From Max Borders.
By now, you’ve probably read about the dust-up between Fox News/Glenn Back and the New York Times. At issue is Glenn Beck’s exposé on Francis Fox Piven, who Beck claims is a radical socialist willing to use violent revolution to achieve redistributionist ends. Is she? You be the judge.
But who is Francis Fox Piven? Learn more about her as she tangles with Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell in this classic 1980 clip:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQkdSj6arn0&feature=]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQkdSj6arn0&feature=
……Together, Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman make a formidable case against Pivens’ egalitarian claptrap. As I’ve said in these pages before, concerns about inequality are very different from concerns about the plight of the poor.
But that ain’t all. In this second clip, Sowell is on fire. Enjoy:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QxO49Ycx0&feature=]
Piven tries her best to sell the socialist idea that equality is based on government discretion. Sowell and Friedman counter with the fact that equality is already an inalienable right and that equal opportunity should be guaranteed.
Thomas Sowell sums it up nicely:
“Any process to ascribe any status to any group of people; equality, inferiority, superiority, must necessarily reduce freedom. Because whatever the government wishes to ascribe to any group, whatever place, to use the phrase that’s more common in the South—that Blacks should have their place—whatever place the government is going to assign to people, that place will not coincide with either what all those people are doing or with how others percieve all those people, because there’s too much diversity among human beings. To maintain any system of ascribed status from the top is going to mean reducing people’s freedom across the spectrum.”
When Pivan tries to co-opt the Civil Rights movement as a socialist cause, he pounds her with this:
“Black people have never supported, for example, affirmative action, quotas, anything of that sort. Wherever polls have been taken of black opinions on such matters as should people be paid equally….black people have never taken position that you describe. So it’s not a question of what black people chose, it’s what you choose to put in the mouths of black people; it’s what you choose to project.”
As Borders points out:
Piven believes the Civil Rights Movement was about wealth redistribution rather than equal rights before the law and an end to Jim Crow.
The Dems and their socialist ideological comrades use minorities as pawns. Unfortunately, too many of them play right into it either because they’re ignorant or they really believe the government “owes” them a free monthly check with no strings attached. Those who work for a living have a justified resentment of assclowns like Piven and the entitlement culture that sucks off the public teat. The Left likes the idea of ascribing black and Hispanics to a victim status; the exploitation value is endless.
More at Ideas Matter:
http://ideasmatter.typepad.com/ideas-matter/2011/01/frances-fox-piven-vs-milton-friedman-thomas-sowell.html
Related posts:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/new-york-times-glenn-beck-incites-violence-by-pointing-out-that-francis-fox-piven-advocates-violence/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/seiu-to-blacks-youre-pursuadable/