Happy Birthday, Thomas Sowell

Another day, another birthday. This time for Thomas Sowell. Dr. Sowell is one of our nation's most sound thinkers. His writings on culture, economics, race, and children are among the best you will read. They include numerous books and a regular column.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from one of my favorites of his books, The Vision of the Anointed:

To those with the vision of the anointed, the public serves not only as a general object of disdain, but as a baseline from which to measure their own lofty heights, whether in art, politics, or other fields. Systemic processes which offer channels of expression of the public's views and values are to be circumscribed and circumvented. Art, music, and ballet are to be financed by compulsory exactions from the public, while ignoring or disdaining what the public itself wants or does not want. Similarly, so-called "public television"—taxpayer-subsidized television—is in fact the least responsive to the public's desires and most reflective of the vision of the anointed. Shamelessly one-sided propaganda for the environmentalist movement, for example, has become a staple of so-called "nature" programs on "public television" for years.

Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called "censorship." If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples rather than oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained usage of the word "censorship" appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed. If a public library declines to buy some avant-garde book approved by the anointed, because either the librarian of the taxpaying public does not like it, that is called "censorship"—even though the book remains freely available to all who wish to buy it and no library can possibly purchase even a tenth of all the books published, so that discretionary preferences are inevitable and the First Amendment does not guarantee either an audience of money.

There's lots more where that came from. Happy Birthday, Dr. Sowell.