Free to Choose (1980 PBS special): Frances Fox Piven, Thomas Sowell debate egalitarianism

Run time: 05:02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QxO49Ycx0   Posted on YouTube: January 25, 2011 By YouTube Member: FreeToChooseNetwork Views on YouTube: 10066   Posted on DU: February 10, 2011 By DU Member: alp227 Views on DU: 611

 
Frances Fox Piven, an academic who's come under attack by Fox News huckster Glenn Beck, was a panelist in a 1980 PBS discussion program that was (I believe) a companion to Milton Friedman's Free to Choose TV special. Here's an interesting exchange between Piven and Sowell on affirmative action during a discussion about egalitarianism.

Piven: People have an ascribed status. It isn't as if government bites intervention and creates it. People are born into this world in a given sector of society and many, many of them are born at the bottom of the society. The argument about equality of results was an argument that was linked to equality of opportunity. people recognize unless there was a degree of equality...enough food, enough security, access to education...unless these things were available to all children, then equality of opportunity was merely a mockery. That's why equality of results became an issue for black people in the United States, and they expressed their concern...

Sowell: You expressed it, damn it! They did not!

Piven: They expressed their will by their extraordinary participation in a protest movement that began in the late 1950s and didn't end until the 1960s.

Sowell (interrupting): I have never...

Piven: Intellectuals were not in that protest movement. Black people were in that protest movement.

Sowell (interrupting): You want me to answer?

Piven: I finished.

Sowell: Good. Black people have never supported, for example, affirmative action, quotas, anything of that sort. Wherever polls have been taken a black opinion on such matters such as should people be paid equally or should it be this or that, black people have never taken a position that you describe, so it is not a question of what black people chose. This what you choose to put in the mouths of black people...

Piven: It's what you choose to put in the mouths of pollsters...the leadership of the black community

Sowell: I have never seen a pollster. (applause)

I read some of Sowell's essays in his new book Dismantling America, and Sowell has written against government equality measures like affirmative action and such. Sowell also says that the onus of equality falls on the people who demand it (such as in his "Fallacy of Fairness" essays). Oh, special shout out to Glenn Beck for getting me interested in Piven. And wow seriously Sowell with his doctorate in economics from Chicago can claim that most blacks don't support equality? Then why do the majority of black voters vote Democratic in presidential elections?

:mad:

Frances Fox Piven has written several books. I plan on reading a Piven book (she's written about elections and welfare) alongside a Sowell book (probably Race and Economics, which Clarence Thomas cites as his influence to conservatism) sometime.

:hi: