Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
8,852 posts, read 10,460,349 times
Reputation: 6670
Advertisements
Quote:
Originally Posted by knowledgeiskey
As a liberal, I'm very enlightened by what this guy says. He knows what he's talking about.
Why isn't he revered along the same basis as Noam Chomsky?
Sowell occasionally has some interesting and even innovative ideas. The problem is he then tries way too hard to shoehorn those ideas into conservative ideologies and agendas. Which would still be OK, except he's often just so obvious, clumsy and heavy-handed about it.
When it comes to being 'heavy-handed', I suggest you watch the most bombastic hour in the history of North American TV, aka 'Hardball With Chris Matthews'.
Next to him, Howard Stern is about as bombastic as Felix The Cat.
When it comes to being 'heavy-handed', I suggest you watch the most bombastic and unquestionably heavy-handed hour in the history of North American television, aka 'Hardball With Chris Matthews'.
Sowell isn't a mainstream intellectual because he's substantially smarter than 99.99999% of the rest of them who pollute our TV screens and media outlets every single day, and lefties can't stand him either.
As a liberal, I'm very enlightened by what this guy says. He knows what he's talking about.
Why isn't he revered along the same basis as Noam Chomsky?
I was having a discussion with a liberal person on this forum a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that I felt Sowell was an intellectual giant and her response was that Sowell wasn't reputable. That was her exact term. He isn't "reputable"
I think that answers your question. 80% of the education establishment is left wing. When people judge a person not on the quality of their scholarship or ideas but on how much they agree with them, and with 4 out of 5 being liberal, then it stands to reason that conservative thinkers will be denigrated no matter how powerful an intellect they have.
I'm not laying this at the feet of liberals as a fault of theirs - If 80% of the academic would was conservative I have no doubt the same thing would be true in reverse. It's just a sign of our polarized times, and since the liberals are the ones in power in academia it is the conservatives who get shortchanged.
When it comes to being 'heavy-handed', I suggest you watch the most bombastic and unquestionably heavy-handed hour in the history of North American television, aka 'Hardball With Chris Matthews'.
Sowell isn't a mainstream intellectual because he's substantially smarter than 99.99999% of the rest of them who pollute our TV screens and media outlets every single day, and lefties can't stand him either.
It sometimes surprises me that Krauthamer gets as much airtime as he does. He's not in Sowell's league but he is also pretty cerebral compared to the usual talking heads you see.
I believe in contrast, with Justice Douglas, that "The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
I think a full slate of impartial originalists would be far superior to any contrast. I believe the best interpretation would be gotten by a slate of people looking for the original intent rather than a slate of different perspectives all looking to twist the words to mean what they want them to mean.
I wouldn't call Sowell a libertarian. He spoke on the behalf of Robert Bork, a judge who didn't believe in privacy.
Bork spoke against interpreting the constitution to say there was a right of privacy in it. That is not saying he didn't believe in privacy. Those are two very different things. I don't think supporting Bork says anything at all about Sowell not being a libertarian.
It's one thing for a libertarian to say how the law ought to be, and another thing to say how the law is. Bork is absolutely right - there is no constitutional right to privacy. It simply isn't there. That doesn't mean you don't have a right to privacy. It just means the constitution does not guarantee a right to privacy. The 9th amendment explicitly states that rights may exist that the constitution does not cover. Privacy may be one such right.
Any decent libertarian should support Bork. The principle that Bork espouses is a libertarian principle. If you do not support what Bork he has said about privacy as being libertarian, then you have no ground upon which to stand as a libertarian for for any of your beliefs. The principle that Bork uses in denying a constitutional right to privacy is saying that the constitution is explicit and you may not simply make stuff up on a whim that isn't in there. So you are left with no constitutional grounds to use in opposing gun control, banning drugs, outlawing gay marriage, mandating confiscatory tax rates, nationalizing industries, etc. Because if you grant the government the ability to find a right to privacy which is nonexistent in the constitution then you also grant the government to find any other ability they may wish to find. And limiting government power as a principle is as libertarian as it gets. The solution to what Bork said is to pass an amendment guaranteeing a right to privacy. It is not to simply declare the right is constitutionally guaranteed as written. You open the door up to all sorts of government abuse if you do that.
So you need to think on the difference between being "against privacy" and being "against a constitutional guarantee to a right to privacy as the constitution is currently written"
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
