still available – just not in the United States. To make a purchase, you’d have to travel to the Sudan as Gerald Williams, Harvard Universit...

Election 2000's messageJanuary 10, 2001

Election 2000’s racial message is that President-Elect George Bush and the Republican Party shouldn’t subsidize political stupidity.

Government crueltyJanuary 17, 2001

George Bush’s secretary of labor nominee, Linda Chavez, withdrew her nomination under charges of hiring a worker and not paying minimum wages plus applicable...

Constitutional ignoranceJanuary 24, 2001

During last week’s Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., laid into President Bush’s attorney general nominee John Ashcroft about his st...

Civil-rights violationsJanuary 31, 2001

Racial charges by many black politicians, civil-rights spokesmen, self-appointed black leaders and guilt-ridden whites are just plain nonsense. They get away...

2001 February

Does America owe reparations?February 07, 2001

Johnny Cochran and a group of successful trial lawyers plan to bring class-action suits against the federal government and some private companies they say pr...

Sources of incomeFebruary 14, 2001

Last week, President George Bush sent his $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal to Congress to have it welcomed by cries of “tax cuts for the rich”. Sen. Tom Daschl...

Fiddling whilst Rome burnsFebruary 20, 2001

What’s an important priority for black politicians and civil-rights organizations? First, there’s the Confederate flag that must be removed from public build...

2001 March

Elite arroganceMarch 07, 2001

Here’s a question prompted by my recent re-reading of Leonard Read’s The Myth of the See-It-All, in “The Coming Aristocracy” (1969). Incidentally, Read found...

The success side of American educationMarch 14, 2001

It’s generally agreed that American primary, secondary and, increasingly, undergraduate education is a failure. But that assessment depends upon just what ev...

Congress hasn't the authorityMarch 21, 2001

Last year, President Clinton signed legislation that orders states to change their statutes so that .08 is the blood/alcohol concentration (BAC) for arrest f...

Radical reform neededMarch 28, 2001

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill calls for an aspirin prescription when radical surgery is what’s needed.

2001 April

Demoralizing young blacksApril 04, 2001

David Bell, Harvard law professor, counseled, “Black people will never gain full equality in this country.” The late columnist Carl Rowan said, “Racism remai...

Kids and GunsApril 25, 2001

Every time there’s a school shooting, there are demands for greater gun control measures that range from longer waiting periods and mandated gun locks to str...

2001 May

Virginia State University TyrannyMay 02, 2001

If we had to single out one American institution that stands at the forefront of modern-day racial discrimination, deception and contempt for fundamental pri...

America's New Role ModelsMay 09, 2001

Former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe how we’ve switched from moral absolutes to situational moral...

America's AmnesiaMay 16, 2001

Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote in “The Disuniting of America”: “History is to the nation … as memory is to the individual. An individual deprived of memory beco...

Orchestrating Energy DisastereMay 23, 2001

One needn’t be a rocket scientist to create California’s energy problems. According to the California Energy Commission, from 1996 to 1999 electricity demand...

Inept Teacher TrainingMay 30, 2001

American education will never be improved until we address a problem seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is teacher philosophy and incompetency.

2001 June

Ignorance or Contempt?June 06, 2001

Congressmen, presidents and Supreme Court justices take an oath of office swearing to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution.

The seen and unseenJune 20, 2001

I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. I buy more from my auto dealer than he buys from me. The trade imbalance doesn’t stop there. My grocer and au...

Racial Double StandardsJune 27, 2001

A measure of accommodation is accorded children because they are not adults and thus not to be held to the same accountability standards. But should that sam...

2001 July

American Contempt for the Rule of LawJuly 04, 2001

What should be the characteristics of laws in a free society?

Liberty's Greatest AdvocateJuly 11, 2001

June 30 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Bastiat. If one were to list the top 10 advocates of liberty, French philosopher-economist Bast...

Tethered CitizensJuly 18, 2001

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “No one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he’s free.” That captures the essence of “Tethered Citizens: Time...

RATIONAL IGNORANCEJuly 25, 2001

While people might be motivated by non-economic factors, from a strictly economic point of view it simply doesn’t pay individual voters to learn about and ta...

2001 August

Riot ideology and de-policingAugust 01, 2001

A Seattle policeman explained de-policing as: “Parking under a shady tree to work on a crossword puzzle is a great alternative to being labeled a racist and ...

Race summit in DurbanAugust 08, 2001

The United Nations will open its “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” (let’s call it WCAR) on Aug 31 ...

The new languageAugust 15, 2001

No one invented language – it simply spontaneously evolved as a system that enables us to communicate with one another. Language is never static because in t...

A usable black historyAugust 22, 2001

John McWhorter, linguistics professor at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, has written a compelling essay in the summer 2001 issue of City...

EnvirobamboozledAugust 29, 2001

Time magazine: “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible...

2001 September

Too much safetySeptember 05, 2001

There’s the old admonition: It’s better to be safe than sorry. The fact of life is that one can be both safe and sorry – that’s if we acknowledge the consequ...

It ain't necessarily soSeptember 12, 2001

Nowhere do lies and misrepresentation stand out in as bold relief as in the political arena. But how we forget.

Reaping the whirlwindSeptember 19, 2001

The recent terrorist attacks suggest that it might be time to re-examine our foreign policy. What should that foreign policy be? Part of the answer might lie...

Airport safety regulationsSeptember 26, 2001

Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta, Czar Norman, has ordered new, ill-thought out, oppressive airline regulations in the wake of recent terrorist a...

2001 October

There's no free lunchOctober 03, 2001

Each semester, I spend a few minutes explaining to my students, both graduate and undergraduate, the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

Emasculation of intelligence servicesOctober 10, 2001

Aren’t you a bit perplexed at how rapidly our FBI and CIA identified, arrested or detained so many people involved in the terrorist attack? The answer’s easy...

Vultures and looters gatherOctober 17, 2001

Vultures and looters can always be expected in the wake of tragedies; they take advantage of increased opportunities to steal. Looters were arrested in New Y...

What's wrong with education?October 24, 2001

Here are some test questions.

Elitist contempt for American valuesOctober 31, 2001

College campuses are home to elitists who are out of touch with and have contempt for American values. Let’s look at some of their statements after the recen...

2001 November

Business and governmentNovember 06, 2001

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. His laissez faire economics played a significant role in the libertari...

Unfinished civil rights agendaNovember 14, 2001

When the NAACP, Urban League and black politicians talk about civil rights, they talk mostly about how many blacks are in college, the racial composition of ...

Profiling neededNovember 21, 2001

Standing in long lines to pass through airport security, I thought: Where’s racial and sexual profiling now when it can benefit most, if not all, passengers?...

A dynamite economics departmentNovember 28, 2001

Reporting their findings in the February 2001 Applied Economics Letters – a British professional journal – Professors Franklin G. Mixon Jr. and Kamal P. Upad...

2001 December

In the name of National SecurityDecember 12, 2001

You’d be surprised by the newly discovered requirements for national security revealed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. We discovered that a thriving airlin...

Education fraud in PhiladelphiaDecember 19, 2001

Education in Philadelphia’s public schools is so rotten that the state government is threatening a takeover.

The leftist mediaDecember 27, 2001

Major media people have values unlike most other Americans. Former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg documents that in his best-seller, “Bias.”