By Thomas Sowell
Thursday, July 04, 2013
The fundamental problem of the political left seems to be
that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the
real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently
their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending source of grievances for the left is the
fact that some groups are "over-represented" in desirable
occupations, institutions and income brackets, while other groups are
"under-represented."
From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed
on the left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are
simply better at different things.
Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate
share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or
grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the
past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional
basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the
population is white?
Most of the leading photographic lenses in the world have
-- for generations -- been designed by people who were either Japanese or
German. Most of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either
India's Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere.
Not only people but things have been grossly unequal.
More than two-thirds of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the
middle of the United States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are
higher than 20,000 feet and Africa has none. Is it news that a disproportionate
share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East?
Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or
performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole
races, nations and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the
political left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why
outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.
All this moral melodrama has served as a background for
the political agenda of the left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor
out of poverty and in general make the world a better place. This claim has
been made for centuries, and in countries around the world. And it has failed
for centuries in countries around the world.
Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the
left occurred in 18th century France, where the very concept of the left
originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of
the National Assembly.
The French Revolution was their chance to show what they
could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised
-- "liberty, equality, fraternity" -- what they actually produced
were food shortages, mob violence and dictatorial powers that included
arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre,
who died under the guillotine.
In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the left
-- Communism -- spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over
a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet
Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.
Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of
national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.
If the preconceptions of the left were correct, central
planning by educated elites with vast amounts of statistical data at their
fingertips, expertise readily available, and backed by the power of government,
should have been more successful than market economies where millions of
individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.
But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and
communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more
market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did
not end the noisy claims of the left.
In the United States, those claims and policies reached
new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy
and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which ObamaCare
has been only the most obvious example.
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