Trigger Warnings

When the American colonies decided to part company from England, they formalized it in a declaration to the world, the Declaration of Independence, which a committee of five was chosen to write. The heavy lifting fell to Thomas Jefferson who was well-read and well-spoken and, it was thought, would produce the best written expression of their rationale. His draft was only slightly modified by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, two other committee members, before it went into a “groupwrite” session by the entire delegation.

In an effort to give Jefferson comfort while he witnessed the editing and amputations of his precious draft in surgery, Franklin told him a story of a hatter who was about to open a shop.

The hatter had a sign made to advertise his business which said, “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money” followed by an image of a hat. Before hanging his sign, Franklin continued, Thompson asked the opinion of several friends. One recommended that the word “hatter” be removed since it was redundant with “makes hats.” Another said the word “makes” should be excised because customers wouldn’t care that it was Thompson who made the hats. A third friend noted that the term “for ready money” wasn’t necessary since merchandise wasn’t sold on credit. Finally, a fourth opined that “sells hats,” could be stricken because Thompson surely couldn’t be expected to give them away. In the end, Franklin sighed, the sign simply said, “John Thompson,” with a picture of a hat. It seemed to both that Jefferson’s declaration was headed to the same fate.

If the PC police have their way, the fate of Thompson’s hat sign may be where higher education is headed in coming years. To quote Gertrude Stein, there will be no “there” there in college education.

What started as a radical feminist left wing idea for website content labeling has now mutated to college campuses – as radical mutations are wont to go these days. The original idea was not without merit – namely, to warn women who had suffered a traumatic experience, like physical abuse or rape, that they were about to be exposed to content involving abuse or rape on a website or in a book or film. The exposure might possibly trigger flashbacks to the personal experience, it was thought, which could trigger unresolved post-traumatic panic attacks, emotional outbursts, urges to flee, etc. Since we never know what has been suffered in the private lives of others, a general warning that content contains extreme social pathologies in some form seems like a good idea. Forewarned is forearmed, therefore, sensitive people could prepare themselves or opt out of the content.

Most parents of socially immature children probably appreciate warnings that content may be inappropriate for children of a particular age or that it contains material they may not want their children exposed to. Even mature adults, I among them, appreciate a heads up that extreme violence is contained in something they’ve unwitting chosen to experience. It might not trigger the reliving of an unresolved experience; however, we routinely warn people that something non-routine should be expected – e.g. “roads slippery when wet” or “not suitable for small children.”

What harm could “trigger warnings” cause you ask? None until the predictably metastatic over-reach morphs into insanity mode, as all movements of this type inevitably do, thereby encompassing even the most benign content. Trigger warning have now been proposed for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it uses the “N” word and is strongly racist in content. No matter that Huck, an orphan, rescued Jim, a slave, and was deeply conflicted because Huck saw Jim as a father figure. But one would have to read – indeed study and reflect on – the novel to arrive at that understanding. And how would any easily offended person get to that point if forewarned that it uses the “N” word and is racist tripe?

This is the way the perpetually aggrieved manage to contaminate the critical thinking of others. They quarantine it. They label it negatively before it can be adjudged objectively. If they can call Mark Twain and Huck Finn racists before a student can even consider the content with a neutral mindset, in time they can control what people learn. They might even extend their influence to book banning – as has happened to the classics in some school systems – despite the fact that not one of the trigger warning advocates is likely educated in literary criticism or is even a trained librarian.

Was Mark Twain a racist? Well, he was born in 1835 – 25 years before the outbreak of the Civil War – in the border state of Missouri. Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were 10 to 12-year olds in a setting that existed along the Mississippi River around 1840 so both are most likely caricatures of Twain himself as an adolescent. Slavery was the norm in the Deep South and widespread in Missouri. Because it was not part of the Confederacy, Missouri was exempted from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. What do you think? Was Twain a racist?

Would it surprise you to learn that Twain was an abolitionist? That he believed Lincoln’s proclamation didn’t go far enough? That he paid the tuition for a black man to attend Yale Law School and for another to study ministry at a university in the south? Would you expect a student to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Adventures of Tom Sawyer with a different perspective first knowing this about Twain? I would. That is what is wrong with trigger warnings.

Life is a traumatic experience for everyone at some level. So do trigger warnings mean traumatized victims of racism will never read Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man or Harper Lee’s equally classic To Kill a Mockingbird because of their racist content? Will victims of sexual assault never read Toni Morrison’s Beloved or The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's moving story of a girl raped, murdered, and watching from heaven the aftermath of her murder unfold on earth? Is the story sad? Yes. Redemptive? Absolutely.

If trigger warning advocates have their way, college professors would be required to warn students that, lest their delicate sensibilities be offended otherwise, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice smacks of anti-Semitism in its historically accurate reprehensible portrayal of Shylock the money lender. Failing to read this 17th century characterization of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, however, would deprive a student of understanding how bigoted Shakespeare’s world was, not to mention never know Portia’s importunate plea to Shylock, “The quality of mercy is not strain'd …” which students not far from entering their life’s work would do well to memorize.

After singing a verse of “I’m a Little Snowflake,” the students of the University of California at Santa Barbara followed Ohio’s Oberlin College and issued a policy proposal that professors should include trigger warnings in their syllabi for student readings that involve rape or sexual assaults, pornography, suicide, graphic violence, gore, self-abuse, and kidnapping. Almost all of Shakespeare’s plays include something on their list. Some plays include them all. When Prince Hamlet draws his last breath, there are so many corpses lying about that I can imagine on a small stage like the Globe that the sole survivor, Horatio, would have had little room to step.

The trigger warning proposal of the little snowflakes at UCSB surely would be required for the Bible, some parts of which would carry an “X” rating were they made into a theater film.

Nor would Sophocles’ Theban trilogy escape their PC-ness. In Oedipus Rex the protagonist unwittingly marries his mother after killing (murder) the man who, unknown to Oedipus at the time, was his father (patricide.) After fostering several children by his mother (incest), the true identity of mom, dad, and junior become known. Mom hangs herself in shame (suicide.) Oedipus rips the brooch from her hanging body and uses its pin to punch out his eyes (self-abuse) out before asking the townsfolk to send him into exile (alienation) as punishment for his vile mistake. 

Likewise Antigone, another of the Theban plays, would require content warning. The eponymous heroine is sealed in a cave to die. Warning: all claustrophobics beware. After 2,300 years, Sophocles is the gift that keeps on offending.

Indeed the entire canon of Western literature would have to be content labeled if the snowflake policy becomes widespread.

Maybe life will carry a trigger warning.

Predictably the proponents of this goofy idea have given little thought to its implementation beyond the initial do-goodism. To name a few, who decides what type of content deserves warning? Which past experiences qualify as “traumatic”? How is student abuse of the policy prevented? For example, War and Peace containing over a half million words in about 1,500 pages is assigned by a lit prof. Every sane student would groan. The clever ones would be “traumatized” by something in Tolstoy’s tome. “Hey, Prof, I had a near-death experience like Prince Andrei; I can’t go through that again.” Voila! It requires little imagination to see where this is headed. “The entire college educational experience is traumatizing. I opt out. Give me my degree; I’m outa’ here.”

The real trigger warning in this silly idea is not the infantilized content precautions its advocates propose. The real trigger warning is that the idea would be proposed at all for serious consideration. Here is yet another camel’s nose in the tent to limit the freedom of the many for the sake of a few – and that for specious reasons. Once again a metastasizing minority is emboldened when given an inch to take a yard.

Get over it, I say!

If a person has been so traumatized by a past experience that he or she becomes psychologically unhinged by revisiting it in literature or film, I’d ask whether that person should be in the classroom or in therapy.

The Uninvited

I’ve sat through many commencement speeches – my own prep school and three university graduations, not to mention those of my children and friends. I can’t remember the theme of a single speech. I can’t even remember the speakers.

Commencement speeches are that way: forgettable, boringly predictable, cliché-riddled, oratory designed to assure the audience of students and families that the past years’ sacrifices of time and money will prove a worthy investment.

So what’s going on with commencement speakers lately? Nine high-profile commencement invitees thus far in the 2014 graduation season have irked students and professors enough to get four of them “disinvited” by four high-profile universities, and if prior years are an indication, there will be more. Last year 16 speakers scheduled to wax eloquent got student and faculty PC hackles up so much that three speakers withdrew. In 2012, 11 managed to twist the panties of enough over-sensitive students and profs to cause one speaker’s honorary degree to be rescinded and another speaker to be disinvited. And in 2011 six speakers torqued the passions of their intended audience so tightly that two became persona non grata.

Wow! Commencement speaking is becoming a full contact sport.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education – aptly called FIRE – a nonprofit nonpartisan advocate for free speech, has been tracking the growing intolerance of the collegiate community. The cancelation of unacceptable speakers is one of its proxies. Robert Shibley, a spokesman for FIRE says, “Colleges and universities are teaching students to think like censors. Yet colleges are the very institutions that are supposed to be teaching students to think critically and consider all sides of an argument.”

The research done by FIRE discovered that there have been at least 145 instances in which speakers have withdrawn their names or been disinvited or faced protest demonstrations during school years since 1987, 100 of which have occurred in the last five years. Isn’t that interesting? These are “learning” institutions. Or are they indoctrination institutions?

Seems to me that if two people agree on every issue, one of them is unnecessary if beliefs are to be challenged. Do students have all “the right answers” after only four years so that no challenges to their beliefs are needed? One of the many rights protected under the First Amendment is the right to offend. Weren’t universities designed to make a hue and cry for tolerance of offensive ideas? Who knows but that new learning may be lurking there. Instead, “higher” learning seems to have become bastions of Kafkaesque tolerance – tolerance of all views except those opposed to their view. That isn’t the way the lifelong search for truth worked for me. When I was a university prof I told students my job wasn’t to give them answers. It was to tell them how to find answers – temporarily.

Take the case of Condoleezza Rice as an example of a university’s tolerance for contrary views.

By most standards, Ms. Rice is a truly remarkable woman. Born the year of Brown v. Board of Education in Jim Crow Birmingham, she experienced many things a small child shouldn’t have to experience – notably that her skin color was more important than who she was and what she was trying to become in life. She couldn’t attend the circus, amusement park, she couldn’t change in department store dressing rooms to try on clothes (she used a storage closet), she couldn’t use public toilets except those designated for “coloreds.” One of her schoolmates was killed in the bombing of a Baptist church by white supremacists.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. Rice isn’t the only person who has suffered from discrimination. Life itself is discriminatory. That’s not all bad. Experience is what we get from life and innocence is what we trade for it. Rice traded well. She earned a Ph.D. in International Studies at age 27. She was on the Stanford University faculty for 30 years during which she became the first woman and first black person to serve as provost. She was the second woman to hold the office of Secretary of State and the second black person. She is a concert quality pianist and is fluent in several languages.

Yet the worthies of the Rutgers University faculty and graduating intellectuals decided that Rice was undeserving of their commencement attention because she had been associated with the evil Bush regime. In that capacity she had

… mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the existence of links between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime … the lies thus promoted led to the second Iraq war, which caused the death of over 100,000 men, women and children, and the displacement of millions of others [and] … at the very least, condoned the Bush administration’s policy of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, and its attempt to present such techniques as legal …

Some accused her of being a war criminal. Without benefit of trial, witnesses, cross-examination, due process, presumption of innocence, and other constitutional superfluities, they concluded her guilt, and in their self-righteousness, demanded the Rutgers “Board of Governors to rescind its misguided decision to invite former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to deliver the keynote address.”

Being far more a class act than the Nine Nazgûl apparently in charge of Rutgers, Rice withdrew her name without being uninvited, saying, “As a professor for thirty years at Stanford University and as (its) former Provost and Chief academic officer, I understand and embrace the purpose of the commencement ceremony and I am simply unwilling to detract from it in any way."

Next comes the un-inviting of former University of California-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. I can confidently say that about the only thing Birgeneau and I could likely agree on is today’s date, and I’d probably double-check that. But despite our polar opposition, he has a right to advance his views and I’d listen to his arguments. He advocates the right of illegal aliens to receive taxpayer-funded in-state tuition, he is pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-LGBT preferences, and pro-racial quotas. He demonized the supporters of California’s Prop 8 traditional marriage ballot initiative, and he connected Gabby Gifford’s shooting to Arizona’s border enforcement. If anyone should escape the disinvitation guillotine, I would have thought he would.

Well, I obviously miscalculated the high-minded faculty and graduating leading lights of Haverford College, a Quaker institution in Pennsylvania. They would have been “deeply disturbed” were he present on the dais for their ceremony. His sin? Birgeneau oversaw the 2011 forceful removal by the Berkeley police and the arrest of Occupy protesters in Sproul Plaza.

The 72-year old physicist therefore received a letter from 16 graduating seniors stating that “we are extremely uncomfortable honoring you” and insisting that he agree to nine conditions in return for the privilege of speaking to them. In addition he must agree to make reparations to the “victims” of Berkley’s Occupy demonstration. “If you choose not to confront the issues before you, we will have no other option than to call for the college to withdraw its invitation,” they warned.

In effect, Birgeneau told his inquisitioners they could put their demands where the sun don’t shine. It may have taken him ten seconds to write the two sentences of his response: “First, I have never and will never respond to lists of demands. Second, as a long time civil rights activist and firm supporter of non-violence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks.” A letter from him to the Haverford dons canceled his acceptance of their invitation to speak.

In his stead, William Bowen, former Princeton University president spoke. After his remarks he properly scolded the graduates, parents, and faculty for their impudence,

I regard this outcome as a defeat pure and simple for Haverford, no victory for anyone who believes, as I think most of us do, in both openness to many points of view and mutual respect. I’m disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau’s handling of events at Berkley, as they had every right to do, chose to send him such an intemperate list of demands. In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a serious discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter arguments.

He got a standing ovation.

Christine Lagarde who heads the International Monetary Fund was disinvited by the prissy pots at Smith College, a liberal arts women’s college. Lagarde canceled her appearance after the good ladies of Smith circulated a petition calling the IMF chief to account for the organization’s “strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide." Well, if she’d be allowed to speak, Lagarde might have addressed those concerns but I’m sure IMF policies were in place long before she arrived less than three years ago. Let’s noose the right neck, ladies.

After Condi Rice gave up her seat on the commencement podium, the hapless Rutgers illuminati extended an invitation to Eric LeGrand, the former Rutgers football player who was paralyzed in a kickoff tackle in 2010. He has given wheelchair-bound motivational speeches to over a million people. But before he could begin work on his speech, the offer was withdrawn. “All fame is fleeting” a slave would whisper in the ear of Roman conquerors. So it is with football players. Too few remembered LeGrand’s playing days.

First Lady Obama was scheduled to speak to the combined classes of five high schools in Topeka celebrating the 60th anniversary of Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education. However, each student was allowed only six tickets igniting a grouse campaign among the students’ families. LeGrand was canceled because he wasn’t famous enough. Michelle was canceled because she was too famous.

Then there’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia anti-Islam activist invited to be the Brandeis graduation speaker. Her family fled Somalia’s enlightened practice of pre-pubescent marriage, clitoridectomy, and female genital mutilation. Somalia is not an equal opportunity mutilator, however, since male genitals do not suffer the razor blades applied to 5-year old girls without benefit of anesthesia lest they should later become promiscuous.

Hirsi Ali’s father was opposed to female mutilation, forced marriage to pedophiles, and other quaint Somalia customs. But for getting in the face of the Somalia government one time too many, he was imprisoned. While there, grandma disregarded her son’s wishes and had his 5-year old Hirsi Ali genitally scarred for life. Thanks, Grandma.

When she was eight and dad was out of prison, the family fled the country, ultimately settling in Kenya. In time she landed in the Netherlands asking for political asylum under questionable circumstances. Those interested can read of her peregrinations in Wikipedia, but of her journey she says

I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage, for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.

For speaking out against Islam and its various practices of female subjugation and for renouncing Islam to become an atheist, Hirsi Ali was the recipient of a fatwah of death. Calling Islam “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death” didn’t help her case. Then after collaborating with Theo van Gogh on the screenplay for Submission, which was critical of the Islamic treatment of women, he too received a death threat.

Van Gogh was assassinated by Islamic radicals on an Amsterdam street in 2004. The murder weapon, a knife, pinned a note to van Gogh’s chest addressed to Hirsi Ali, which read in part, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you will break yourself to pieces on Islam.” Hmm. The religion of peace?

Eventually Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands for America where she works for the American Enterprise Institute. She married a British historian and they have a son born in 2011. Of Islam she has said,

Once [Islam] is defeated it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.

Hirsi Ali was invited to speak at the commencement of Brandeis University and receive an honorary degree. Apparently the right and left hands in these laughably high-minded schools don’t communicate with each other until after the fact. The right hand invited. The left hand, unfazed by the practices of female genital mutilation, forced marriage, polygamous marriage, the kidnap, selling, and enslavement of girls, female subjugation by males with intact genitals, honor killing of women, educational deprivation of females, and forcing them to dress as if they were going to a Halloween party as Casper the Ghost, that left hand ignored all of these pre-historic practices to voice its concern that Islamic students might be a tad bit too uncomfortable with someone as outspoken against Islam as Ayaan Hirsi Ali puttin’ on airs and acting equal to men – which would get her killed in most of the Middle East. Well, phooey! I sure wouldn’t want to make a Middle Easterner – a guest of my country with privileged access to a first rate university – feel uneasy!

The Council on American-Islamic Relations contacted Brandeis with concerns about inviting “a notorious Islamaphobe” who would offend the decorum of its commencement – a commencement which was the launch pad for the senior class to enter the real world of ideas where people don’t give a hoot in a high hat about the delicate sensibilities of Brandeis graduates.

Predictably the left hand prevailed and the honorary degree and invitation to Hirsi Ali to speak was withdrawn. This same left hand had no problem in awarding an honorary degree to Tony Kushner who said that the very act of creating the state of Israel was a mistake.

It’s hard to believe that free-thinking Albert Einstein was one of the co-founders of Brandeis, a non-sectarian Jewish university dedicated to overcoming post World War II anti-Semitic bigotry. Einstein turned down a proposal that the school be named for him and therefore it became the namesake of Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Associate Justice.

If you Google its website, you’ll find that the Brandeis motto is the Hebrew word Emet. It translates “truth even unto its innermost parts.”

Perhaps the Brandeis worthies should consider changing it to “We shall not tolerate opposing thought.”

Gary Becker RIP

Gary Becker is not a household name. Few economists are. So when he died on May 3rd I initially hesitated in deciding if his outstanding career accomplishments had enough interest to be suitable for a blog. Only after reading a couple of dozen eulogies published upon his passing did I conclude Becker’s story deserved telling regardless of his general renown.

Becker’s mentor, University of Chicago Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, an economist who is widely known in the business community, called him “the greatest social scientist of the last half century.” Apparently Friedman thought “economist” was too narrow a category to corral Becker’s fecund mind. “Gary Becker may well go down in history as the chief architect in the designing of a truly general science of society,” said another mentor and University of Chicago Nobel laureate, George J. Stigler.

When he was selected to receive the Nobel Prize in 1992, Becker told an interviewer, "I was interested in social problems but felt that economics had the tools by which to handle these long-term interests and social questions." Indeed. He created so many new fields for economic inquiry that in awarding Becker the Nobel prize the committee had to create a new category for his work, recognizing him for “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” In the past, winners were chosen for a specific piece of work; Becker was chosen for many innovative works.

As to making the best decisions for society, Becker, a free market libertarian, trusted the imperfections of markets rather than the imperfections of government regulators. His choice of market solutions over government-run solutions was based on analytic study, not ideology. Nevertheless it put him on the wrong side of the tracks as far as the Left was concerned, for whom more government is always the solution. Until he saw how badly government managed it, Becker confessed several years ago that he initially supported the Iraq war.

His work was controversial, offending non-economists with, for example, suggestions that decisions like marriage, having children, immigration, crime, and drug trafficking, among many other social issues, could be analyzed as economic choices, no different – some would say – than buying a house or a bag of groceries. Critics thought his ideas patently absurd. Never mind that marriage and divorce, having and parenting children are profoundly economic decisions at their core.

Becker fended off critics who argued that social decisions were not rationally made. He described the “marriage market” for example:

It's not an organized market the way the stock market is or a bazaar is in the Middle East, but it's a market nevertheless with the property that there are different people in this who are looking to get married. Not everybody can marry the same wonderful man or woman, and they have to make choices. And they may have met somebody who they're pretty happy with. They wonder about whether if they'd waited they'd meet somebody better, and these are the kinds of choices one makes in other markets. So using market as a metaphor, but I think it's a very good metaphor for what goes on here.

Becker opposed the redistribution of incomes by government social engineers who defended it saying redistribution is the “fairest” solution for combatting rising income inequality in the US. Becker’s rationale was firmly supported by economic analysis rather than emotional “do-goodism” typical of government solutions. "I think inequality in earnings has been mainly the good kind," Becker said. How could inequality be good, lamented the social architects who believed every child deserved an “A” and every youth team should be awarded a winner’s trophy?

Income inequality rewards those with more education, according to Becker, and rewards people who possess more skills to create more value in the world. Yes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Becker knew that from his research. But "If you're in an environment where knowledge counts for so much, then if you don't have much knowledge, you're going to be a loser," Becker says. The poor fall behind because the rich are better educated in marketable skills. The gap creates the right kind of incentives, not the kind government creates in tax policy which penalizes the most successful and rewards the least successful. The poor know that more skills and education are the key to getting ahead. When they respond to that incentive, society benefits, which is good even if some choose to be left behind.

"Well, it's unfair," Becker agreed. "The accident of birth, the accident of the genes we have, the accident of parents we have: It is unfair." So should government impose remedies to compensate for the inequalities of parents and genes? Should we switch babies as Plato suggested? Who wants to live in a world that equal?

Yet, government intrudes with its typical meat-axe solutions designed to override choices people make in its quest for a fairer economy. Fairer by whose standards? Fairer for how long? Forever? Isn’t that called a subsidy? Government solutions that combat society’s “bad” choices are always a dangerous step in infringing everyone’s freedom. Taking money from one group to give to another, Becker said, was an ill-advised unbalancing of incentives that are naturally in place. Knowing the government will protect them for making bad choices, what incentives will high school graduates have to work hard at getting more education or skill training instead of taking a dead-end job? Choosing less education and training deprives society of a more competitive workforce. The economy grows slower. Everyone is penalized in the long run. Thankfully few people choose that route. But, in Becker’s view, the less educated and less skilled should be penalized until they choose to make better decisions. That’s the best incentive. Government doesn’t have a better one.

Becker wrote his doctoral dissertation on the economics of discrimination – an area of society overgrown with government interference and regulation. He challenged the idea put forth by Karl Marx that the person who discriminates gains advantage by exercising bias. But Becker argued that employers who refuse to hire qualified people simply because of their skin color will ultimately lose out to competitors in a free market. Discrimination is less likely, Becker said, in highly competitive industries because survival and prosperity depends on hiring the most qualified people regardless of skin color. Professional sports is a case in point. Over 70% of the players are black. In contrast, Becker noted, government-regulated industries are less competitive and therefore more likely to discriminate covertly if not overtly.

Take the current scandal set off by Don Sterling’s surreptitiously taped remarks, for example. The media stoked his off-hand comments into a firestorm to show he was a racist. Sterling is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. No one would conclude, however, that he was a racist by looking at his team make up, which is essentially all black. No one could conclude that he was racist by looking at his pay structure – the top three players, each black, make $46 million, 63% of the total salaries paid to the 18 players on the team.

Regardless of what Sterling says, what he does is guided by sound non-racial economics. An all-white or mostly-white team would not be competitive. He knows that. It didn’t take government meddling to achieve a non-racial team make-up. A competitive market did it. Sterling, however, has now been banned for life by the NBA and the association of team owners is investigating ways it can legally force Sterling to sell his team. For what? For a stupid remark he made, which his actions put to the lie? If “right thinking” is to be policed, let’s start with Congress and White House, and don’t leave out the Supreme Court.

I don’t have enough space in this blog to show the insight Becker brought to understanding crime and punishment, human capital, marital decisions, and the drug war to mention a few social issues that yielded to his applications of economic analysis. Illegal drug trafficking and the crime it spawns exist because a market for drugs has been created by current laws. Eliminate the illegal market by legalizing drugs, Becker proposes, and the profit leaks out of illegal drugs and the attendant criminal activity diminishes. In time the demand for legal drugs would shrink and crime would vanish.

At its core, the decision to commit a crime is an economic decision, according to Becker. The benefits of the crime are weighed against the probability of being caught and the consequences of punishment. The reason crime exists in many segments of society – from white collar, to street crimes, to violent crimes – is that the benefits far outweigh the costs. Combating crime, Becker recommends, requires increasing the probability of punishment and its severity.

Why do we have a healthcare system whose costs are consuming our GDP? Because government has interfered with the systems to deliver it. Government has created incentives that drive healthcare costs up by preventing health insurance from being sold across state lines, mandating minimum coverage, creating a malpractice industry, insuring more than catastrophic losses, paying the insurance expense for one group by taxing its cost from another group – to name a few government-sponsored abuses. Real Becker-based healthcare reform would rid the system of these perverse incentives. That isn’t likely to happen because government would have to limit itself.

Many of Gary Becker’s insights and recommendations were controversial when proposed and all were unorthodox. He forced ideologues to argue their solutions with facts and to turn them into policy solutions as he did. While he never was able to overcome critics’ resistance to his attempts to revolutionize social policy he revolutionized its rhetoric.

If you want to read a book that applies economics to non-economic problems as Becker did throughout his career, read Freakonomics. The author Steven Levitt is a former Becker student.

Levitt and a colleague analyzed which economists have had the greatest impact on society as measured by citation frequency in research papers by authors published in the top journals in recent years. Becker was the leading economist with thirteen of his works cited. No other economist had more than three or four works cited.

From the time that his doctoral dissertation was accepted, Gary Becker produced a continuous stream of influential work averaging two original researched books in each of the six decades his career spanned before death claimed him at age 83. No other economist has had such output.

My Ph.D. is in business, not economics. Nevertheless we studied his emerging work when I was in graduate school. Even 40 years ago, his ideas were inspired.

Kerry’s World

The meaning of words often becomes muted when they fall out of common usage. So while I knew the general sense of the word, “apartheid” I refreshed my understanding with this definition from Wikipedia:

Apartheid an Afrikaans (Dutch-German) word meaning "the state of being apart." literally "apart-hood" … a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party governments, the ruling party from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence … Since the 1950s, a series of popular uprisings and protests was met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders [Nelson Mandela among them]. As unrest spread and became more effective and militarized, state organizations responded with repression and violence.

Two weeks ago Secretary of State John Kerry gave a closed-door briefing of the Israel-Palestine conflict in which he said,

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state” … A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state …

The modern state of Israel is home to about as many Jews as the Nazis destroyed in the Holocaust. Few more inflammatory metaphors could have chosen by the bumbling Kerry to label the Israeli position in the Palestinian conflict than “apartheid state.” No other ethnic group has been victimized more by racial hatred for over 2,000 years. Was this a Freudian slip? It made me wonder what sub-conscious anti-Semitic prejudices Kerry may be harboring.

Predictably the outcry was loud and immediate. And just as predictably the Kerry State Department issued a denial that he’d said what he’d said.

“The Secretary … did not state publicly or privately that Israel is an apartheid state …,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. Unfortunately, Kerry had been taped so there was no denying what he said. Hmmm. No doubt smoke poured from Ms. Psaki’s ears as she pondered the dilemma. Then she came up with this beaut:

“He certainly didn’t say ‘is.’”

This sort of rhetorical silliness is reminiscent of Clinton’s obstruction of justice word-parsing: “It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is” and Kerry’s, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it."

Not to be outdone by her boss in the monthly State Department “Foot in the Mouth” contest, Spokeswoman Psaki was quick to assert the “some of his best friends are Jewish,” defense. Well, la-dee-da!

“…If I could rewind the tape,” Kerry later told his critics, “I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.”

Israel is a country smaller than the state of New Jersey. At one place, it is only nine miles wide. Its population is eight million people, of whom six million are Jews. The rest are non-Jewish immigrants related to Jews, Israeli Arabs, Christians, and Druze. The Arabs participate in and are protected by Jewish law and democratic processes. It appears to me that some non-Jewish groups are already living side-by-side with the Jews as Uncle Kerry and Papa Obama want.

It’s their neighbors living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Lebanon, however, that are the troublemakers. Hamas and the PLO have launched 10,000 rockets into Israel hitting homes, synagogues, hospitals, schools, and villages. It’s not the sort of place that John and Teresa Heinz Kerry or Barry and Michelle would choose to live. But Team Obama/Kerry have no qualms about telling the Jews how they should live. Both have asked the Israeli government to give up more land and move in a little tighter. It does make the Jews an easier target, don’t you think?

The Palestinians hate Jews so much they won’t take sovereign control of any territory ceded to them unless all Jews are expelled – just abandon your home and move in with other Jews, like you did in the Polish ghettos when the Nazis wanted you out of designated Aryan territories. Remember Schindler’s List? Kerry and Obama say this would pave the road to peace.

Conveniently ignored by Kerry and Obama is the Clinton-engineered 2000 Camp David Summit which Yasser Arafat, the Soviet-trained terrorist, scuttled. Clinton later wrote in his book My Life that Arafat complimented him saying, "You are a great man," to which Clinton responded, "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one." Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross also later wrote that Arafat shot down the peace solution because he didn’t want to shut off the ability to make more demands later, especially the “right of return.” Arafat wanted a one-state solution, not a two-state side-by-side solution. Until there was a single Arab state encompassing all of the historic Palestinian territory, there would be no solution on Arafat’s terms. In other words, no Jews allowed in the Middle East.

Also conveniently ignored is the fact that days before Kerry’s “apartheid” blunder, the 79-year old President of the laughingly named Palestinian Authority, aka the PLO, signed a unity deal with Hamas, their rival terror group, to join forces in destroying Israel. President Mahmoud Abbas of the PA had two choices: break off peace negotiations or be assassinated. The elected Arab mayors of communities in the West Bank, Samaria, and Judea who were trying to live in peace with Israel were knee-capped by Abbas goons. Why isn’t this stuff reported?

The only “apartheid” state in this explosive area is the Arab areas insisting on ethnic cleansing of the 650,000 Jews living in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem – the terrorists whose cause Kerry and Obama are championing.

A question for the geniuses in Foggy Bottom: what does the economy of the Palestinian Arab territories produce – i.e. what are its main industries? The economy of Israel mirrors the modern world as evidenced by its GDP per capita of $32,000. The GDP of the Palestinian-controlled territories is less than $2,000 per capita, a third of which is foreign aid, since the Palestinians are the world’s largest per capita recipients of it. It’s a welfare society. Why? Because a significant part of its human capital is not deployed into productive work. It’s engaged in violence – fighting its neighbors, the Jews. Since the creation of modern Israel in 1948, generations of Palestinians have known no other enterprise except fighting. Most notably this is true among Arafat’s PLO fighters. War is the main industry of the Palestinians.

It’s a fool’s errand to debate whose land it is. That’s not the issue. Civilizations had occupied it before Joshua’s conquest of the Canaanites around 1300 BC and civilizations occupied it up to the Ottoman Empire, which lost it in WW I. Someone has always taken it from someone else. But it’s always been God’s land in my book. The land dispute is what it is. Is a peaceful resolution possible?

If a peaceful resolution isn’t possible, and it doesn’t appear it is in current circumstances, then the contestants must fight until there is a winner. That’s the way most disputes are resolved absent a peaceful solution. It wouldn’t be my choice, but I don’t live there. Neither do Kerry and Obama.

Although Kerry hasn’t said so directly, he has implied that no resolution is possible with the current leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Kerry said if “there is a change of government or a change of heart, something will happen.” But I’m not sure that dog hunts. Over the history of the conflict, Israel has been led by governments on the right, left, and center – all of which negotiated unsuccessfully with the Palestinian representative of their time. Not so with the Palestinians who have always been led from the left and negotiated accordingly. The problem isn’t Netanyahu.

But if regime change is what Kerry thinks is needed, I’d agree. Get rid of Kerry and Obama. Kerry’s Manichean world exists nowhere, least of all in this part of the world. And Obama doesn’t like Netanyahu, has no respect for Israel or its historic relationship to the land, and sees no advantage to a democratic island in the Middle East. If anything, Obama and the Clinton/Kerry State Department would like nothing less than an isolated, humiliated Israel. Getting rid of Obama and Kerry would be progress because no one could be worse for Israel than theses two.

Obama has destroyed any sense of this country’s historic support of Israel, support which poll after poll confirms. What I can’t understand is why 80% of American Jews keep voting for Democrats who don’t support the nation of Israel. Good grief, the Jews in Congress, 99% of them Democrats, don’t support the nation of Israel!

So, yes; let regime change happen – in 2016!

The Unwise Latina

In 2006 the voters of Michigan approved by a margin of 58% to 42% a state constitutional amendment outlawing race-based preferences. Alleging that in passing an equal protection amendment, Michigan voters had violated the equal protection rights of minorities (I’m not making this up) an affirmative action group sued Michigan voters.

Two years ago the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed 8-7 that Michigan voters violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by mandating equal protection and struck down the amendment. Michigan’s Attorney General took the appeal to the Supreme Court, which two weeks ago ruled 6-2 in his favor to let the amendment stand.

Not without fireworks, however.

Today – almost 60 years to the day since Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and only two months short of the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – there exist people who believe that the vestiges of institutionalized discrimination from two generations ago (before Brown and CRA) still remain, justifying continuing state-sponsored discrimination for racial minorities. Unfortunately some of those people wear black robes and sit on court benches. Sonia Sotomayor is one of them.

The Supreme Court’s Michigan ruling two weeks ago was not sweeping, though many (including me) thought it should have been. It did not strike down the discriminatory practices of universities using affirmative action in the 42 states that don’t ban it, for example. It said Michigan could amend its constitution outlawing race-based preferences via ballot initiative. The opponents of the Supreme Court Michigan case, including Sotomayor, clearly had no problem with discrimination – as long as it favored minorities. When it didn’t favor minorities, they had a problem.

The metronomic swing voting Anthony Kennedy joined Alito and Roberts while Scalia joined Thomas to make the majority. But surprisingly the reliably liberal Stephen Breyer also joined the majority. Thus three different majority opinions were written explaining why the Right was, well, right, leaving Sotomayor and Ginsberg alone on the Left, for whom Sotomayor wrote a withering 58-page dissent. Kagan recused.

While dissenting opinions are normally short philosophical statements of “this is why I voted as I did” and sometimes include “this is why I think the majority is wrong, “ Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion was a tirade – longer than the total of the majority opinions in this decision. Moreover, she read the entire dissent from the bench – an unusual but not rare practice – to demonstrate how wrong she thought her six “colleagues” were, especially Chief Justice Roberts, who she called out, albeit not by name, for special ridicule.

The core of her vituperation slapped Roberts for being “out of touch with reality,” Stephens for being willing to “sit back and wish away” discrimination, and Scalia for believing that race-sensitive admissions policies “do more harm than good” and his assertion that Michigan residents favored a colorblind constitution and "it would be shameful for us to stand in their way."

Thus, Sotomayor opened fire on race neutralism:

My colleagues are of the view that we should leave race out of the picture entirely and let the voters sort it out. We have seen this reasoning before.  

Hinting that the majority’s decision supporting Michigan voters will return the Nation to Jim Crow racism, Sotomayor argued that the voters’ choice to end racial discrimination was an act of racial discrimination and that the only sure way to end such racial discrimination is by mandatory (court-ordered) maintenance of racial discrimination. She didn’t use those words, but the intent was clearly there in the last paragraph on page two of her dissent, which is available at the hyperlink above.

Sotomayor mocked Roberts’ oft-quoted dictum that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," which he wrote in the Seattle School District case. She called his thinking “out of touch with reality.”

[Quoting Roberts] “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It is a sentiment out of touch with reality… The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.

Race matters, she asserted, with a jab to Kennedy who believed the issue to be decided is “whether, and in what manner, voters in the States may choose to prohibit the consideration of such racial preferences.” She calls his lack of judicial activism “sitting back and wishing away, rather than confronting” racism.

As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.

Roberts felt compelled to defend himself against her scurrilous attack in a rebuttal opinion.

… It is not “out of touch with reality” to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect … that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to “wish away, rather than confront” racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.

But “good faith” disagreement is not something Sotomayor comprehends. She could take a lesson from the first minority on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. He was often frustrated by the Court’s opinions related to race, but he never personalized it as she did.

For example, in a case involving bankruptcy, the bankrupt applicant was unable to pay the $50 bankruptcy filing fee, which, his lawyer argued, was denial of due process and equal protection. The lower court agreed but the Supreme Court didn’t. The opinion of the majority argued that he was offered installment payments for the fee that were no more than “the price of a movie or a little more than the price of a pack of cigarettes.” Marshall took offense. He began to write his dissent stridently – “It may be easy for judges with life tenure and a salary guarantee to think that …” but then rewrote a moderate introduction, "It may be easy for some people to think that weekly savings of less than $2 are no burden." He went on to argue that it’s perfectly fine to differ over opinions about what Constitution requires, but it was “disgraceful” to interpret the Constitution with opinions about what poor people are able to do unless one has been poor.

Sotomayor is incapable of that kind of professional politesse – or reasoning.

Scalia also felt Sotomayor should be reprimanded. “As Justice Harlan observed over a century ago, ‘[o]ur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,’” Scalia recalled in the Harlan’s dissent written for Plessy v. Ferguson. “The people of Michigan wish the same for their governing charter,” Scalia concluded.

Citing Sotomayor’s dissent introduction, Scalia scolded her assertions, saying that it is “… doubly shameful to equate ‘the majority’ behind [the Michigan constitutional amendment] with ‘the majority’ [on the Court at that time] responsible for Jim Crow.”

Scalia, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, pointed out in rebutting Sotomayor’s dissent that discrimination is discrimination regardless of its noble motives. If a clearly race-neutral standard happens work for whites and against minorities as an unintended consequence, neither the law nor the court may step in and jigger the standard to eliminate its unwitting “disparate impact.”

Scalia was too charitable to remind the second most junior justice on the Court that the question the Michigan case was narrow: to decide if and how voters in the States may choose to prohibit the consideration of such racial preferences in college admissions – no more, no less. The last time I checked, college admission is not a constitutionally-protected right.

Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” Instead she showed in the Michigan decision what an unwise Latina she really is. She did not judge the case; she argued it. Her abominable racism is no different than the racism she railed against in her dissent.

Sotomayor was never suited to sit on the highest court in the land. There were better qualified, more thoughtful candidates from which to choose. But now that she is there, at age 59, she will have many years and ample opportunities to undermine the constitutional order of this country.

Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are living proof that presidential elections undeniably have consequences.