Published By: All Right Magazine on November 4, 2009

In this exclusive interview, Economics Professor and Rush Limbaugh guest host Walter E. Williams tackles everything from the economy to the Great Depression to “Black Economics” to the perfect gift for the Mrs. this holiday season.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In your book, Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism, you wrote that American education is “in shambles.”  Simultaneously there is a major push to have more and more people attend college.  These students are the freshmen in your classes, so what’s the most egregious example of miseducation you have seen personally in the classroom?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh, well.  I’ve seen students who cannot do simple mathematical computations, students who have very poor use of the language.  Let me give you one example.  Some years ago (I haven’t noticed it recently or I haven’t taught the introductory classes where I do get a lot of freshmen.) I’ve come across students writing in their bluebook.  They cite something, and spell it several different ways, site, cite, sight, not being able to differentiate between the various terms.  Then a lot of it is that students are many times just plain lazy.  They don’t want to do the work.  They expect a high grade for a mediocre performance.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: “C” means average, but then they want the “A” or excellent score?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh, absolutely.  I did a column a couple of weeks ago, and if you look at since 1960, grade point averages have been rising, but SAT scores have been falling, which tells you something about grade inflation in colleges.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You are a professor of economics.  If a student walked into your office at George Mason University, declared that she were quitting college, but wanted to know one thing about economics for the real world, what would it be?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: There’s no free lunch.  That is that there’s nothing free.  Everything costs.  That’s one of the problems that our economy’s facing right now or that Americans are facing.  They think that they can get free health care.  They can get free education or free transportation, or that cleaner air does not cost us anything.  And so, that’s one of the uncomfortable things about economists.  We tell people that things cost, and when you say things cost, that simply means that when you get more of one thing, you have to give up something else.  That is, nothing is free.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You have called attention to something called the Enumerated Powers Act that would require Congress to list the Constitutional authority for each law, which has not yet, of course, passed.  Even so, wouldn’t the claim just be the General Welfare Clause, or the Necessary and Proper Clause?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Yeah.  Congress will always find a way around the Constitution.  However, I think if you read the Enumerated Powers Act that’s sponsored by Congressman John Shadegg, who has introduced it every Congress since 1995, it does not allow them to get away with the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause.  They have to specifically point in the Constitution where they get the authority.  And as a matter of fact the reason the Enumerated Powers Act’s maximum number of co-sponsors in the House has been 31, or it could be a bit higher than that (and it has never had a co-sponsor in the Senate until this year) is that the Congressmen can read the writing on the wall.  If Congress were forced to obey the United States Constitution, then I would say that two-thirds to three-quarters of all the spending Congress does would be found to be unconstitutional.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You’re probably right about that.  Article 1, Section 8 has a very short list of things government is able to do according to the word of the law.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s right, and if you read the Founders’ statements, they say that Congress can only do those things that are specifically enumerated.  On my web page Walter E. Williams.com, I have quotes from Madison and Jefferson, and I believe that Jefferson said that Congress cannot do anything in the general welfare but only those things specifically enumerated.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Those quotes are full of that kind of thing because they were trying to get away from King George III and Parliament and some of those decisions.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s absolutely right, and Americans do not understand the level of contempt that Congress has for the Constitution because here’s a guy or a woman who puts their hand on a bible and swears to uphold the Constitution, and the first thing they do is try to tear it down.  However, the more worrisome thing is that I wonder whether the contempt by Congressmen for the Constitution just represents the contempt Americans for the Constitution, that is if you said to Americans, look, this Social Security program, it’s not authorized by the Constitution, and we’re going to get rid of it, they would go ape.  Or if you say, look, this senior citizen prescription drug program is not in the Constitution, so we’re going to end it, you’d have these people rioting.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Everybody wants to cut spending except on his or her personal slice of the pork, it seems.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Right, but the key point here is that Congress’ contempt for the United States Constitution might be simply representative of the general contempt among the population of the American people.  One of the tragic things is that if by magic, James Madison were running for the presidency in 2008 making the kind of statements he made when he was President and also when he was at the Philadelphia convention, the American people might even lynch him.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  He might not even get the chance to make the statements because they would take one look at him on television, being 5’4” and 120 pounds, and they wouldn’t take him seriously.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Yeah.  One of the quotations on my page is what he said in 1794.  In 1794 Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees.  James Madison stood on the floor of the House irate and said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to spend the money of its constituents for the purpose of benevolence.”

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And he’s the Father of the Constitution, so there’s no wiggle room there.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s right, and if you look at federal expenditures today, two-thirds or three quarters of it is for the purpose of benevolence. Handouts to farmers, handouts to business, bailouts, food stamps, Social Security, prescription drugs, just name it.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One time on the radio you said the Republicans are almost as bad as the Democrats because they’ll take your money and give it to a different set of people.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah.  The Democrats believe in taking your money and my money and giving it to poor people in cities, and Republicans believe in taking your money and my money and giving it to banks and farmers.  They both agree on taking our money.  They just disagree on what to use it for, and the last Republican Congress is evidence of that. When Republicans had control of the White House, and the House of Representatives, and the Senate, they went on a spending binge.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: It seems that when Gingrich and the Contract with America had sort of expired, that was the end of that kind of thing.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: And they just proved that it’s a matter of whose ox is being gored.  And so this is one of the faults that many people make.  They think they can change what goes on in Washington D.C. by changing the personalities involved, by electing different people.  That’s not very optimistic because if you elect somebody to office, they’re going to find the same constraints as anybody else, so what we have to do is change the rules of the game.  That is we have to, for example, have a spending limitation amendment to the Constitution saying that Congress can only spend a certain percentage of the GDP.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Or at the very least the balanced budget amendment that never quite happened.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I’m against the balanced budget amendment.  Look at it.  Our GDP, our gross domestic product, is $14 trillion.  I would not be happy if Congress spent $14 trillion and taxed us $14 trillion.  We’d have a balanced budget, but we’d be slaves.  The point is to limit federal spending and not worry about the balanced budget.  I’d much rather have an unbalanced budget where Congress spends $4 trillion and taxes us $2 trillion.  We’d be freer.  And Congress would just love a balanced budget amendment in the sense that they’d always be able to say we must raise taxes to balance the budget.  Spending could just go through the roof, and then they could come back and say there’s an amendment saying we have to balance the budget, so up your taxes go.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: How dangerous are both the current deficits and the overall national debt?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: They’re very dangerous.  The national debt will never be paid off.  Congress will repudiate the debt.  That’s what all countries do with a national debt when it gets out of line.  And one way to repudiate the debt is just inflate the currency.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And so then you have a Weimar Republic situation?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Well, hopefully it won’t get that bad.  But I think that we run a real risk of seeing the inflation during the Jimmy Carter days as the good times.  I would surely hope that won’t be the case.  But see the Federal Reserve has the capacity to break the back of an inflation, but you can imagine next year or the year after, there’s been some revival in the economy and we’re clipping along but prices are rising and the Federal Reserve starts tight money policy, they’re going to run into all kinds of political gunfire as a result.  People will say just as the economy is getting on its feet the Federal Reserve is starting the tight money policy to stifle the economy.  That will be the political argument against the Federal Reserve pulling in the reigns on the money supply.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: And that would be another one of those potential populace rebellions too when all of a sudden the interest rate on the house will be 10%.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: And what you’re going to have is the inflation and the higher interest rates, but they might just disguise it, that’s all, but we’re still going to suffer from the spending binge we’ve been on.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Speaking of that, how will the average person know when the economy has recovered?  What are the best signs?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I think that one of the signs is the recovery in the equity markets.  And what equity markets are really about is that they’re guessing how the future will be, short term, at least.  And there are leading indicators of recovery and lagging indicators of recovery, and employment is one of the lagging ones.  Why employment has not increased the way it has been promised to increase is that firms are becoming more productive.  They are finding out that they can do more things with fewer workers.   In this recovery, the employment will not rebound as rapidly as it has in the past.  Firms have found ways to economize on the most costly input, namely labor.  If they can get machines that don’t need sick days off, and don’t demand higher wages and health insurance and all these other things, they’ll surely choose those methods of production in contrast to wage labor.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  This is the 80^th anniversary of the Stock Market crash that contributed to the onset of the Great Depression.  Is this current economic situation the worst since the Great Depression, as it is often said?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I don’t know.  And first of all the stock market crash had absolutely nothing to do with the Great Depression.  If you look at, just look at the numbers there, by mid-year 1930, the stock market had recovered its October losses.  But nonetheless the Great Depression went on until 1946.  And what caused the Great Depression and what extended the length of the depression was failure by government.  The Federal Reserve Bank changed money supply by 25% and then Hoover and the Democratic Congress raised taxes 25% to 63% and then the New Deal legislation regulating the economy made it worse.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And that doesn’t even include the Roosevelt Recession in ‘37.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah, and Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, around 1937 said, “Mr. President, we have spent more money than we have ever spent, and it has not done any good in terms of revitalizing the economy.”

Now I think one of the things Americans do not realize is that we have been around since 1787, and we went from 1787 until 1930 experiencing depressions, and sometimes they called them panics, of a duration between one and six years.  Nobody until 1930 thought that the federal government ought to be involved in the economy in terms of stimulus packages, bailouts, and all that kind of stuff.  Each time we had a depression, and we came out of it.   A good example is 1921.  There was a sharp downturn in the economy.  Nothing was done about it, and we recovered by 1922-23 and just went off to the Roaring Twenties with no government program.  And rather remarkably, when we did have a government program in 1930 under the Hoover and the Roosevelt administrations, we had the longest depression of our history.  It went from 1931 to 1946.  And a lot of people say that the Depression was ended by the start of World War II.  That’s utter nonsense.  And if you ask anybody who was living during World War II and were buying things, what could they buy, and how were they living, it was not a good thing.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Have you ever disagreed with Rush Limbaugh?  What was the issue, if there was a time?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I disagree with his stance on the decriminalization of drugs.  I think that the War on Drugs has been one of the most devastating policies in recent history.  We have made many neighborhoods unlivable.  It’s corrupted public officials including policemen and people at our border because this stuff could not get in the United States unless somebody’s getting paid off.  My view on it is that if anybody’s going to use drugs, heroin or cocaine, I would spend some time trying to convince them not to use it, because I don’t think it’s very good for you. But on the other hand, I have so much respect for individual liberty, that I would never take any measures to stop the person from using it.  As a matter of fact, when the first Bush appointed Bill Bennett as the Drug Czar, I asked a question, which was not warmly accepted by people in the administration.  I said, “Look mankind has been trying to eliminate drugs, gambling, and prostitution since before Christ, and it has been an utter failure.” So I asked Bill Bennett whether he thought it would be the Bush administration that would succeed.

So my view is that I think the Drug War is inhumane in one sense.  If a person is hell bent on destroying himself, then I say let him destroy himself rather than force him to destroy others in the process of destroying himself. What I’m saying is that cocaine is cheap to produce, and the reason it is very costly is because of all the laws and regulations, all the things people have to do to get it to the market.  Drug addicts are not very productive, so that means that they have to go rob, steal, and murder people in order to get money to get their fix.  And I say that’s inhumane, forcing them to destroy others in the process of destroying themselves.  So I’d rather just let a drug addict sit in a corner and nod and go his way rather than forcing him to destroy others.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Even if that person is on the dole?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Nobody should be on the dole.  The point is, I don’t believe that one person should be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another because that’s what slavery is all about.  That is when you force one American to work and you take his money to support some other American, I think that’s hideous, but we do a whole lot of it in our society.  Nobody has the right in my opinion to live at the expense of another person.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Some readers may not know that you are also an “expert” on gender relations.  What is the perfect gift for the Mrs. this upcoming Christmas season?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Unfortunately, my Mrs. (we were married 48 years before she died almost a couple of years ago).  This happened some years ago.  I was doing the Rush Limbaugh show around Christmas time and somebody called up and asked me what did I get for my Mrs. And so I said I got her a pair of golf shoes.  She doesn’t play golf, but the golf shoes have cleats on them so she doesn’t slip and slide on the ice when she’s washing my car in the winter.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And the e-mails starting flowing in, I’m sure!

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah, and I did it to kind of get the “Feminazis” worked up.  And it went over big, so that’s what I did every year giving people advice what to give their spouse, but it’s all tongue in cheek.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Some time ago, you authored a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to all Persons of European Decent.  What is the story behind it?  Was there a particular incident that led to it?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s on my web page at Walter E. Williams.com, and if you click on Gift, there it is.  It’s a proclamation of amnesty, and I give it to all Americans of European ancestry, and I say for both their own grievances those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like damned fools.

This was a number of years ago when I was teaching at Temple University, in the early or mid ‘70s, and my colleagues were talking about some black students who came to the chairman’s office demanding a course in Black Economics.  I was asking my colleagues how do economics differ from black people to white people, and they couldn’t give me any reason, because it’s just nonsense.  I was telling them at a department meeting that if some Italian students came in demanding Italian economics or Polish students came in demanding Polish economics, you’d throw them out of your office by the scruff of their necks, and the reason you don’t throw the black students out of your office is that you feel guilty about what your ancestors might have done to us.  I suggested that I wanted to give them full and general amnesty for their own grievances so that they stop acting like damned fools.  Many white people will tolerate forms of behavior from black people that will not begin to tolerate from white people, and they do it from a sense of guilt.

One other example of this is that I went to lunch, soon after I started Temple University with a very nice guy, as a matter of a fact a refugee from Austria when Hitler came, and he was telling me that he had a number of black students in his class, and they were not doing very well.  He was looking for my advice. I said, “What do you, in fact, do?”  He said, “I try to take into consideration discrimination and the handicaps they have had.”  I said, “I’m not asking that.  You get a pencil just like I get, and you have to put down a grade.  What do you do in that case?” And so he said, “Well if they come every day, and they look like they’re taking notes, I give them a ‘C.’” I said, “That’s very much like you have an English class, and there’s a dog in the class, and one day the dog gets on his hind legs and says, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’  Well you give the damn dog an ‘A’ no matter what he says, you don’t expect him to talk in the first place, and whatever he says is laudable.”  He said, “I never really looked at it that way.” And he damn sure wouldn’t do the same thing with white students.  He’d flunk them.  But with black students, motivated by guilt and by other things he’d treat them differently than he would treat white students.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Finally, where can people go to find out more about you and your observations on economics and the government?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: There’s a lot of good stuff on Walter E. Williams.com and also there’s the recent collection of my columns Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism.  Amazon carries it and the Hoover Institution, the publisher, carries it.

Tags: Black Economics, economics, economy, Education, Great Depression, Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism, recovery, Rush Limbaugh, Walter E. Williams

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