Category: Opinion Editorial

BY JOHN STOSSEL

The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 was noble in intent, but disastrous in practice. A boon for frivolous lawsuits and little else, the ADA is a prime example of the futility that is legislating compassion.

You own a business, maybe a restaurant. You’ve got a lot to worry about. You have to make sure the food is safe and tastes good, that the place is clean and appealing, that workers are friendly and paid according to a hundred Labor Department and IRS rules.

On top of that, there are rules you might have no idea about. The bathroom sinks must be a specified height. So must the doorknobs and mirrors. You must have rails. And if these things aren’t right — say, if your mirror is just one inch too high — you could be sued for thousands of dollars.

And be careful. If you fail to let a customer bring a large snake, which he calls his “service animal,” into your restaurant, you could be in trouble.

All of this is because of the well-intentioned Americans With Disabilities Act, which President George H.W. Bush signed 20 years ago.

The ADA was popular with Republicans and Democrats. It passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities, 377 to 28 in the House and 91 to 6 in the Senate.

What does it do? The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, requiring businesses to provide the disabled “equal access” and to make “reasonable accommodation” for employees. Tax credits and deductions are available for special equipment (talking computers, for instance) and modifying buildings to comply with the accessibility mandate.

The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?

Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.

How could employment among the disabled have declined?

Because the law turns “protected” people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the Overlawyered.com blog, says that the law was unnecessary. Many “hire the handicapped” programs existed before the ADA passed. Sadly, now most have been quietly discontinued, probably because of the threat of legal consequences if an employee doesn’t work out.

Under the ADA, Olson notes, fairness does not mean treating disabled people the same as non-disabled people. Rather it means accommodating them. In other words, the law requires that people be treated unequally.

The law has also unleashed a landslide of lawsuits by “professional litigants” who file a hundred suits at a time. Disabled people visit businesses to look for violations, but instead of simply asking that a violation be corrected, they partner with lawyers who (legally) extort settlement money from the businesses.

Some disabled people have benefited from changes effected by the ADA, but the costs are rarely accounted for. If a small business has to lay off an employee to afford the added expense of accommodating the disabled, is that a good thing — especially if, say, customers in wheelchairs are rare? Extra-wide bathroom stalls that reduce the overall number of toilets are only some of the unaccounted-for costs of the ADA. And since ADA modification requirements are triggered by renovation, the law could actually discourage businesses from making needed renovations as a way of avoiding the expense.

A few disabled people speak up against the law. Greg Perry, author of “Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government’s Protection of the Handicapped,” says that because the disabled now represent an added expense to businesses, many resent them.

Finally, the ADA has led to some truly bizarre results. Exxon gave ship captain Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab. Hazelwood then drank too much and let the Exxon Valdez run aground in Alaska. Exxon was sued for allowing it to happen. So Exxon prohibited employees who have had a drug or drinking problem from holding safety-sensitive jobs.

The result? You guessed it — employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their “right” to those jobs. The federal government (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supported the employees. Courts are still trying to sort it out.

More money for the parasites.

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John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

What is the best way to increase the frequency of poor decision making in society?  If you guessed ‘government subsidies,’ you’re correct; they’re the best way to punish the good for being the good.

One of the things that makes it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.

In other words, if one person out of 10,000 has his car set on fire, and it costs an average of $10,000 to restore the car to its previous condition, then it might seem as if charging one dollar to all 10,000 people would be enough to cover the cost of paying $10,000 to the one person whose car that will need to be repaired.

But the joker in this deal is that people whose cars are insured may not be as cautious as other people are about what kinds of neighborhoods they park their car in.

The same principle applies to government policies. When taxpayer-subsidized government insurance policies protect people against flood damage, more people are willing to live in places where there are greater dangers of flooding. Often these are luxury beach front homes with great views of the ocean. So what if they suffer flood damage once every decade or so, if Uncle Sam is picking up the tab for restoring everything?

Television reporter John Stossel has told how he got government insurance “dirt cheap” to insure a home only a hundred feet from the ocean. Eventually, the ocean moved in and did a lot of damage, but the taxpayer-subsidized insurance covered the costs of fixing it. Four years later, the ocean came in again, and this time it took out the whole house. But the taxpayer-subsidized government insurance paid to replace the whole house.

This was not a unique experience. More than 25,000 properties have received government flood insurance payments more than four times. Over a period of 28 years, more than 4,000 properties received government insurance payments exceeding the total value of the property. If you are located in a dangerous place, repeated damage can easily add up to more than the property is worth, especially if the property is damaged and then later wiped out completely, as John Stossel’s ocean-front home was.

Although “moral hazard” is an insurance term, it applies to other government policies besides insurance. International studies show that people in countries with more generous and long-lasting unemployment compensation spend less time looking for jobs. In the United States, where unemployment compensation is less generous than in Western Europe, unemployed Americans spend more hours looking for work than do unemployed Europeans in countries with more generous unemployment compensation.

People change their behavior in other ways when the government pays with the taxpayers’ money. After welfare became more readily available in the 1960s, unwed motherhood skyrocketed. The country is still paying the price for that — of which the money is the least of it. Children raised by single mothers on welfare have far higher rates of crime, welfare and other social pathology.

San Francisco has been one of the most generous cities in the country when it comes to subsidizing the homeless. Should we be surprised that homelessness is a big problem in San Francisco?

Most people are not born homeless. They usually become homeless because of their own behavior, and the friends and family they alienate to the point that those who know them will not help them. People with mental problems may not be able to help their behavior, but the rest of them can.

We hear a lot of talk about “safety nets” from big-government liberals, who act as if there is a certain pre-destined amount of harm that people will suffer, so that it is just a question of the government helping those who are harmed. But we hear very little about “moral hazard” from big-government liberals. We all need safety nets. That is why we “save for a rainy day,” instead of living it up to the limit of our income and beyond.

We also hear a lot of talk about “the uninsured,” for whose benefit we are to drastically change the whole medical-care system. But income data show that many of those uninsured people have incomes from which they could easily afford insurance. But they can live it up instead, because the government has mandated that hospital emergency rooms treat everyone.

All of this is a large hazard to taxpayers. And it is not very moral.

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Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

BY WALTER E WILLIAMS — 23 AUG 2010

A strong rebuttal to the critics of last week’s controversial column, Dr. Williams illustrates mathematically that Social Security is, in fact, an unsustainable and immoral pyramid scheme.

My column titled “What Handouts to Cut?” created a number of angry responses, and for the first time in my life, I had some, not much, sympathy for political cowardice. Most letters were from senior citizens angered by my suggestion that they were receiving handouts and those handouts be cut.

Federal tax receipts for 2009 totaled $2.1 trillion. The largest items in the federal budget were Social Security ($710 billion), national defense ($689 billion), Medicare ($456 billion) and Medicaid ($327 billion). The primary recipients of federal spending are seniors. Some of the letters argued that it’s unfair to characterize what seniors are getting as handouts because they worked all their lives and paid into Social Security and Medicare.

Jagadeesh Gokhale, senior economic adviser, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, professor of Economics at Boston University document the looming Social Security and Medicare crises in “Is War Between Generations Inevitable?”

They report that “A male reaching 65 years of age today (in 2000, the year of their study) can expect to receive $71,000 more in government ‘transfer’ benefits (of all kinds at both the federal and state levels, but mainly from Social Security and Medicare) than he will pay in taxes (of all kinds at both the federal and state levels) before he dies. A 65-year-old female can expect a net gain of more than twice that amount; she can expect $163,000 more in benefits than she will pay in taxes.”

The picture is not so rosy for people who entered the labor force in 2000. They will pay far more in taxes than they will receive from transfer programs. Expansion of elderly handouts, such as prescription drugs, will make things worse. “For example: A 20-year-old female can expect to pay $92,000 more in taxes than she will receive in transfer benefits over her lifetime. The future looks more than three times as bleak for her male cohort, who can expect to pay $312,000 more in taxes than he will ever receive in benefits.”

Why is Social Security a better deal for today’s seniors? Just look at what they paid in. From 1937 to 1949, the maximum annual Social Security tax was $60. It remained under $200 until 1956. After 1956, Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance was added and in 1966, Medicare was added. It wasn’t until 1969 that maximum Social Security taxes exceeded $2,000. Today, the maximum annual Social Security tax is $13,000 and the maximum annual benefit is $25,000.

As with any Ponzi scheme, the people who get on board early make out. This is pointed out by Geoffrey Kollmann and Dawn Nuschler of the Congressional Research Service in their report “Social Security Reform.” (October 2002)  They say, “Until recent years, Social Security recipients received more, often far more, than the value of the Social Security taxes they paid. … For example, for workers who earned average wages and retired in 1980 at age 65, it took 2.8 years to recover the value of the retirement portion of the combined employee and employer shares of their Social Security taxes plus interest. For their counterparts who retired at age 65 in 2002, it will take 16.9 years. For those retiring in 2020, it will take 20.9 years.”

My question is: How can anyone who draws out every penny he’s put into Social Security in a few years say that he’s not living at the expense of another?

In my opinion, it takes a special form of callousness and disregard for the welfare of future generations of Americans for today’s senior citizens to fight against reform. Nobody’s talking about abolition of federal senior programs. We must accept that serious mistakes were made and we must take compassionate corrective action.

But what the heck! As I said in my “What Handouts to Cut?” column, “Both today’s politicians and seniors will be dead so why should they make sacrifices now to prevent an economic calamity decades off into the future?”

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has authored more than 150 publications, including many in scholarly journals, and has frequently given expert testimony before Congressional committees on public policy issues ranging from labor policy to taxation and spending.

BY JACOB SULLUM

The debate over whether or not Muslims have a right to exercise their rights and freedoms near Ground Zero has exposed many collectivists for what they really are.  Why is this even being discussed?

I do not often agree with President Barack Obama or New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But they have taken the right position in the controversy over plans for a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, defending religious freedom and property rights against government meddling driven by irrational prejudice.

In contrast, whatever residual respect I had for Newt Gingrich because of his libertarian impulses as a Republican opposition leader and speaker of the House has been wiped out by his shameful performance as a jingoistic rabble-rouser who insists that “we should not tolerate” what the Constitution requires us to tolerate. By conflating the avowedly moderate, pluralistic and ecumenical backers of Park 51 with the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, he encourages the same sort of collectivist thinking that inspired those mass murderers.

Gingrich distinguishes between “well-meaning Muslims,” who agree with him that the project should not be built so close to ground zero, and “radical Islamists,” who are fundamentally hostile to the West. But he says the radicals include both “violent jihadis,” who openly support terrorism, and “stealth jihadis,” who advocate peaceful coexistence while using “political, cultural, societal, religious (and) intellectual tools” to achieve the same goal of Islamic domination.

Although Gingrich implies that the imam behind Park 51 — Feisal Abdul Rauf — is a stealth jihadi, there is not much evidence to support that view. Gingrich cites the project’s original name, Cordoba House, as proof of Rauf’s aggressive intentions, calling Cordoba “a symbol of Islamic conquest.”

Yet Rauf, rather more plausibly, says the name was intended to evoke the golden age of Spain under the relatively tolerant Cordoba caliphate, a period when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in what, by the standards of the Middle Ages, qualified as harmony.

One of Rauf’s most prominent critics, Stephen Schwartz of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, notes some radical-sounding associates, but even he concedes that Rauf has reached out to Muslims with a wide variety of viewpoints. Though Rauf might be faking it, he has a long record of condemning violence and engaging in interreligious dialogue — a record persuasive enough that the FBI looked to him for help in fighting terrorism.

To Gingrich, however, none of this really matters. In his view, anyone who supports Park 51 is a stealth jihadi by definition.

Gingrich does not object to the project because the wrong sort of Muslims are building it. He objects to any Muslim house of worship on that site. He declares that “there should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” What an absurd non sequitur. Since when is a foreign state’s intolerance an excuse for trampling Americans’ constitutional rights?

Sarah Palin, the first national figure to make an issue of Park 51, says, “We all know that they have the right to do it.” But Gingrich knows no such thing.

“The Ground Zero mosque is all about conquest,” he says, “and thus an assertion of Islamist triumphalism which we should not tolerate.” In response to those who note that interfering with the project because of its Muslim character would violate the First Amendment, he says, “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”

Put aside the fact that if Nazis owned a lot next to the Holocaust Museum, they would have a right to put up a sign, subject to content-neutral regulations. Gingrich’s comparison between Muslims and Nazis reflects his more general equating of Muslims with terrorists, which is at the heart of his objections to Park 51.

Jews, Christians or Hindus are free to build whatever they want at 51 Park Place, but not Muslims. Why? Because the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks were Muslims. Once you strip away the Orwellian rhetoric equating peaceful religious activity with violence, Gingrich’s position really is as simple and appalling as that.

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Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology Choice (BenBella Books). Sullum is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

Lincoln once noted that ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ What, then, should be done when the ‘house’ consists not of warring geographical sections, but of the people vs. the government?

“We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States — the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in “The Federalist,” a book written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge — to this day — to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining and evading the Constitution.

While various political leaders have, over the centuries, done things that violated either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, few dared to openly say that the Constitution was wrong and that what they wanted was right.

It was the Progressives of a hundred years ago who began saying that the Constitution needed to be subordinated to whatever they chose to call “the needs of the times.” Nor were they content to say that the Constitution needed more Amendments, for that would have meant that the much disdained masses would have something to say about whether, or what kind, of Amendments were needed.

The agenda then, as now, has been for our betters to decide among themselves which Constitutional safeguards against arbitrary government power should be disregarded, in the name of meeting “the needs of the times” — as they choose to define those needs.

The first open attack on the Constitution by a President of the United States was made by our only president with a Ph.D., Woodrow Wilson. Virtually all the arguments as to why judges should not take the Constitution as meaning what its words plainly say, but “interpret” it to mean whatever it ought to mean, in order to meet “the needs of the times,” were made by Woodrow Wilson.

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

Now there is leaked news of plans to change the immigration laws by administrative fiat, rather than Congressional legislation, presumably because Congress might be unduly influenced by those pesky voters— with their Constitutional rights — who have shown clearly that they do not want amnesty and open borders, despite however much our betters do.

If the Obama administration gets away with this, and can add a few million illegals to the voting rolls in time for the 2012 elections, that can mean reelection, and with it a continuing and accelerating dismantling of America.

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BY JOHN STOSSEL

Nicknaming him ‘The Undertaker,’ Ayn Rand was once skeptical of Greenspan’s capacity as a thinker and a human being.  Given recent events, Rand’s initial assessment seems sadly prophetic.

I’m getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts.

This has a certain sad irony. Recall that Greenspan once was an associate of Ayn Rand, the philosophical novelist who provided a moral defense of the free market, or as she put it, the separation of state and economy.

Greenspan even contributed three essays to Rand’s book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” — one for the gold standard, one against antitrust laws, and one against government consumer protection.

It was slightly bizarre when Greenspan accepted President Reagan’s appointment to run the Fed — maybe he thought that as long as the Fed exists, better someone like him run it rather than one who really believes government should centrally plan money and banking.

Be that as it may, Greenspan went on to pursue an easy-money policy in the early 2000s that is widely credited, along with the government’s easy-mortgage policy, for the boom and bust that followed.

During a congressional hearing two years ago, Greenspan shocked me by blaming the free market — not Fed and housing policies — for the financial collapse. As The New York Times gleefully reported, “(A) humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets.”

He said he favored regulation of big banks, as if the banking industry weren’t already a heavily regulated cartel run for the benefit of bankers. Bush-era deregulation is a myth perpetrated by those who would have government control the economy.

We libertarians were distressed by Greenspan’s apparent abandonment of his free-market philosophy and his neglect of the government’s decisive role in the crisis.

But at least he took a shot at the new controls Congress coveted: “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident. … (M)arkets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”

But now Greenspan, going beyond what even President Obama favors, calls on Congress to let the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts expire — not just for upper-income people but for everyone. “I’m in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. Our choices right now are not between good and better; they’re between bad and worse. The problem we now face is the most extraordinary financial crisis that I have ever seen or read about,” he told the Times.

He says he supported the 2001 cuts because of pending budget surpluses, but now that huge deficits loom, new revenues are needed.

Why? Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation says that since the cuts, “The rich are now shouldering even more of the income tax burden.” The deficit has grown not because we are undertaxed but because government overspends. “Tax revenues are above the historical average, even after the tax cuts,” Riedl writes.

Given the stagnant economy, this is the worst possible time for tax increases. (Is there ever a good time?) Taking money out of the economy will stifle investment and recovery, and it’s unlikely to raise substantial revenue, even if that were a good thing.

Finally, the stupidest thing said about tax cuts is the often-repeated claim that “they ought to be paid for.” How absurd! Tax cuts merely let people keep money they rightfully own. It’s government programs, not tax cuts, that must be paid for. The tax-hungry politicians’ demand that cuts be “paid for” implies the federal budget isn’t $3 trillion, but $15 trillion — the whole GDP — with anything mercifully left in our pockets being some form of government spending. How monstrous!

If cutting taxes leaves less money for government programs, the answer is simple: Ax the programs!

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John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.

BY WALTER E WILLIAMS

As the debate between looters and producers rages on, the titanic government handouts to seniors, many of whom are sitting on quite a bit of accumulated wealth, tend to be overlooked. Why?

Because of failure to heed the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, which has produced runaway federal spending, our nation sits on the precipice of disaster. Former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt and deficit commission, in a Washington Post article “Obama’s Debt Commission Warns of Fiscal ‘Cancer'” (July 12, 2010) said that “(A)t present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries.”

The commission added the current budget trend is a disaster “that will destroy the country from within” unless checked by tough action in Washington. The tough action required is spending cuts in programs, including the so-called nondiscretionary, eating most of the federal revenues.

According to the Census, around 80 percent of Americans 65 and older own their own homes compared to 43 percent under 35. Twenty-three million households, or 37 percent of all homeowners, own their homes free and clear, and most of these are seniors aged 65 and older. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s 2007 “Survey of Consumer Finances,” the median net worth of people 65 and over is $232,000, those under 35 years have a net worth of $12,000 and for those 35-44, it’s $87,000.

For good reason, older people have accumulated more wealth than younger people; the primary reason is that they’ve had more time to do it. There is no logical case that can be made for using the tax system to force Americans with less wealth to subsidize those with more wealth. But it’s not clear who is subsidizing whom.

Consider an elderly widow, say 70 years old, with a modest retirement income of $18,000 living in a $300,000 house that’s fully paid for. She might receive local property tax forgiveness, medical and prescription drug subsidies and other federal, state and local subsidies based upon her age and income.

When subsidies are provided for this lady, whom are we truly benefiting? It’s not the lady but her heirs. Conceivably, the lady could make a deal with a financial institution to pay her property taxes, allow her to live in the house for the rest of her life and give her a lump sum cash settlement so that she can live without the handouts.

Upon her death, the house becomes the property of the financial institution, not her heirs. Giving the widow handouts allows her to bequeath to her heirs her assets, a $300,000 house. If her children want to inherit the house, they, rather than taxpayers, ought to take care of their mother.

We can start getting the federal spending under control by ending subsidies to people with high net worth that can be ready turned into cash such as a home or business. While seniors might say that they support reduced government spending, they, like other handout recipients, believe they have a right, through government, to live at the expense of others. What’s more, they have considerable clout — they vote in large numbers. Only 50 percent of young people vote, but up to 70 percent of seniors vote.

Political guts have always been in short supply and politicians fear senior retaliation at the polls. Moreover, it’s a practical matter for seniors and politicians. The true economic calamity won’t hit the country until 2030 or 2040.

By that time, both today’s politicians and seniors will be dead so why should they make sacrifices now to prevent an economic calamity decades off into the future? Seniors might protest my cynicism but they can easily prove me wrong by waging an effective campaign to end handouts based on superannuation.

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has authored more than 150 publications, including many in scholarly journals, and has frequently given expert testimony before Congressional committees on public policy issues ranging from labor policy to taxation and spending.

BY LARRY ELDER

The continued media attention paid to Al Sharpton, a proven hypocrite and notoriously divisive race hustler, far outstrips the relevance that Sharpton holds in either the black or white communities.  Why?

A well-known “civil rights activist” made the cover of Newsweek, the left-wing “news” magazine reportedly sold for its debt and $1. Based on this cover story, the buyer overpaid.

The headline, above the flattering photograph of a Man of Gravitas, reads: “The Reinvention of the Reverend Al: From Tawana to Obama, What Sharpton’s Longevity Says About Race in America.”

It’s good to be the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of America’s pre-eminent race-hustlers and demagogues. The word “shameless” doesn’t do him justice. The word “whitewash” understates the gushing makeover accorded him by Newsweek.

The article discusses, but minimizes, the how and why of Sharpton’s rise to national prominence: He falsely accused a man of rape. Almost 20 years ago, Sharpton became famous by championing the cause of a black teenager named Tawana Brawley, who, it turned out, lied when she claimed that she’d been abducted and sexually assaulted by whites. Sharpton not only offered Tawana Brawley up as a sympathetic victim of America’s alleged pervasive racism, he accused Steven Pagones, a white assistant district attorney, of committing the crime.

A grand jury found that Tawana Brawley fabricated the whole thing. Sharpton not only refused to apologize, he dared Pagones to sue him for defamation. Pagones obliged. A jury unanimously found Sharpton liable, and Pagones’ lawyer spent years trying to get Sharpton to pay the judgment. To this day, Sharpton refuses to apologize to Pagones, who said he received death threats.

Newsweek says Sharpton “has been right much more often than wrong in his choice of causes.” Obviously, this offsets the numerous times Sharpton, without due cause, screamed and blustered and bullied, pulling race cards from every pocket.

The piece barely touches on or completely ignores many items on his long list of schemes, fraudulent race-based hustles and scandals. Nothing about the FBI surveillance video of Sharpton arranging a cocaine/money laundering deal with a mobster-turned-informant. Nothing about Sharpton calling the first black mayor of New York a “n—er whore.” (With typical gall, Sharpton later pushed to “ban” the use of the N-word.)

Newsweek says, “His enemies sometimes charge, bizarrely, that he has chosen a career as a peripatetic community activist for the money.” Bizarrely? Nothing about how he signed with one of Hollywood’s biggest agencies, which then shopped a sitcom starring Sharpton, called “Al in the Family.” Nothing about his gig as a paid pitchman for LoanMax, a “predatory lender” that cannot legally operate in New York.

Crown Heights tells us everything one needs to know about Sharpton. A 7-year-old black child was accidentally struck and killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew in that section of Brooklyn, N.Y. It sparked three days of riots, resulting in a hundred people injured and the stabbing death of a young Jewish scholar, who was surrounded by a mob chanting, “Kill the Jew.” Sharpton fanned the flames, leading some 400 protesters through a Jewish section of Crown Heights.

He said: “The world will tell us that (the child) was killed by accident. … What type of city do we have that would allow politics to rise above the blood of innocent babies? … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. … All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise. Pay for your deeds.” Later he said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

Want a different perspective on the reverend? A November 2004 Village Voice article led with this title: “On a New High, Sharpton Hits a New Low: TV’s Democratic Minister of ‘Moral Values’ Takes a Hypocritical Plunge.”

Newsweek: “He has lived an upper-middle-class, although hardly opulent, life.” The Village Voice: Sharpton and family lived in “their enormous Brooklyn mansion.”

Newsweek: “(Sharpton) is one preacher who has managed to negotiate the temptations of fame untouched by sexual scandal.” The Village Voice, on Sharpton’s apparent extramarital relationship with a married employee: “The … saga is not just a question of sex; it’s a window into the dysfunction of Sharpton’s universe.”

So what, indeed, does Sharpton’s “longevity say about race in America”? It says that Newsweek and others who should know better apply a different and lower standard of acceptability for a black race-hustler like Sharpton than for a white race-hustler like David Duke. And, assuming Sharpton ever mattered, does he now?

Blacks and whites were asked by Gallup in 2003 to name “the most important national leader in the black community today.” Four percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites named Sharpton.

On some things, it appears, whites and blacks are not so far apart. Perhaps the Rev. Al achieved some racial unity after all.

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Larry Elder is a syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author. His latest book, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” is available now. To find out more about Larry Elder, visit his Web page at www.WeveGotACountryToSave.com.

BY JOHN STOSSEL

One of the things that most people on both sides of the political aisle believe is that government should be in charge of building and maintaining all common infrastructure.  But is this really a good idea?

In “Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity,” I bet my readers $1,000 that they couldn’t name one thing that government does better than the private sector.

I am yet to pay.

Free enterprise does everything better.

Why? Because if private companies don’t do things efficiently, they lose money and die. Unlike government, they cannot compel payment through the power to tax.

Even when a private company operates a public facility under contract to government, it must perform. If it doesn’t, it will be “fired” — its contract won’t be renewed. Government is never fired.

Contracting out to private enterprise isn’t the same thing as letting fully competitive free markets operate, but it still works better than government.

Roads are one example. Politicians call road management a “public good” that “government must control.” Nonsense.

In 1995, a private road company added two lanes in the middle of California Highway 91, right where the median strip used to be. It then used “congestion pricing” to let some drivers pay to speed past rush-hour traffic. Using the principles of supply and demand, road operators charge higher tolls at times of day when demand is high. That encourages those who are most in a hurry to pay for what they need.

It was the first time anywhere in the world that congestion pricing was used. Bureaucrats were skeptical. Now congestion pricing is a hot idea for both private and public road management systems.

Likewise, for years there was a gap in the ring road surrounding Paris that created huge traffic problems. Then private developers made an unsolicited proposal to build a $2 billion toll tunnel in exchange for a 70-year lease to run it. They built a double-decker tunnel that fits six lanes of traffic in the space usually required for just two.

The tunnel’s profit-seeking owners have an incentive to keep traffic moving. They collect tolls based on congestion pricing, and tolls are collected electronically, so cars don’t have to stop. The tunnel operators clear accidents quickly. Most are detected within 10 seconds — thanks to 350 cameras inside the tunnel. The private road has cut a 45-minute trip to 10 minutes.

Indiana used to lose money on its toll road. Then Gov. Mitch Daniels leased it to private developers. Now it makes a profit. The new owners spent $40 million on electronic tolling. That’s saved them 55 percent on toll collection. They saved $20 per mile by switching to a better de-icing fluid. They bought a new fleet of computerized snowplows that clear roads using less salt. Drivers win, and taxpayers win.

It also turns out that government roads often run more smoothly when drivers have more, not less, freedom.

This sounds paradoxical. Politicians often sneer at libertarians, saying, “You want to get rid of traffic lights?!” Well, yes, actually. In some cases, traffic moves better and more safely when government removes traffic lights, stop signs, even curbs.

It’s Friedrich Hayek’s “spontaneous” order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing. The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings — to pedestrians and other cars — rather than just to signs and signals.

It demonstrates the “Peltzman Effect” (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.

In Drachten, Holland, lights and signs were removed from an intersection handling about 30,000 cars a day. Average waiting times dropped from 50 seconds to less than 30 seconds. Accidents dropped from an average of eight per year to just one.

On Kensington High Street in London, after pedestrian railing and other traffic markers were removed, accidents dropped by 44 percent.

“What these signs are doing is treating the driver as if they were an idiot,” says traffic architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie. “If you do so, drivers exhibit no intelligence.”

Once again, freedom and responsibility triumph.

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