Quotes from Walter E. Williams

Europeans are a people with little willingness to defend themselves. They are people who believe that peace treaties, appeasement, and disarmament produce peace.

The 2000 election of George W. Bush as president gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson once said, "There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."[

The federal minimum wage is complemented by state laws that sometimes exceed the federal requirements. Federal and state minimum wage laws represent deliberate governmental intervention in the labor market to produce a pattern of results other than that produced in a free labor market.

The economic effects of minimum wage legislation have been analyzed in numerous statistical studies.[44] While there is a debate over the magnitude of the effects, the weight of research by academic scholars points to the conclusion that unemployment for some population groups is directly related to legal minimum wages and that the unemployment effects of the minimum wage law are felt disproportionately by nonwhites.

How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us "affordable" housing to now turn their attention to bringing us "affordable" health care?

Congress will raise taxes and/or slash promised Social Security benefits. Each year the situation will get worse since the number of retirees is predicted to increase relative to the number in the workforce paying taxes. In 1940, there were forty-two workers per retiree, in 1950 there were sixteen, today there are three, and in twenty or thirty years there will be two or fewer workers per retiree.

The switch from sales ladies behind each counter in five-and-dime stores to checkout lines, from waiter-served to self-service and fast-food restaurants, from full-service to self-service gasoline stations are among the responses to higher labor costs. So, too, are the absence of movie theater ushers and the wide use by restaurants of plastic utensils and paper plates, because they do not require dishwashing.

You men win your way into office and retain that office essentially by promising some Americans that you will give them the fruits of another man's labor. You also win office by promising one group of Americans that they will be given a right or privilege that will be denied other Americans.

How much of a barrier to self-improvement is discrimination? What kinds of tools are in the ready grasp of those subjected to it? Surely one doesn't want to sit around waiting for the end to discrimination.

With that, the officer approached the cab with his hand on his pistol and opened the door, demanding that I get out and asking me who in the hell did I think I was talking to him that way. I attempted to get my passenger's name and address as a witness to the incident; but the officer warned him he'd better be on his way lest he be charged with interfering with a policeman.

Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway suggest that while other factors may have been at work, New Deal interventions (Davis-Bacon Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, and other labor legislation) during the 1930s and later cannot be easily dismissed as a major factor in reducing work opportunities for blacks.

I lost the job because one of Jack's employees complained to the department of labor that he was in violation of child labor laws.

Before the do-gooders "helped," they forgot to ask, why would anyone work ten hours per day for the paltry sum of $2 or $3 an hour? Would they have selected such a job if they had superior alternatives? The only conclusion is that the low-paying sweatshop job might be their best alternative. Such a person is indeed unfortunate, but they are by no means made better off by the destruction of that low-paying job.

The Study of Society: A Unified Approach. The

Using 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, Ann Hill and June O'Neill found that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of welfare benefits led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock

I prefer a thief to a Congressman. A thief will take your money and be on his way, but a Congressman will stand there and bore you with the reasons why he took it.

Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.

We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he's friendly and cuddly shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's still got teeth and claws.

Tyrants always condemn and seek to replace the market process with government coercion because tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed