Dismantling America: and other controversial essays pdf

Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, political commentator, social theorist, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a poor family. After his family migrated to the North, he grew up in Harlem, New York.Beleaguered by financial difficulties and deteriorated home conditions, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. Upon returning to the United States, Sowell took night classes at Howard University before attending Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1958.He earned his master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and received a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. During his academic career, he served on the faculties of several universities including Cornell University, Amherst College, the University of California, Los Angeles, and, currently, Stanford University. He has also worked at think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell is generally described as a conservative, especially on social issues;a libertarian, especially on economics ,or libertarian-conservative.He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with libertarians on some issues including national defense. Sowell was an important figure to the new conservative movement during the Reagan Era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Sowell was offered a presidential position in the Nixon Administration and as Federal Trade Commissioner by the Ford Administration in 1976, but declined both offers. Similarly, he was offered to head the U.S. Department of Education as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, but refused to take the position. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002. Sowell is the author of more than 45 books and has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers.

Dismantling America: and other controversial essays pdf by Thomas Sowell

These wide-ranging essays—on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues—have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than an erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must over-ride both the traditions of the country and the will of the people.
Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University rape case, the underlying concern is about what these very different kinds of things say about the general direction of American society.
This larger and longer-lasting question is whether the particular issues discussed reflect a degeneration or dismantling of the America that we once knew and expected to pass on to our children and grandchildren. There are people determined that this country's values, history, laws, traditions and role in the world are fundamentally wrong and must be changed. Such people will not stop dismantling America unless they get stopped—and the next election may be the last time to stop them, before they take the country beyond the point of no return.