http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._WilliamsWalter E. Williams, (born March 31, 1936) is an American economist, commentator, and academic. He is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author known for his libertarian views.[2]
Reason has called Williams "one of the country’s leading libertarian voices."[3] In 2009, Greg Ransom, a writer for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, ranked Williams as the third most important "Hayekian" Public Intellectual in America, behind only Thomas Sowell and John Stossel.[5]
As an economist, Williams often speaks and writes in favor of free market economics and against socialist systems and government intervention. He "is perhaps best known for his rigorous, fact-based argument that the free market is a force for racial equality."[3] Williams has said "That's a challenge I love: making economics fun and understandable."[6] He has also said: "I praise lassez-faire capitalism as being the most moral and most productive system man has ever devised. Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man."[7]
Williams supports legalization of selling one's own bodily organs on the grounds that it increases the supply of organs for transplant. He also makes the libertarian argument that the true proof of whether or not an individual owns something is whether or not he/she has the right to sell it. If selling organs is illegal, he says, then, consequently, individuals do not own their own bodies.[8]
He is also a critic of the minimum wage and affirmative action, believing that both practices are detrimental to both blacks and liberty. Williams has penned a number of pieces detailing his view that minimum wage increases are harmful to low-skill workers.[9][10][11] Williams especially emphasizes his belief that racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States are overemphasized as problems faced by the black community and do not adequately explain the situation blacks face today.
Holding libertarian viewpoints, Williams criticizes gun control as endangering the innocent and failing to reduce crime. Williams opposes anti-discrimination laws in the private sector on the libertarian grounds of freedom of association.
He has gone on record as advocating the Free State Project in at least two columns and once on television. The Williams endorsement correlated with the largest single membership jump in the first 5000 phase of the project, a jump even higher than the results of the project being Slashdotted. He also believes in the right of U.S. states to secede from the union as several states attempted to do during the Civil War.[12] Williams has supported or been sympathetic toward various secessionist ideas in his writings.[13] "As I got a little older I had it mostly polished when I was in college in terms of the ideas of liberty. And also I must have read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense I don’t know how many times. At least twenty-thirty times, and that kind of instilled some radical ideas in me as Thomas Paine was trying to instill in the colonists. Affirmative action has led to, I believe, many Black people expecting favors from the system and not working as hard as they otherwise would, that is if you know that you can get into college because of affirmative action—or some people call it diversity nowadays—well then why work as hard in high school? So it might undermine some of the spirit of people. And I think that the basic premise of those who advocate affirmative action is that the problems that Black Americans face today are the result of racial discrimination."
In reaction to the racial hyper-sensitivity he saw in higher education, in the 1970's Williams started offering white colleagues a gag certificate of amnesty and pardon to all white people for Western Civilization's sins against blacks - and "thus obliged them not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry." He now offers it to anyone through his website. [14]
In his work, Williams builds on the economics of the previously mentioned Thomas Sowell, as well as those of Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, and he has described Ayn Rand's Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal as "one of the best defenses and explanations of capitalism one is likely to read."[15] Williams frequently fills in as host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program when Limbaugh is traveling.
