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A Column This Week by Thomas Sowell
Raymond Richman, 7/24/2015

We would like to call your attention to a recent column by Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

His most recent books on economics include Housing Boom and Bust (2009), Intellectuals and Society (2009), Applied Economics (2009), Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008), Basic Economics (2007. Sowell's journalistic writings include a nationally syndicated column that appears in more than 150 newspapers from Boston to Honolulu. Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

His column points out, as we have done on this site in several blogs, on the racist, anti-black nature of the federal minimum wage. Before the minimum wage was enacted under Pres. Roosevelt and before it was increased in the  1950s. black teen-age unemployment was in the single digits. He writes:

As the minimum wage kept getting raised, so did the unemployment rate for black 17-year-old males. In 1971 it was 33.4 percent and it hasn’t been under 30 percent since. It has often been over 40 percent and, occasionally, over 50 percent.

His column also describes how government intervention in the housing market has hurt the blacks.

Government pressures and threats forced mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards to allow more low-income and minority home buyers to qualify. But after the housing boom became a bust, the biggest losers were low-income and minority home buyers, who were unable to keep up the payments – the very reason they were turned down before lending standards were lowered.

We wrote about the effects of the Community Investment Act of 1977 on this site. The Act is still in existence!