Below, Dr. DiLorenzo points out that Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell hold some of the same supposedly pernicious views attributed collectively to those of us who write for LRC and the Mises Institute.
This brings to mind someone else who holds virtually all of our supposedly offensive views: African-American economist Walter Williams. I have never seen the beltway libertarians personally attack him, as well they shouldn't.
But as we run down the list of his views and statements he has made, many of them are essentially identical to what we are accused of being so vile for thinking:
* The Civil War. In a piece titled "The Civil War Wasn't About Slavery," Williams writes, "By destroying the states' right to secession, Abraham Lincoln opened the door to the kind of unconstrained, despotic, arrogant government we have today, something the framers of the Constitution could not have possibly imagined. States should again challenge Washington's unconstitutional acts through nullification." (Williams also endorses Dr. DiLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln, on its jacket.)
* Immigration. Writes Williams: "Our borders should be made secure both against illegal entry of persons and potential threats to national security." And I'm glad Ron Paul's newsletters didn't say this: "For the most part, yesteryear's immigrants came here legally. Because there was no welfare state, we were guaranteed that they'd work as opposed to living off the rest of us. Furthermore, they sought to assimilate and adopt our culture and become Americans. That's not so true today, where Hispanic activists seek to impose their language and culture on the rest of us." (The claim that people at this website or at the Mises Institute all share this view is false: I, for one, strongly disagree with Walter Williams and Ron Paul on this issue and favor open immigration.)
* Rodney King. The article is not online, but at the time Williams observed that the media distorted the public's perception of the case by airing a selective portion of the videotaped beating.
* Race discrimination. When I had him as a professor at Grove City College, Dr. Williams pointed out that it would be entirely rational and proper to discriminate in favor of blacks (and against other races) when selecting a basketball team if one knew nothing else about the prospective players. He also said the same thing about Chinese in choosing a team for a mathematics competition. (As far as I know, no one here is accused of saying that... but you can well imagine they'd be dredging it up and giving it the least charitable interpretation possible if we had.)
I could also point out that in his college lectures, as in his guest-hosting stints for Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Williams seemed to go out of his way to be politically incorrect and offend the PC sensibilities of certain members of his audience -- much like some of us at this site sometimes do.
The fact that Williams said these things above (and many others like them) does not make them correct, of course, and I certainly don't agree with him on everything (especially foreign policy) or expect anyone else to. I only observe that he is never subjected to any scathing criticism -- much less calls for him to be excommunicated from polite society -- for holding the very same views that those of us on this site are accused of holding.
UPDATE:
Here's another one -- homosexuality. For a 2003 column, Williams drew fire for citing statistics on homosexuals' allegedly low life expectancy which came from the fiercely anti-homosexual psychologist Paul Cameron. (Again, I don't know that anyone here has cited Cameron or made similar arguments -- but you can imagine what we'd be hearing now if we had.)
