Economic Prosperity Limited Only by Strength of Will

Thomas Sowell is really on top of his program here. Economic stagnation is just one of the tools that the progressive socialists use to maintain a group in a specific voting block. The blacks, for example, are told they have a right to not be productive because the culture says they are not equal to others, but all the while those that control the purse strings, political and economic, that are attached to a minority, they soar in the very culture that they say no one can advance without their help but never deliver. Is more food stamps and free phones the answer? What about jobs?  Where are the leaders, Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton when they are needed most?

How is this part of living in a free country? How is it that the progressives use this oppressive tool so effectively over and over again and are allowed to get away it by the people that are entrusted by the Constitution to seek out these abuses but sit on their collective hands, the national media and other organizations decanted to helping the disadvantaged like the NAACP?

Why is this? Who are they? What is their motivation to do nothing, or worse, lie about the catastrophic results of their negligence?  

Economic Mobility
Thomas Sowell                 

Most people are not even surprised any more when they hear about someone who came here from Korea or Vietnam with very little money, and very little knowledge of English, who nevertheless persevered and rose in American society. Nor are we surprised when their children excel in school and go on to professional careers.

Yet, in utter disregard of such plain facts, so-called "social scientists" do studies which conclude that America is no longer a land of opportunity, and that upward mobility is a "myth." Even when these studies have lots of numbers in tables and equations that mimic the appearance of science, too often their conclusions depend on wholly arbitrary assumptions.

Even people regarded as serious academic scholars often measure social mobility by how many people from families in the lower part of the income distribution end up in higher income brackets. But social mobility -- the opportunity to move up -- cannot be measured solely by how much movement takes place.

Opportunity is just one factor in economic advancement. How well a given individual or group takes advantage of existing opportunities is another. Only by implicitly (and arbitrarily) assuming that a failure to rise must be due to society's barriers can we say that American society no longer has opportunity for upward social mobility.

The very same attitudes and behavior that landed a father in a lower income bracket can land the son in that same bracket. But someone with a different set of attitudes and behavior may rise dramatically in the same society. Sometimes even a member of the same family may rise while a sibling stagnates or falls by the wayside.

Ironically, many of the very people who are promoting the idea that the "unfairness" of American society is the reason why some individuals and groups are not advancing are themselves a big part of the reason for the stagnation that occurs.

The welfare state promoted by those who insist that it is society that is keeping some people down makes it unnecessary for many low-income people to exert themselves -- and therefore makes it unnecessary for them to develop their own potential to the fullest.

The multiculturalist dogma that says one culture is just as good as another paints people into the cultural corner where they happened to have been born, even if other cultures around them have features that offer better prospects of rising.

Just speaking standard English in an English-speaking country can improve the odds of rising. But multiculturalists' celebration of foreign languages or ethnic dialects, and of counterproductive cultural patterns exemplified by such things as gangsta rap, can promote the very social stagnation that they blame on "society."