More Walter E. Williams Vomitus

Some Walter Williams columns kinda sorta make sense even if they are based on flawed reasoning. This column doesn't pass the semi-rational test. http://lubbockonline.com/editorial-columnists/2012-03-26/williams-cities-liberal-agenda-dont-serve-black-residents#comment-216063

Williams uses crime as an index of how "the liberal agenda" has failed. But criminal laws are the same, whether one is in Detroit or in a wealthy white Republican enclave in the same state. Miranda rights are exactly the same.

Indeed, you will find that a particular crime is likely to bring a stiffer sentence and higher probability of conviction if the defendant is black. So in Scarsdale, a white defendant is more likely to get probation than a black defendant in Buffalo. This is the reverse of what Williams is claiming.

If you look at the realities of arrests and sentencing and the criminal justice system as a whole, whites get more liberal justice than blacks.

Why then did the murder rate increase after the 1950s? Was it liberalism? Or was it the growth of the drug culture? Was it increased prosperity in the black population? Were more blacks able to buy guns than before? Was it because of the flight of whites from inner cities? Increasing population? Was it because of the pervasiveness of modia and advertising and the bitterness blacks felt about being denied a part of the American dream? All of these are possibilities.

And an economist should be aware that the structure of our economy has drastically changed. The trend has been toward more low-paying jobs and high-pay highly skilled jobs with little in between, which has been a total social and economic upheaval in this country.

Wiliams doesn't come out and say that a higher black crime rate was linked to the civil rights movement and an end to segregation but he might have; the correlation is there, and he is basing his argument on correlation.

Mr Williams is a rare species, a rara avis, because he is black and conservative and Republican. And so newspapers like the AJ can put his column up against their masthead and feel righteous and PC as they accomplish two ordinarily incompatible goals, having a black columnist on their editorial page and at the same time serving up more conservative drivel.