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Bully Pulpit

The term "bully pulpit" stems from President Theodore Roosevelt's reference to the White House as a "bully pulpit," meaning a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda. Roosevelt often used the word "bully" as an adjective meaning superb/wonderful. The Bully Pulpit features news, reasoned discourse, opinion and some humor.

Sunday, December 31, 2006

In which it is demonstrated that a flair for rhetoric doesn't equal eloquence or intelligence

As usual, Thomas Sowell asserts authoritative-sounding conclusions after a shallow analysis that simply ignores any facts he finds inconvenient. ("How much is something or someone really worth?" Dec. 28)

Yes, a free market will dictate its own "fair price" for goods and services. Sowell falsely assumes we have one, then denigrates our basic American ideal of equal opportunity in the marketplace.

The recent congressional election shows that most Americans understand what Sowell refuses to acknowledge: Money buys power, and power makes money. We voted to stop our slide toward corrupt Third World economic circumstances, where business and government are walled off completely from moral and ethical considerations. Sowell may condemn it as moral exhibitionism and a whiney desire to redistribute "other peoples' money," but the real question is whether it became their money equitably.


Ruth Mary Weston

Well, well, well. Look what we have here. One of the Triad's very own double-digit IQ mouthpieces has broken bad and decided to take on no less an intellect that Thomas Sowell himself.

Two huge ironies struck me in Ruth Mary's letter. The first was her accusation that Dr. Sowell had engaged in shallow analysis and had ignored inconvenient facts. Hello pot, have you met kettle? Ruth Mary appears to have skimmed over Dr. Sowell's article and found all the convenient hooks on which to hang boilerplate leftist drivel. She even managed the obligatory and gratuitous reference to Jesus and scripture.

The second irony was that Ruth Mary rebutted Dr. Sowell with the same utopian, equalitarian nonsense that he has so efficiently dismembered in nearly all of his writing on economics and social conduct. While Dr. Sowell and the Austrians are certainly not joined at the hip, he has very effectively used the writings of Hayek and Von Mises, as well as his own conclusions to break down the Marxian arguments for enforcing equality at the point of a gun. As well, and to the first irony above, Dr. Sowell masterfully exposes the shallow thinking that underlies the pronouncements of equalitarians and socialists.

I am certainly no fan of corporatism and I undoubtedly have some problems with Dr. Sowell's writing on occasion, but here he is operating within the scope of basic laissez-faire capitalism. And there is the root of the matter. Ruth Mary has less a problem with Dr. Sowell and what he has written than she does with the entire concept of laissez-faire capitalism.

Ruth Mary is probably one of those semi-literate members of the local liberal echo chamber and has likely never had a serious intellectual challenge to any of the platitudes she mouths. Look at the venue she chose. I think it safe to assume that Dr. Sowell rarely, if ever, reads the Greensboro News and Record. Ruth Mary is counting on that, and counting on the very strong probability that Dr. Sowell, or even someone of his intellectual standing is not likely to challenge her nonsense this time, either.

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