RLL Ep.38 Walter Williams Remembered

Hi everybody, Steve Matthews here. Thanks for joining me for Ready It Looks Lucid episode 38. The title of this episode is Walter Williams Remembered. Well, there was some sad news this past week. One of my personal heroes died on Monday, December the 1st, and I'm talking here about Dr. Walter Williams.

Dr. Williams was an economist and was a professor for many years at George Mason University in Virginia, but he wasn't just an academic. He was also somebody who was very well known as a public intellectual.

And if, say, you are someone who's in the liberty movement or a liberty-minded person and maybe a libertarian or maybe you're a conservative or something along those lines, the name Walter Williams is probably one that you recognize because he wrote a newspaper column for many years, probably about 40 years or so, and he was also pretty well known as one of Rush Limbaugh's regular guest hosts.

It always seemed like, if I recall correctly, that he would fill in for Rush maybe the week between Christmas and New Year's was typically one of the times of year that Walter Williams would sit behind the EIB microphone and school people in sound economics.

So, though it's sad to hear of his passing this past week, I didn't want to make this a sad show, but really to just honor someone that I think have thought very highly of for most of my life and to give you a little bit of sense of the man and how he actually mentored me.

Now, I say I never knew him personally. I never was a student of his. I never sat in a classroom with him, but yet he really did teach me and he taught me an awful lot about economics at really a very important kind of impressionable time in my life.

It made a big difference to me, and so that's why I just wanted to, I really think of this episode more as just a public thank you to Dr. Williams for all of the wonderful work that he did and how much his work has meant to me over many years.

There's an article, I guess it was a write-up. I don't know if you call it an obituary. Maybe a write-up would be more like it in the New York Times that was done. In fact, it was just today, December the 4th.

I'll read a little bit of that to you here. So, here we go. Quote, Walter E. Williams, 84, dies, conservative economist on black issues, skeptical of anti-poverty programs. He was a scholar who reached a wide public through a newspaper column and books and as a fill-in for Rush Limbaugh.

Now, let me just read a little bit of this. This is actually a pretty good write-up. I mean, it's in the New York Times, so I mean, they're not the kind of people who would necessarily be favorable to Walter Williams' views.

If you are familiar with Walter Williams, of course, he was somebody who believed in free market and laissez-faire economics, capitalism, and he was also somebody who believed in limited government. So he had a very biblical view of economics and politics, and I don't know for sure.

I strongly suspect he was a Christian himself. I know I heard him make numerous references to church-related things over the years, and I very strongly suspect he was a Christian. And I do know in terms of his writings, in terms of his beliefs about economics and politics, they certainly were consistent with the scriptures.

Before I get started here, I also wanted to say hi to everybody on livestream. This is my second go at livestream. You know, it was funny. The first one was on Thanksgiving, and I was trying out a new program.

Actually, I had livestreamed on Twitter a few times before that, but I got this new program. It's called Restream, and it lets you stream across a number of different platforms all at once. Well, I got the thing all set up, and I was going, and I was having a pretty good time with the Thanksgiving episode, and I got done.

At the end of it, I saw that somebody had sent me a message, and he said something like, dude, your audio is off. So I was sitting here yammering on for about 45 minutes, and it wasn't any sound. Fortunately, I did record it as a podcast, so I did get the audio on another device, but that was, well, you know, doing podcasting and blogging and writing and things like that, it has its humbling moments, and that was one for me.

So I think I've got the audio on this week. I learned how to check that, so hopefully, if you don't hear me and you're watching out there, please be kind enough to drop me a chat and let me know. Anyway, so back to the article here.

This is the New York Times, excuse me, this is the New York Times write-up on Walter Williams. Walter E. Williams, a prominent conservative economist, author, and political commentator who expressed profoundly skeptical views of government efforts to aid his fellow African Americans and other minority groups, died on Tuesday on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia, where he taught for 40 years.

He was 84. His daughter, Devon Williams, said he died suddenly in his car after he had finished teaching a class. She said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and hypertension. As a public intellectual, Mr. Williams moved easily between the classroom and public forums that gave him a wide reach.

He wrote a syndicated column, lectured across the country, and frequently appeared on the radio as a substitute host for the ardently conservative Rush Limbaugh. The author of about a dozen books, including The State Against Blacks, Mr. Williams was the subject of a 2014 PBS documentary, Suffer No Fools, in which he maintained that anti-poverty programs were subsidizing slovenly behavior.

The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, Jim Crow, and the harshest racism could not have done, namely to destroy the black family, Mr. Williams declared in Suffer No Fools.

So that kind of gives you a little bit of a flavor of Walter Williams. And one of the things that, maybe just to tell you a little bit about him, just from my own personal experience, you know, when I was growing up, and this is back when I went to school, I graduated high school in 1984.

And when I was going to school and growing up, I went to public school, you know, I'm a product of public school, okay? And I went to public school my whole life. And going through public education, you know, you kind of got this sense, I mean, and nobody stated this explicitly, but you kind of got this sense that if you had any ambition, say, of being a scholar, you know, a serious scholar in any field, that you really had to adopt a set of beliefs that were at odds with Christianity.

You know, you had to be a Darwinist in terms of your thinking about mankind. You had to be a, you know, some kind of a collectivist in terms of your economics. You had to be a big government guy in terms of your politics.

Now, again, nobody ever explicitly stated this. It was more implicit in the kind of education we received. Because, of course, when you're talking about public education, what you're doing is you're talking about government education.

So, I mean, of course, you're going to get an education that favors what? Big government. And I always got this sense that when I was going to school that I wasn't really being taught straight, that I wasn't getting a straight scoop.

But I didn't know what the truth was. And I was very confused. And I was very frustrated. And in fact, I was a pretty crummy student when I was in high school. And part of it was because I just I didn't trust the kinds of things that I was being taught.

It just didn't seem quite right to me. But if you'd really pressed me on the issues, I would have had a hard time really articulating for you why I thought that. But I tended not to have a whole lot of interest in academics.

And I did very poorly when I was in high school. And I don't say that as a boast. I'm not happy about it. I wish that I had handled things differently. But no, I didn't do well. And part of the reason was, was just because I found the intellectual climate, the atmosphere, the ideas that were put forth, they didn't have a lot of appeal to me.

And I always wanted to believe, I don't know, maybe this was the Lord's leading in my life. I wasn't a Christian at the time. But I always believed in, I wanted to believe in liberty. I wanted to believe in freedom, in economic freedom, in political freedom.

But I just wasn't seeing that in the teaching that I was getting. So anyway, I remember I first came across Walter Williams' work, I want to say about 1984. So it was about the same year that I graduated high school.

And the local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, carried his weekly syndicated column. I started reading his stuff. And I was just blown away by it. You know, as I said, the general kind of intellectual atmosphere then, as it is now, is a sort of big government type of socialism.

But Walter Williams was just like, it was like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. He was so different from anybody else I had ever read up to that point. He was somebody who would write very powerfully, very clearly, very logically, and defend freedom, and defend limited government, and defend economic liberty.

And I was just absolutely amazed and blown away by it. And one of the things that really captured me the most, of course, is that Walter Williams was black. And yet he would write columns that would just, he would just flay the received wisdom of the day.

You know, there was always this idea, oh, well, you know, that blacks aren't doing well in this or that area. And it's all because of racism. It's all because of white racism. It's white racism that is to blame for this.

And I'd read Walter Williams, he'd say, no, it's not white racism that's doing this. It's socialism. It's the welfare state. And in fact, let me go ahead, I'm going to read that quote again. This is from a quote from the New York Times.

And I know this must have been kind of painful for them to print this. So I'm going to read it again. This is Walter Williams, quote, the welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, Jim Crow, and the harshest racism could not have done, namely to destroy the black family, end quote.

That was a quote from that PBS special, Suffer No Fools. By the way, that PBS special they talk about, it's about an hour long special on featuring Walter Williams. And it's actually, it's available on Amazon.

So if you have Amazon, if you've got Amazon Prime, it actually comes with your Amazon subscription. So if you have that, go check it out. I'd strongly recommend it to you. I always love hearing Walter Williams talk about economics.

And if you've never heard him before, you're in for a real treat. I just, I've always loved his work so much. But I would read things like this. And it was just, it was just shocking. Like I say, it was like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

And it was like, who is this guy? And where does he get these ideas? And I was very keen to learn. And I say, this was at a time in my life that as a senior in high school, I was going into college. And so those are very intellectually formative years.

And you know, for me, reading his work really kind of reawakened or maybe awakened for the first time, really the interest in scholarly things from my standpoint. Because like I say, I had this idea growing up that if you had to be a scholar, well, you had to be some kind of, you know, socialist, liberal, you know, what have you.

And I think there was a lot of truth in that, actually. There's certainly a lot of truth then. And of course, if you look at the way universities and formal academics is today, that really is true. I mean, you have to have a, you have to kind of accept the worldview of the secular liberals.

And that's something that I was never comfortable with. But yeah, here I'm reading someone who's a PhD economist and a college professor, and man, I mean, he's just flaying the received wisdom. And it was just, it was always so much fun to read him and to read him and to see him skewer the received wisdom.

I always enjoyed that. But in reading him and in learning from him, I say it for the first time in my life, kind of began to awaken interest in scholarship, because I began to see that, yeah, you could be a scholar.

And not only could you defend liberty, but you could make a pretty compelling intellectual argument for that. In fact, you could make a much better argument for liberty and freedom than you could for all the big government social welfare programs that were out there.

So that was one of the big takeaways that I got from Walter Williams and from his work over the years, was just the fact that good scholarship can really be used to support liberty. Now, I wasn't even a scripturalist at the time.

When I talk about scripturalism, I'm talking about the work particularly of Gordon Clark and John Robbins. And this was years before I even read their stuff. But his work, Walter Williams' work, actually kind of helped prepare me for reading some of the work of Gordon Clark and John Robbins much later on.

It was probably about another 18 years or so. It wasn't until about the year 2000 or so that I actually started to read Clark and Robbins. But this was in, say, about 1984 or so when I started reading Walter Williams.

So anyway, going through this article a little bit, let me read a little bit more of that. Here's to kind of give you a little more flavor of Walter Williams. He argued, that's he, Walter Williams, argued that many well-intentioned government programs, including the minimum wage and the law that in effect mandates union wages on federal construction projects, hurt disadvantaged Americans, particularly black people.

In an influential essay, Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly, published in 2007, he argued that a minimum wage, it was $5 .85 at the time, came with legally mandated fringe benefits such as employer payments for Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, and worker compensation programs at federal and state levels that run as high as 30 of the hourly wage.

And Williams goes on to say, quote, put oneself in the place of an employer and ask, does it make sense for me to hire a worker who is so unfortunate as to have skills enabling him to produce $4 worth of value per hour when he's going to cost me $8 an hour?

Most employers would see doing so a losing economic proposition and not hire such a worker, end quote. Well, duh. And it's amazing, though, that Walter Williams, he makes this point, he makes it very powerfully, right?

I mean, if you're, say, an employee, maybe you've got limited skills for whatever reason, maybe it's your first job, for example, and somebody hires you on and maybe you only produce $4 an hour, but they got to pay $8 an hour.

Well, who's going to do that? I mean, you're going to have a hard time getting a job there like that. And what minimum wage does is it hurts low-skill employees because they can't find employment. It hurts people who are looking for an entry-level job because they can't find a job that will pay them at a rate that their skills justify.

And that's a pretty compelling argument, and yet there are so many people, and we're talking about PhD economists at some of the most prestigious universities in the United States or around the world who argue that, yeah, minimum wage is a great idea.

And what that is, of course, is that's government interference in the economy. And, of course, one of the biggest sources of that interference—and we've talked about that, I think, a little bit in my podcast.

I know I've written quite a bit about it, but one of the biggest sources of that interference is the Roman Catholic Church. Now, Walter Williams didn't say that. That's not in the New York Times article, and I don't know that he necessarily said that in his columns.

I'm saying that. That's where that comes from. A lot of that comes from the influence of Roman Catholic economic thought, which is very collectivist. So let's continue on here with the New York Times article.

Mr. Williams contended that the civil rights legislation championed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s had actually worsened race relations by seeking an equality of result in terms of voting rights and bans on discrimination, rather than equality of economic opportunity, which he said might better have lifted more black Americans out of poverty independence on public welfare programs.

Oh, my goodness! Now, this was something—again, this is one of the things, early on when I began reading Walter Williams' work, that I was just floored by it. As I mentioned, Walter Williams himself was black, and I was used to the standard issue mainstream stuff that you'd see on TV or read in newspapers, right?

I mean, guys like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, I mean, those were some prominent civil rights advocates at the time. They were always into bigger government programs, more laws compelling people to do this, that, and the other thing.

I thought that, well, I guess that's what black Americans really think. That's what they want. Walter Williams comes along, and he just blows that stuff out of the water. I thought, I've never seen anything like this.

Again, this is a very good summary of Walter Williams' argument, that all of these—so many of these civil rights laws that try to impose things like quotas and what have you on employers and on the workforce create a lot of ill will.

Not only does it create a lot of ill will, it actually holds holds—creates problems for black Americans who are trying to advance. It actually, in a lot of ways, hurts people that supposedly it's out there to help.

It's interesting. It goes on here. It says that he, again, Walter Williams, had his critics on the liberal side. In 1981, in a Q &A face-off with Mr. Williams in the opinion pages of the New York Times, Benjamin Hooks, then president of the NAACP at that time, was unsparing in his assessment of black conservatives like Mr. Williams.

He goes on, and this Benjamin Hooks criticizes Williams. He says, black conservatives are basically a carbon copy of white conservatives. They object to affirmative actions designed to overcome preferences long accorded to white males.

They object to busing as one effective remedy for rectifying a school system that has been deliberately and historically segregated, etc., etc., and he continues here. Well, the problem with so many of the liberals is that they always think that somehow getting government involved in things and forcing people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do is the way to go.

But Walter Williams had a consistent philosophy of liberty. He had a consistent philosophy of liberty. Think about what Jesus said. Jesus said, if the Son of Man shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.

Liberty is something that we find in the scriptures. We find economic liberty. We find political liberty. Now, that quote that I gave you from Christ, I mean, of course, he was talking there about spiritual liberty.

Spiritual liberty is the fountainhead of political and economic liberty. Now, again, I'm filling in some things here. I don't know that Walter Williams necessarily openly talked about that or not. Maybe he did.

I haven't read everything that he wrote. But liberty is something that is—it's God-given. It's a gift of God. And Walter Williams understood the importance of political and economic liberty to help people to grow, to help people to develop, to help people to learn and have an opportunity to apply their God-given gifts and their talents.

You don't get to a place of success. You don't have a—I guess what I'm trying to say here is that nobody can give you prosperity. I mean, you try to give people stuff. You try to give people free stuff.

What it ends up doing is destroying them. And that's one of the things that Walter Williams argued quite a bit. I mean, you find this just consistently in his columns, that government anti-poverty programs, the government affirmative action programs, things like this, even if they were well-intentioned, I mean, even assuming the best of intentions were the part of the people who initiated them, that they actually ended up hurting the very people that they were supposed to help.

And I remember, and I don't have the column here handy with me, but I do recall reading in one of Walter Williams' columns, he was talking about growing up. And he grew up in the housing projects in North Philadelphia, and he was born in 1936.

So he grew up—he's pretty close to the same age as my parents—he grew up in the 1940s, 1950s in that particular period of time. And that was in the pre-civil rights era. So there was a lot of pretty overt discrimination that was going on that was taking place against blacks.

But one of the things that was interesting in listening to him talk about his experience growing up, it was really quite remarkable. Because you think today of the housing projects, it immediately conjures up images of drug addicts and shootings and prostitution and all this kind of very depraved sorts of things.

But when you listen to him talk, it sounded almost like an all-American neighborhood. He talked about the fact that with he and all of his friends, that he was the only one that didn't have both parents at home.

His father left his mother when he was very young. But all of his other friends, their parents were married. They were intact families. They would go out—I remember reading him talking about how they'd go out and they'd camp out in the yard at night and nobody would think anything of it.

And they got a good quality education when he was growing up as well. And it sounded like it was a pretty normal American neighborhood. And this was in the housing projects, in the 1940s and 1950s. And of course, you compare what he experienced growing up before all of the great society social welfare programs came along in the 60s, it was a very, very different world than the one that we live in today.

After all of those social welfare programs came along, the so-called Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. And that was one of the recurring themes of his work was how welfare had destroyed the black families.

And it wasn't just black families he'd talk about either. Welfare destroys any families. There's no quicker way to destroy the moral fiber, the industriousness of any people than to put them on the dole.

Put them on the government dole to say, you deserve free stuff. You have entitlements. You could sum up a pretty good chunk of Walter Williams' work as sort of a career making war on the word entitlement.

He had a view, and this was a very biblical view of the relationship between work and money. You think about what the Apostle Paul wrote. He said, if a man will not work, neither let him eat. And of course, you say that today and people tend to recoil at horror.

Oh my gosh, you can't be that cruel. How can you be so terrible? Well, I mean, that's what the Bible teaches. And that is also very sound economics. And that is what Walter Williams also taught in his public work.

And I'm sure he probably did in the classroom as well. I know him from the work that he did publicly as a writer, as a columnist, or as an author of books, or as a radio talk show host. I know he always supported the idea that people had a responsibility to work.

And if they wanted something, if you wanted something, your job, you had to go out and you had to work for it. You didn't have a right to sit and claim, oh, I've been disadvantaged or discriminated against or something like this.

Now you owe me free stuff. Because of course, that's very much in vogue. It was in vogue back in the 1980s when I first started reading Walter Williams. That was very much mainstream in the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson was president.

And of course, it's gone hyper-nuclear in our own day. I mean, if you don't think that, say, giving out reparations, for example, is a great idea, well, you're a really terrible person. I mean, that's the very kind of thing that Walter Williams opposed throughout his career consistently.

In fact, it even says here, Mr. Williams also opposed affirmative action programs and proposals to pay reparations to black people for slavery. The problems that black people face are not going to be solved by white people, he said.

And that's true. I mean, the only way that you're ever going to get anything is you have to go out and you have to apply yourself. You're not going to, you know, nobody can give you a career. Nobody can give you skills.

Those are things that you have to go out and you have to apply yourself. And if you have the sense that somehow you're entitled and that somebody owes you something just because of who you are, well, you're not going to get very far in your life and you're probably going to be pretty bitter.

And the article goes on to talk about how he became an economist. He actually got his PhD from UCLA out in Los Angeles. And it also goes on to talk about how he returned to Philadelphia, where he grew up.

He taught at Temple University from 1973. And then in 1980, he moved on to George Mason University. He was also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. That's a libertarian think tank. And I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to put this article in the show notes.

I know the New York Times, I mean, you do have to have a subscription to get to it. But if you do have one, you can go ahead and read the write-up. It's actually, like I said, it's quite a good write-up.

You know, it's better than I would expect from the New York Times because, of course, philosophically, Walter Williams is very different from the editorial staff of the New York Times. And just to give you another flavor of Walter Williams' work, there's a recent column.

This was maybe a, oh, I don't know, a couple, it was back actually September 23rd. So a little bit over two months ago. It's a column that he wrote. I'm getting this from Town Hall, and I'm going to put this in the show notes as well.

But it's called Language and Thought. And here's Williams writing. He says, 17th century poet and intellect John Milton predicted, when language and common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by the ruin and degradation.

Gore Vidal, his 20th century intellectual successor, elaborated saying, as societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate. Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.

And he continues, Williams does, let's look at the concept of white privilege. The notion that white people have benefited in American history relative to and at the expense of people of color. That's what white privilege is.

It appears to be utter nonsense to suggest that poor and destitute Appalachian whites have white privilege. How can one tell if a person has white privilege? One imagines that the academic elite who coined the term refer to whites of a certain socioeconomic status, such as living in the suburbs with the privilege of high income amenities.

But here's the question. Do Nigerians in the U .S. have white privilege? As reported by the New York Post this summer, 17 of all Nigerians in this country hold master's degrees, 4 hold a doctorate, and 37 hold a bachelor's degree, according to the U .S. Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey.

By contrast, 19 of whites have a bachelor's degree, 8 have master's degrees, and 1 have doctorates. What about slavery? Colleges teach our young people that the U .S. became rich on the backs of free black labor.

That is utter nonsense. Slavery does not have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. I doubt that anyone would claim that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor.

The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, while the richest states and regions where those were slavery was outlawed, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

And again, the column continues. It's really good stuff. I'm going to go ahead and put that in the show notes as well. But it just goes to show you again, that gives you kind of a sense of the flavor of his argumentation and how he could really refute so many of those arguments that we hear.

I mean, you watch the news, you hear people talk, and you hear that term, white privilege. I mean, that's a very common, almost a buzzword today. And here he really eviscerates the idea by saying, hey, how do you explain the fact that, say, Nigerians, and he's using Nigerians as an example, how is it that Nigerians in the United States actually have stronger educational backgrounds, percentage-wise anyway, than the average white American?

Or how is it possible that the South, which held slaves, and the North, which was relatively poor compared to the North, which didn't have slaves? We're constantly told that America was built on the back of slaves and that slaves are responsible for building the United States.

And as he notes here, slavery has a really crummy track record for building wealth. You don't build wealth that way. And of course, that shouldn't surprise us as Christians, right? Because slavery is not Christian.

If you want to read a little bit more about slavery, there's a wonderful little booklet by John Robbins. It's called Christianity and Slavery, and it's an exposition of the book of Philemon. And if you read through Philemon, I mean, that's where you really get some explicit detail in the New Testament about abolishing slavery.

You really find that strongest arguments right there in Philemon, and John Robbins does a brilliant job explaining that. I'm not going to go into that right now, but you may want to check that out. It's a really great little book.

It's in print. You can get it from the Trinity Foundation. So anyway, I just wanted to give you a little bit of flavor of Walter Williams and his argumentation. And you might also find this interesting too.

If you're like me and say you admire, love the work of John Robbins, I'm a huge admirer of John Robbins. I mean, John Robbins is, you know, I talk about Walter Williams as an early influence in shaping my thought.

Well, John Robbins probably did more than anybody else to really kind of put all the pieces together and shape my thinking. I mean, I call myself a scripturalist today. And of course, scripturalism was the name that John Robbins gave to Gordon Clark's philosophy, you know, the idea that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth.

But you might be interested to know, you know, if you're an admirer of John Robbins, that John Robbins was well aware of Walter Williams' work and actually admired him quite a bit. And here's a piece that was actually written by John Robbins.

It's a review of one of Walter Williams' books. This was written on the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE. And at the time, John Robbins was, it was written in 1996, and I believe John Robbins was the editor in chief of the Foundation for Economic Education at that time.

John Robbins was very interested in economics, and I was always very interested in economics. And of course, part of that interest in economics, a big chunk of that actually came from reading Walter Williams.

And so I was so glad to come across a number of years later, John Robbins' work, where he really ties in, you know, and shows how the economics of freedom is something that you can derive from the scriptures.

But writing in 1996, John Robbins is giving a review of Walter Williams' book. And let me read a little bit of this to you. The title of it's Do the Right Thing, that's the title of Walter Williams' book, Keen Insights from a Sound Economist.

So John Robbins calls Walter Williams a sound economist. Now, if you know John Robbins, there's not a lot of people he would say that about. I mean, John Robbins was a very discriminating, and I mean that as a compliment, very discriminating intellect.

He's somebody who admired, you know, logic and precision of thought. And those are things that are fairly, unfortunately, very rare qualities, even among academics in our own day. But he called Walter Williams a sound economist.

So let's read a little bit from John Robbins' review of Walter Williams here. Quote, Dr. Walter Williams, chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Virginia, a syndicated columnist for the past 15 years, has collected his best newspaper columns from 1990 to 1994, sorted them into seven categories, and published them under the title Do the Right Thing.

Young Walter Williams grew up in North Philadelphia housing project in the 1930s and 40s. He thanks his, who having been abandoned, looks like the, sorry, the words a little bit cut off here. Oh, here we go.

Let me stretch this out here. Young Walter Williams grew up in a North Philadelphia housing project in the 1930s and 40s. He thanks his mother, who having been abandoned by her husband, raised two children by herself through difficult times.

She is the one who gave me a spirit of rebelliousness and taught me hard lessons about independence and discipline. He later went on to earn his doctorate in economics from UCLA. Dr. Williams also thanks Providence that enabled him to have teachers in high school and professors in college who didn't give a damn about what color I was and held me accountable to high standards.

The title Do the Right Thing reflects Dr. Williams' political philosophy in two important respects. It is not enough to think the right thing, though all right action must start with right thinking, it is necessary to do, to act.

Faith without works is mere lip service. Second, when one does act, one must do the right thing, the moral thing, not the expedient thing or the politic thing. Dr. Williams sees the source of American decline in the 20th century as moral rot in both our private lives and our public institutions.

In an age of philosophical and moral relativism, the BOMFOG, the ubiquitous and false platitudes about unity in the brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God, Dr. Williams' honesty and analysis may be painful for some delicate souls.

Regardless of whose sensibilities are offended, he writes, I do not hesitate to call the things as I see them. Why? Because I care about our country and fear for its future as a free and prosperous nation.

More importantly, Dr. Williams cares about the truth. Williams is controversial, but then anyone worth listening to is controversial. Long before William Sapphire thought of characterizing Hillary Clinton as a congenital liar, Williams recognized the political class, especially Congress, as charlatans, either ignorant or contemptuous of the Constitution.

Williams does not exaggerate. As one who worked on Capitol Hill for several years, I can attest to the accuracy of his observation. About the only thing sure to call forth more ridicule on the floor of Congress than a serious reference to the Constitution is a serious reference to the Bible as the Word of God.