Walter Williams ask; “Are We Equal?”
Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal -- or should be equal -- is foolhardy and creates mischief. Let’s look at it.
Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men’s intelligence has far greater variability. That means that though there are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots. The latter might partially explain why more men are in jail than women.
Watch any Saturday afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the minds of liberals everywhere: “Does this look like America?” Among the 10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. If you want to see the team’s white players, you must look at the bench. A Japanese or Chinese player is close to being totally out of the picture, even on the bench. Professional basketball isn’t much better, with 80 percent of the players being black, but at least there are a couple of Chinese players. Professional football isn’t much better, with blacks being 65 percent. In both sports, blacks are among the highest-paid players and have the highest number of awards for excellence. Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.
By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL's ice hockey players. But don’t fret about black NHL underrepresentation. State underrepresentation is worse. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Mississippi or Louisiana. Any way we cut it, there is simply no racial proportionality or diversity in professional basketball, football and hockey.
A more emotionally charged question is whether we have equal intelligence. Take Jews, for example. They are only 3 percent of the U.S. population. Half-baked theories of racial proportionality would predict that 3 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates are Jews, but that’s way off the mark. Jews constitute a whopping 39 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. At the international level, the disparity is worse. Jews are not even 1 percent of the world’s population, but they constitute 20 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners.
There are many other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population, and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. I’m personally wondering what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men. Population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women.
Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we’d be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality's being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.
By Walter Williams. Professor of economics at George Mason University.
Comments
Perhaps the brilliant mind of Mr. Walter Williams was attempting to make a point, in a somewhat lighthearted way, that governments attempting to make all of us equal are a fool’s errand?
That was my personal take away.
We are now economic slaves to this left/liberal/progressive/socialist/communist/Democrat administration. There are still people in the world who are taught that they should do no physical work, that they should have others labor for them. They prefer slaves; they believe that the rest of us are their cattle. There is a book called, "White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves" At the same time that we were being sold slaves in this country, European and Americans were being sold into slavery in North Africa. Between 1 and 2.5 million white slaves were captured, broken, sold, misused, starved and killed until our Navy cleaned out the Barbary pirates from North Africa. That's where the Marine song got the lyrics, "from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli"; Tripoli is in North Africa. We were much desired as slaves; we were hard working, knowledgeable, creative, and enjoyed for illicit purposes. That was at the same time that the same people, in the same ways, with the same results were selling slaves to America. We need to know who these people were and what their belief system is. We need accurate information to make good decisions, history is our best teacher.
Hi Guys, Are we talking about/ or voicing personal opinions here today [which is OK and legal...lol], or giving some Biblical insight [which takes a little research and work]?? Both are good and fine, but one of them are far superior. One is the current idea, interpretation, general consensus, or observation.... and one is the REAL DEAL, the absolute Truth of the Word. I just want to get along, if possible. Have a great day! --Tommy Schuckman
Ed, Good way to put it!
All men are created equal, but they immediately begin to diverge.
Semper Fidelis
Louie, Ummm, wrong answer again. We Saved Christian will continue to sin now matter how much we try not to -- until we are either dead or Raptured to heaven. sorry. But that doesn't mean that we would want to willfully sin!
I agree with what you stated: ..."You must love the Lord God with all your heart and strength... and you must love your neighbor as yourself." What we must also do is not sin because any sin offends God. The Commandments when broken out tells us what is a sin. If we love God we will not offend Him. If we say we love God and continually sin then we are kidding ourselves.
Louie B, While I certainly respect your comments and like them, I see some serious error in them, sir. For one thing, all well read, real Christian KNOW that WE are not under the 'Old Law Covenant' anymore since our Lord, Jesus was put to death on the cross! That Old Law was 'superceded' by the "New Covenant" as dictated by Christ..."You must love the Lord God with all your heart and strength... and you must love your neighbor as yourself." Too, the 10 Commandments listed at Exodus 20:1, are just the beginning of the next 300 other binding Commandments, many of which carried the Death penalty... making them very important too. So now we know who reads their bible and who don't. Thank you for your comment.
Historian: What we all have in common is that we are children of God. He loves all of us equally but He does consider Jewish people special. That does not mean that He loves us less.
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