Now book tvs indepth program with williams. He tackles many issues including race, education, environment, health care and more. Host Walter Williams. You writemo its difficult to ba goodte economist an be certify perceived as compassionist. Often one hasre to avoid unpleasant questions. Guest that is absolutely right. To be a good economist you have to y look at cause and effect. Something, someone has to tal about cost. A lot of times people dont like to talk about costs. Host is an economist a coldblooded creatures . Guest i dont think so. I think i am a nice person. One of my issues, to help understand me, my initial premise is the each own ourselves. I am my private prope that he is ai am my private property in you are your private property. If you accept the idea of some ownership theacn cecpter ttain e moral internet acts are in mora lets say the reason what rape is immoral is because it violates private property. Murder violates private property and sodas theft. Does so, i think a good vision of how the world should be from a moral standpoint is you look at theor initial parameter. L p host what about the concept of the common good . G . Guest the common good does it make a lot of sense whatsoever. I think a lot of things have lot been done in the name of common good. Nam what hitler did in germany was o me done in the name of common good and i think many horrible acts that we see around the a world and over the history of the world has been done in thehr name of common good and has beeo not not been very moral. Host mini view americans education as a failure, but in a f at least one important way it has been a success. A success of dumbing down the nation so we follow easy prey to charlatans, hustlersg dowons,. H guest i think that is. Absolutely right. I think if you just look at i dont watch any of the debates, but if you look at some of the debate and particularly those of the on the democratic side of the spectrum, you find that americans dont really care about the character of the person and what they are calling for port our nation and i think its because i think americans character of a person. Have become dumbed down by the educational system, but there is another success and educational system and that is teachers and the people who run the educational system, they have far greater powerwho and fewer accountability standards than they have ever had. Host you spent quite a bit of timehad. Host you spe wris education. What has happened here in your view . Guest i think there are several things that have happened that dont yelp for the good of the system. Appe i think onene has been the gross monopolization of education in our country. Syem. I believe the numbers around 1950, there were 52000 School Districts in our country. Ion in. Today, there are about 13000 School Districts, so there is a massive consolidation. I dont think that is good for our system. Then, i think that there are fewer accountability standards,t both for students and both foraa educators. That isbity s, we see that teacs and principals get pay raises and promotions whether the kids can read or write and kids get their diploma whether they can di wher write. I think a sterling commitment condemnation for the School System is the fact that Incoming Freshman in college are not ready for college. I think something close to 50 have to take remedial education either in reading, writing or mathematics. That is saying that the Public Schools are issuing fraudulent diplomas. That is they are issuing athe diploma that certifies that aevn kid can read and write at 12cant grade level, when in fact he cannot. Host what do you teach . T guest economic theory, microeconomic theory and innomi. Nepal, i teach our first phd pourse with her incoming phd students i teach them the microeconomic theory and in the spring, either intermediate which his undergraduate course in academic theory. Host what you want your students to learn by the time they graduate . Studeno guest i would love for my students to share my values, but i dont talk about my values int class. What i hope that they gain frome my class is to learn how torn think. That is to learn how to engage in dispassionate analysis and hopefully if they get out in the world and they get in policy commissions if they can engage in dispatch analysis they can come up with compassionate policies or compassionate ideass host what kind of education o you have . Guest well, i tell people and its not nice of me to say this, but i tell people that im very happy that i got virtually all of my i received virtually all of my education before ivedl became fashionable for white wha people to like black people and what, i mean, by that is that when i earned a c in high school or college, that was a realh sc honest to god c that i earned and when i earned on a that wast real honest to god a that i earned and those people did not care about the legacy of discrete nation. They didnt care about my handicaps of beingheye about my they held to standards and i think that is good and many i think man students, both black and white are not, blac held up to a high standard. For example, in my Junior High School one of their assignmentso was to write a three page essayn and i received my essay back from the teacher on two has a occasions torn into four pieces with a little note on top of it, at least you can spell correctly, rewrites. But, if a teacher did that today the teacher might be in a lot of trouble. Because she might be hurting thg kids feelings of selfesteem, well, when i was going to School Teachers to give a damn about my selfesteem is the one in your book, up from the projects, europe autobiography, youth gues right about doctor rosenberg, i believe it was, one of your teachers see two he was my englh english teacher in high school and i thought very highly of te him, but and he used to come to school early and he taught college tutorial english. Englio those kids that he saw that hads some college potential would arrive at 7 00 a. M. And he would drill us on english, topics and grammar. Anyway, one day in class what he had the habit of doing or what his teaching techniques was to write a sentence on the board and have one of the students correct the sentence. T board. So, one day he wrote a sentencen on the board and a student, error in the sentence and he was about ready to erase the to er sentence from the board andas ie raise my head and said doctor rosenberg, there is anotherd error and he looked at it awhndt said what is it and i said there is lack of agreement between the subject of the object of verb to be and so he said very very frin good. You are very alert the smartingn and so ig said to my friend sitting beside me i said here i pay taxes for the teacher thath teach me and i have to teach them and he heard me and went into a tirades theory he williams, teaching this material is like casting pearls beforepes the swine. Bef he said you will never beated w anything he was really frustrated with me itd tand legitimatelyhe so because i ws that kind of clown in class, but hes addressing me that way was the first real challenge that ia had in high school and i ultimately graduated second inad my class, but i needed that kinl do. Dressing down. Can you imagine what would happen to a white teacher telling a black saying the same thing to a black kid today that doctor rosenberg said to me . D tme . He would be kicked out of the school. He would be called a racist. E w gselinld be condemned or not caring enough about the kids feelings and selfesteem. Host one of your books is called race economics. What does economics have to odo with race . Ur eco of confusion guest i think there is a lot of confusion between race and economics, but i think race has economics. Played a role in our country in terms of the economic wellbeing of lets say blacks or other discriminated against minorities and it has had an effect. Minorii book, race economics i point out when the is that ther, di disk discrimination does not explain as much assc peopler think it explains about the problems of race in our countrya host this is a common 1997. T you wrote for years i said the wd klux klan wanted to sabotage black dimmick excellence they couldnt find the tool more effective than the public School System most excellenc major citm you are going to junior highf b about the time of brown versusf board of education. Guest high school. Thataf host did that affect you at all or change your classes . Guest no, it didnt. I went tong a predominantlye blk school in north philadelphia. It was Benjamin Franklin high school and at the time the german franco high school was wi the lowest rated school in the city. It was north philadelphia, but on the back. However,lphiominat if you can ia time tunnel and you could pull Benjamin Franklin up to todayenn than benjamin frankly would probably one of the highestiladl rated schools in the city of philadelphia and the reason why is that standards, educationaln standards have plummeted so much. My statement have plted so aboux klan, i have often said if you want to sabotage any chance of a black Academic Excellence youlle couldve had a better way you cf the public School System in most cities. Schoo but we do see is that most americans are unaware of and particularly black americans are unaware is that the average, black High School Graduate or the average black high school 12th grader has the reading, writing, math and Civics Knowledge of the average whiteer seven door eighth grader. A48 g i mean, that is a devastating statistic that is where a majority of the blacks graduatea from high school with a grossly fraudulent diploma. Now, the quality of education that white students get is nothing to write home about. Thats because the standards are very low. Thats according to recent National Assessment of educational progress statistics for 2015. I think that its only 30 or 40 of white Students Court proficient in reading and math, but for blacks its 7 score proficient in math and i think like 10 score proficient in reading. Audule host where do why those . Ost ritiesnt guest well, there are probably a number of reasons. Nuf one has to do with Education System in general, but i think one of the things we have to recognize is that that there are many input seguin education and its some of it inputs are they are it doesnt make a i difference on howt much money u spend on education. Ccur. Education would not occur. In other words, what i am sayinn is that for a kid to do well in school, someone must make sure e 8 0 the kid is in bed by eight or 9 00 p. M. At night. Mebodyust someone must get them up in the morning and get them breakfast. Someone must make sure they arrive at school on time fornd e someone must make sure they doe. E, ir homework and someone must make sure that he minds the teacher cured if that is not d done, i dont care how much you money that you put into education budget, education will not occur unless those things are done and if you asked the y questionou, well, can politicias do those things, and then president of the United States can make sure that a kid is in bed on time, can a mayor or anga cons punishment or senator no, you need a parents and by the way, i think you need to nk parents. Arents. Host when it did in your view when did this start to switch . Th becomewhene standards reality and when did the changes in education take place . Guest i think if i were just too try to find a time i would think during the 60s and 70s. Standards began to change. Mber m as a matter of fact, i remembero my mother used to complain abou the preachings of doctor spock saying you should not thinkk, yr children. Regardless of what doctor spock advised, i got spanked. Regar so,dles i think what we saw to e ad started to in terms of education we started to move away from things that work very well to things that sounded good as we went from things that worked d ll to doing things that sound good at things that sounded good ward very productive. N as a matter fact, one example of this is to say i live in a high Income Neighborhood in the state a of pennsylvania. H in but,co and my wife had been tryg to get me to move my daughter m out of this fairly good publicuf high school and i was resisting it because tuition at the private school was like 14000 a year. School practis back in 80s. What convinced me to move her t the private school was a Parent Teacher meeting that i had with her teachers and her mathscho teacher all of her teacherseah were in the room and the math teacher said, well, your daughter has not been turning in her assignments on time and sloppy work and had not beenk, h paying attention. Them i said why dont you flunk her . T we dont know anything about it. He said we dont like to flunk the kids. We like the kids to feel good. About themselves and i told him i feel good about myself everyvy time i solve a set of aquaticqus equations and i told my wife t that evening lets start looking for a private school. Host did the standards change . Ht d guest yes. Ac a matter fact, one of theerf things that the private school we were interviewing several he schools and the school we ultimately decided to send my nt hter to, the head matures mistress said we dont hhiigher education majors. Yo that is if you teach a course ic english you had to have your degree in english and if you had teach a course in matthew have to have your degree in math and also, if my daughter was slack on some of her jobs, some of her work, we knew within the nextf two days because they send a report home and if she did something very well, we would na know that as well. Member of an host in an interview that you did with the national reviey magazine, you say im not a i member of any party. I call myself a jeffersonian liberal. A we need to take back the word liberal because people who use it to describe themselves today are not liberal at all. Ople it goes onto say that williamsl. Is in large part a libertarian, but some people call a Classical Liberal though he says he splitn with many libertarians on National Defense and Foreign Policy that he doesnt mind being labeled a conservative c2 well,poli i have been called a e lot of things in my nearly 80n years of life, but yes, i think we need toye take back the words liberal from liberals because liberal essentiallyls bu means that you are for a person of liberty and people who call themselves liberals today are not for personal liberty they are for saying things like using the government to forcibly use one american to serve theent toc purpose of another ande they are anything but freedom oriented. Tt host how did you get from the projects of north philadelphia, to economics professor at George Mason University in washington suburbs . Guest well, it was not an easy trip. You know, one who has gone from where i started to where i am now, you dont to that without luck and chance. Tat with and help from many other people i mean, im not a self made person but, i think very significant about my journey is joat its a wonderful testament about our nation. P in that is, just because you knowte where someone ended up in life, you can be sure about where he started. Is so and i think that is so great about our nation. Thats part of the uniqueness of the United States. E noti a class society. The trope, if you dont start at the topot goi he were not goingt to the top, but in the unitedart states is possible if you start at the bottom and you move all the way to the top and interestingly if you look at thf if you look at forbes list of the 50 or the 100 richest people in the United States, yod dont find the names like rockefeller, carnegie, ford and all of these people. You find new money, steve jobs, bill gates and its relatively people that start out withrela relatively modest incomes are middleclassti and they moved to be the richest people in the world and i think that is a great commentary about the United States and something that we should work hard to preserve. Host i happen to watch any of the debates so far . Guest im not turned on by oliticians that much. F th i think that the political worll is important, but i think politicians are salesmen and they are trying to sell peopleo on their particular vision or try to get people to vote for them and they will maybe use any tools at their disposal to gettm people to vote for them. T im just not turned on by politicians. Host in fact, up from the projects page 128 you write its always been my opinion that say for a precious fewrespect congressmen these people are not deserving of the honor andi r respect they receive. I regard most of themegarm sa ay of both of the constitution and the moral precept of our Founding Fathers c2 that is ge absolutely right. And i think that any politiciant who would rigorously live up to their oath of office and uphold the United States constitutionde which is not elected to office by the American People because reat politicians reflect, they reflect the values and views of willAmerican People. That is those that will electof them to office. Now, some people might say thats a bit strong, well, what we might ask ourselves what would happen to politicians thaa had the vision of say James Madison and in 1784, congress appropriated 15000 to help some french refugee. James madison stood on the four of the house i rate and said in v a virtually quoting him i cann undndertake the way my finger on that article in the constution o that authorizes congress to spend the money of their constituents for the purposes. If you look at the federal budget, two thirds and three quarters of it is poor the purposes of benevolent. Just ask yourself, what with the American People do to a politician or to Anyone Running for office who would make a Statement Like madison did . Ent s or make anot