Comment on The Right Scoop: Economics: Thomas Sowell on Hannity

Economics: Thomas Sowell on Hannity | The Right Scoop

Thomas Sowell begins three minutes in and he does smack down Frances Pliven. This is from some 30 years before he appeared on Hannity.


I missed that day but I remember the filming of "Free to Choose" in Harper Library. Regenstein was where you went to do serious research in a huge efficient factory of a library. Harper was what a college library of your dreams would be, shelves of books in a medieval setting with big foam pillows that could be pulled to form a nest. I spent many happy hours there.

Src: Archival Photographic Files, [apf digital item number, e.g., apf12345], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

The old Harper Library was eliminated in 2009 and turned into a highly functional workspace in what strikes me as an act of vandalism.

How the University has slipped from the school that showcased Milton Friedman to one often dominated by those jealous small souls whose campaign originating in the Anthropology Department recently tried to block honoring him. The school fell under the influence of inherited money controlled by radical heiress Penny Pritzker, who pushed the corruption of the University to advance Barack Obama. That dovetails with Obama's career also being advanced by another child of privilege, the radical Bill Ayers.

Obama was hired as an Adjunct by Geoffrey Stone at the Law School, in a manner that avoided the normal faculty hiring and review process. There by accounts I heard he was a known embarrassment and considered an unscholarly partisan hack. His course was considered a "gut" to be endured. Meanwhile Obama's wife, who had failed as a lawyer, was, despite having no connection with the school and no particular experience or qualifications, hired first for a job in the office of the Dean of the College John Boyer and then at the Medical Center. Her duties were to steer poor people without insurance to other hospitals. For that dubious work she was paid first $120,000 a year ,with that sum nearly tripling to $317,000 when her husband was elected to the US Senate. Stone was later promoted from Dean of the Law School to Provost of the University and when he left that post Obama, although not his wife, left the University.

It is telling that Obama arrived at the Law School after the final retirement of Edward H. Levi. Read Levi's obituary, especially his words on the role of the University and on the radicals who sought to seize control of it, and compare it to what has happened since.