Oh @josie, you always ask these ideologically framed questions. I wonder if you realise the assumptions laden within them? I’ll get on to analysing how later on. ...
I realise this isn’t exactly what you asked about, but it’s part of deconstructing why your question is so blatantly rhetorical, and why I, and probaby a few others, are reluctant to ever respond to your questions. The thing about an ideologue like Sowell, is that he thinks his particular ideological narrative is some sort of metaphysical truth—or at least he speaks so confidently about the ideas he believes in, that he may as well think they’re the “truth”.
But ideologies aren’t and cannot be true. Not even the best scientific models are “true”. What ideologies offer are convenient and sometimes useful narratives, and these narratives define the social world for us—they tell us who or what to blame for the problems we perceive, what those problems even are, and what needs to be done to solve them. And the attitudes and the sort of decisions made from having these narratives have moral and ethical implications, because they end up shaping the very sort of society we all live in and affect people in very real ways (especially if they’re the ones on the receiving end of blame for perceived problems.)
I’m going to use something from the Marxian economic perspective for a moment just as an example. I’m not advocating it or asking you to entertain it as being valid in any way, since I expect you reject it outright anyway. It is just an example of an alternative narrative. Take the idea of __exploitation theory__ and how “value” (don’t worry about the definition here) is taken from workers by the owners. In this narrative, no typical worker ever “earns” what he actually works for, because the aggregate of people who own the companies which employ the workers, take that surplus that the worker would otherwise have “earned”. In other words: the capitalist owners “take somebody else’s money” with the somebody else being typical working people.
Just to reiterate: I do not care to convince you about Marxian economics. I’m trying to illustrate the ideological assumptions behind your question, in particular the assumptions implicit in the idea of “earned money”, and “take others money”.
Sowell is from the Chicago school economic perspective, which contradicts and offers an alternative narrative to the Marxian one. In his narrative everyone “earns” exactly what they deserve to “earn” because the forces of supply and demand have regulated the wage markets toward equilibrium, and it’s market forces which are the arbiter of what everyone ought to earn.
When accepting this narrative, it’s unions demanding more money for their workers who are now “taking other people’s money”, and it’s people in low tax brackets making use of government funded services and social security who are “taking other people’s money”, and it’s the government instituting minimum wage laws on employers which is “taking other people’s money”.
Do you see how the different perspectives benefit different interests? It’s not a matter of ascertaining which is “true” or which is more valid. They simply have different consequences, but you’ll also find that the dominant narrative, and the one espoused by many intellectuals, and pundits in the media, is usually one which benefits the interests of the __socially dominant groups__ (the political class, the rich, bankers, CEOs, corporations, etc) in our society, and ideologies and perspectives that oppose the socially dominant groups are the ones which get castigated and caricatured.
Lastly, the narrative which benefits the socially dominant groups will try to sell their ideology as being beneficial to everyone, some of whom go on to internalise the values of these “elites” and repeat their slogans as if they were truth, and perhaps go on to ask rhetorical questions couched in their language and framed with their ideological assumptions.
Damn. That was too long.
