Disparities and Free Speech

Well, thank you. Good to be with you.

I just hope I haven't misled you.

I only know what people tell me. That's even true at Stanford.

I only know what my research assistants tell me.

Yes.

In Harlem. I-

Well, you know, I, I thought about it as I was doing the research for the first chapter where I get into the birth order thing. Now, had my parents, lived a normal lifespan, I would've been the sixth child in the family. They died young, and so I was adopted in infancy, in a fam- as an only chi- and raised as an only child in a home with four adults. And, in terms of what I found in the re- do- about the research, on birth order, clearly that was a huge advantage. and so their misfortune, was my g- good fortune. And moreover, the family in which I was raised moved to New York, which at that time had a far superior, educational system to that in North Carolina, and far superior to what it is today.

No. I mean, I can- a little kid, there was nothing in my background that would've done, put me there. but fortunately, when, in Harlem, there was a kid named Eddie that, members of the family had run into before I ever arrived from North Carolina. And he was a very, came from a highly educated family. and they immediately saw the implications if they could get him to, to sort of mentor me. And, now had I met Eddie on my own, chances are I would never have seen any, significance. he would just have been s- one of the people I pass by. But of course, the, the adults understood what the future was like and thinking about things that kids don't think about, despite the great, worship of ch- of, of child talkers these days. and so, b- so he took me to a public library, and I had no idea what a public library was. Wow. I was eight years old, and I saw all these books, and I had no idea why we were there when I didn't have any money to buy one book. And so what am I gonna do with all these, you know, hundreds of books up on the shelf? And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing. And again, I was very s- reluctant to g- take out a library card 'cause I didn't know what all this is about. But he w- talked me into it, and I said I borrowed a couple of books. And really, had I not encountered him, the entire rest of the story could not have been the way it was. I mean, at some point I would've learned what a public library w- was, but by that point it would be too late.

I mean, if you, when you start getting in the habit of reading when you're eight years old, that's a different ballgame than if you have to wait till you're a teenager and it's too late now.

one of the books was the Doctor Dolittle books I don't know if you even know what those are. He c- he could talk to the animals.

Alice in Wonderland and, the rest of them. But the, I came in on May, and there wasn't, school wasn't open until September, so I had no one to play with, and I was just bored to tears. -hmm. And so I started reading, really for the first time, and I got the habit of reading. And on that, you know, that made the rest possible.

Yes. The same, the same fellow who was, very knowledgeable about, all about the school system. So when I finished elementary school and they assigned me to a junior high school in a very bad, neighborhood, he told me that, "You can get transferred." And I, in fact, got transferred to a much better school. had I gone to that other school, I- again, the story would've been entirely different. and I... One of, one of the themes of the early part of the book here is that there are, there are a whole number of things y- have to come together, and if you don't have all of those prerequisites, then all the whatever good qualities you have don't matter. And I mentioned, illiteracy, that, you know, in the middle of the 20th century, something like 40% of the adults in the world were still illiterate. And so it doesn't matter what their native talent or any of that w- ca- came along. You can't read, there are a whole lot of, occupations you just simply can't get into.

I guess, although I wouldn't carry it too far, because some of the most, disastrous notions in the world have come from highly educated people with, I'm sure, high IQs.

Oh, I, I am,... I will settle for almost any kind of thinking. It's so rare these days.

But it's not that unusual. most of the leading conservative, thinkers of our ti- time, did not start off as conservative. You got a couple like, Bill Buckley and, George Will. But I mean, Milton Friedman was a, was a, was a liberal and a Keynesian. Hayek was a socialist. Ronald Reagan was so far left, at one point the FBI was following him, you know? so, p- the, so there's a huge movement, from the left to the right as people get older.

Yes. I mean, there was no alternative being discussed. my first job was as a Western Union messenger, and, I would come home on some nights, I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which cost all of 15 cents in those days. But I figured I'd splurge now and then. And I would drive, it would go all the way up Fifth Avenue, past all these Lord & Taylor and, all these fancy, places. And then I would cross 57th Street past Carnegie Hall, and then down Riverside Drive, and that was the sort of the Gold Coast area. And then y- as I came across this long viaduct and it, that turned into 135th Street, suddenly there were the tenements. And I wondered, "Why is this?" I mean, it's so, it's so, it's so different. And nothing in the schools or most of the books, seem to deal with that, and Marx dealt with that. so it's, it's e- it's like winning an election when there's only one person running.

facts.

Well, you know-

Yeah.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And, and specifically, my first, professional job, I was a summer intern at the US Department of Labor, and I realized from dealing with these people that the US Department of Labor... One of my biggest concern was about minimum wages. -hmm. Has been for a long time. And so my, m- at first I thought, "Well, this is good because all these people are poor and they'll get a little higher e- income, and so that'll, that'll be helpful." And then, as I studied economics, I began to see, well, there's a downside. They may lose their jobs completely, so there's, there's that. And so I tried, and I, when I was at the Labor Department, I tried to t- talk about that to them, and eventually I came up with some test of it. And, when I came up with this test, how we might test this, I was waiting to hear, "Congratulations," you see-... that I had this, and I could see these people were stunned. They said, "Oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that will ruin us all." Wow. You know? Yeah. Yeah. You know? And I realized the US Department of Labor had its, own agenda and interests, and that didn't necess- not necessarily mean that the, whether poor people lost their jobs for minimum wage or got higher pay was their highest priority.

No, that w- no, that was really the turning point.

And then I began to see that all these government agencies and whatnot, they have their own institutional incentives. And you cannot say that the government will step in and do the, what's right for these people and whatnot, because they'll do what's right for themselves.

Well, I, actually I didn't, I didn't feel any need to, do a lot, a lot of proselytizing. it was enough for me that I was now beginning to understand things I hadn't understood before. And, as you've noted in the, in the book, I have, I mention minimum wage studies, and, really they're, they're, they're incredibly flawed. -hmm. There's a whole chapter on numbers. - and I, and the other thing, getting back to my personal development, I mean, I left home when I was 17. no high school diploma, no skills, no job experience. And I discovered that there was not a huge amount of demand for people like that. but in retrospect, decades later when I do research, I realize that in 1948, the unemployment rate for Black 16 and 17-year-olds was 9.4. For whites the same age, it was 10.2.

And those numbers are much smaller than we h- we're used to in recent decades. a- and there's no serious, racial difference. In fact, the Blacks in my age bracket were doing just slightly better. and of course, one of the things that the minimum wage d- law does is that it creates unemployment, raises it to multiples of what it was. 1948 was a w- was a special time because the minimum wage law was passed in 1938, and in the intervening 10 years, there was huge inflation, and the law hadn't gotten changed. And so for all practical purposes, there was no minimum wage law. But had we had s- these wonderful liberals-... insisting that I be paid w- a living wage that would support a family of four, I would've been unemployed. And I don't, I don't know what, what that would've led to.

highway.

Oh, I think it's the idea that you don't have to check a good sounding idea against what actually happens. the whole 19- and there are people to this day who think that the 1960s was just a great period. And, and I'll, I'll say to them, "Do you realize how many, good trends, the, the, the m- the murder rate, among, black males had gone down, had been going down for two decades?"

You know, by 18% in one decade, 22% in the next decade. And in 1960, it suddenly takes a U-turn, straight up. And that was not peculiar to blacks or even to the United States. Pinker's book, about, violence said, you know, that throughout w- the Western world, the h- the homicide rates did a U-turn- -hmm in the 1960s. So the question is, what actually happens when you put your wonderful ideas to work? Do they produce the kind of thing you thought they were gonna produce, or do they produce all the opposite in many areas? And they produced lots of opposites.

Well, it depends on what your baseline is. Pinker is much more optimistic than I am. I, I happen to be very pessimistic about the future, but I hope the optimists are right.

No, but I think, having s- studied so many things that sounded so good and ended up so bad, it makes me, doubt, especially when there are people who are anxious to spout off with very little, s- study of what, of what they're talking about.

Well, there's always been that, as long as there have been human beings, but the question is the magnitude of it and the ability of various institutions to shut out, any other viewpoint, and of which the universities are the worst examples.

That, I mean, when I, when I, when I, see the riots when Charles Murray shows up, and I happen to know Charles Murray, I mean, if you can demonize Charles Murray, you can demonize anybody.

I mean, and I listen to see w- what are they gonna quote that he said? I've never heard a single quote of all the books the man has written. They never quote anything he said.

And a lot of what he said is the direct opposite of what they claim he said.

Well, it be- well, it was not that bad in the 1950s when I was a Marxist and when Senator Joe McCarthy was, car- was f- tracking down anybody on the left. But, I said whatever I felt like, wherever I felt like it, and I got no such b- blowback.

He was in Washington and I was in Cambridge- Yeah... and so be it.

Oh, no, there was a number of things. You real- venereal diseases, for example, were going down at a very steep rate. It was either syphilis or gonorrhea that was one half, as prevalent in 1960 as it was in 1950. The, the brilliant idea was to bring in sex education, you see, to avoid, unwanted pregnancies and so on. And, - Venereal diseases skyrocketed. Unwanted pregnancies, teenage pregnancies skyrocketed. The, it's amazing that so many people on the left are able to just ignore any facts that go against their theory.

I mean, it ju- just does not,... My old mentor at the University of Chicago, George Stigler, argued, however, that, economists have very little influence, and what they say makes very little difference. And he was giving a talk at the Hoover Institution once, and he said, "Thanks to years of dedicated work by Tom Sowell, the next minimum wage increase will be five cents an hour-... less than it would've been otherwise."

Well, I, when it comes to impact, that's a different, the story entirely. I mean, long ago I stopped, accepting invitations to testify before congressional committees. Yeah. It's an absolute waste of time. They have made up their minds, and they just wanna be able to say they've heard all points of view. -

tha- that's right. Yeah. And I remember once, Kenneth Clark, was, I was debating him, and he was beside himself because of this, my s- supposed sinister influence in Washington. This is during the Reagan administration. And I told him, "If my, if my influence in Washington is all you have to worry about-... you are a very,

Yeah. 'Cause I have had, I can't think of anything that happened any different than if I had never said anyb- thing to anybody.

No, I'm just realistic. I mean, and I, I can't, I can't, f- find, I can remember testifying before one committee, and, the audience was so rowdy that the chairman had to back, bang the gavel to, to k- keep them shut, to shut them down. and, and they had put some little tiny thing in the law they were billing. and I would bet their rent money that provision is g- is gone now. Because there are so many people who d- who didn't... I was saying that if you're gonna help, poor kids, then give the money to the kids or else, you know, pr- provide it for where- wherever they go. Don't turn it over to the institution- Yeah... because they will then use it in an entirely different way.

There must, there must be somewhere- But-... by law of averages. But, it is not prevalent.

Yeah, Milton Friedman used to always say that he was, he was a liberal. So did Hayek and, and of course, in different countries, the word means different things. I mean, Australia, if you said you were a liberal, they, they would understand what you were saying. But in a, but a liberal in Aus- Australia is different from a liberal in the United States.

Yeah, in the American sense of the word.

Yeah, ex- except of course in foreign policy.

And, and I mean, I guess also the, the lib- libertarians seem to have this atomistic view of the world, which I think is, j- completely unrealistic.

Because I mean, I mean, and not only in my life, but in the, in the li- in the lives of people around me, the surroundings m- make a huge difference. one of the things I get into a lot in the book is this, the disparities imply, either discrimination on the one hand or genetic differences on the other.

and disparities are the norm. I mean, I was just reading something in j- the other day, you know, that, Latin America has 8% of the people in the world. They commit 38% of all the murders.

and in Latin America, 80%... no, thir- 38% f- for that. But in Latin America, 80% of the murders occur on 2% of the streets.

So but you find, and when you look up facts, that's what you find over and over again. and, and in all the discussions of, income d- differences, they act that it, they never take into account age, and age is huge. I mean, Japanese Americans have a median age of 50. Hispanic Americans has, have a median age of 26. Now, y- when you see, Hispanic Americans greatly over-represented among baseball stars- And not a single Japanese American baseball star in the major leagues, I don't believe, in the entire history-

No.

No, that was... There are people of Japanese ancestry who have been, become baseball stars.

All of them are from Japan. None of them are Japanese American.

That's right. Yeah. so, so how many 50-m- year old men are gonna be baseball stars?

and by the same token- Not that many... how many 20, 26-year-old men are gonna be surgeons or CEOs, any other kind of job that requires long years of study or, and/or long years of experience? And so even if they were the same, if the two groups were the same in every other way, and if there was absolutely no distinction or discrimination or whatnot, they still, there would be a huge difference in income simply because of age.

Well, I know, I know 127 pa- pages are text, and the rest of it is notes.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm trying. I try to, but, we'll, we'll see how it works out.

that's, h- wholly peripheral- Okay... as far as I'm concerned. I mean, there are, just trying to get a few simple facts across is a full-time job.

hmm.

Yeah. the word ha- has almost opposite meanings. I mean, the first meaning when they say he has, someone has discriminating taste, you mean he, he can tell what is a good, wine from a bad wine, what is a good camera from a bad camera, and so forth. And that's almost the exact opposite of the meaning in the law, where y- you mean someone who, judges someone by what group he comes from irrespective of the individual's actual, personal, qualities. So th- those are two very different things. ideally, you would like every person to be, judged as an individual, but as a practical matter, that becomes impossible because the costs are prohibitive.

I use the example where if you're walking down the street- Yeah... at night and, you see a shadowy figure in a, in an alley up ahead, I mean, do you judge him as an individual? Or do you cross the street and, go a- across on the other side? 'Cause, the cost of, of judging him as an individual can be very high, including your life. So we make that distinction. But then I say the, I call that discrimina- discrimination 1 is when you just have a, a ver- a very good understanding of what the facts are. And so if you judge each person as an individual, I call that dis- discrimination 1A.

And then if you judge them by the group they belong to, that's not as good, but that's discrimination 1B, but it's still based on some facts. discrimination 2, which is why, reason we have anti-discrimination laws, is that y- you don't worry about that at all. If he's- someone that you don't like for whatever reason, then you, you, you know, discri- you are biased against him.

Yes. And it, and it, and it's devastating. I mean, wa- wars in general are much easier to start than they are to stop. I mean, when, when that, fellow in, in Serbia shot the archduke, I mean, who knew that was gonna c- millions of people around the world- Yeah... including people from the United States about t- about 10,000 miles away are gonna come over there and start shooting.

Yeah, and you can't get... and you get... and then, and I'm worried about the tr- current trade war. You start a trade war, you may never be able to stop it in the, in the, in the next decade 'cause there are too many people involved, too many cross currents of interest and so on.

Oh, my goodness. I'll try to be rational.

They are, they are, they are so awful. well, the public has no idea what... I'm reading a book about the schools, and the woman who's writing it, Diane Ravitch, is talking about how teachers have due process before they can be fired. Now, y- when you look into the facts of it, right down here in, I think it was m- Atherton, the, it cost a half a million dollars to fire one incompetent teacher. you know, y- y- you don't have a big enough budget-... you know? Right. And in, and New Y- and New York you have something called the rubber room. These are teachers who are so incompetent that the principals don't want them in the classroom. you know, and they get paid full salary, and they show up, and they accrue, pension rights and so forth. And, I, the last time that t- I forget how many millions of dollars are spent a year in New York paying for teachers who don't teach, and in fact don't do anything but show up at the same time as if they were teaching, and they read magazines or whatever they feel like doing. and this farce goes on, at a time when they don't have enough money to provide the kids with, decent, supplies.

No, you... Heavens, during the Reagan administration, that was the only time I know of when the Federal Register grew smaller. That is, th- where they compile all the laws that have been passed in a given time. So it can be done. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, e- easy, but it can be done. Someone once, there was some issue with s- Reagan was discussing, and someone said, "You know what? It's complicated." He said, "It's not complicated. It's just not easy to do." I mean, right now, we, I, one of the big farces out here are talks about affordable housing, and they're p- appointing, blue-ribbon committees to look into why there's no affordable housing. And I think that's, that's like appointing a blue-ribbon committee to, to explain why the ground is wet after it, after a rain. I mean, it's very simple. If you prevent people from building housing, and the population is growing, you're gonna have a housing shortage. Yeah. And you won't have affordable housing. It's really, you know, Economics 1 during the first two weeks.

are there any- No, it depends on what, depends on what they're doing. Yeah. There are, there are some things, the government is necessary to do.

Oh, f- for security, first of all, the having dependable laws. some people think that if you're, for free markets, that means you don't think the government should do anything. No, you, the free markets don't operate except within a framework of laws. That's wholly different from having them operate with politicians, jumping in fr- un- at unpredictable times to suddenly, pass some new, legislation.

No, I think the main thing, people have to know what the facts are themselves. if everyone knew what all the facts were, I think you'd have an entirely different set of people elected. I, I can't believe that, either of the, presidential candidates in 19, in 2016, would've, would've been the candidates if you had an informed public.

Well, the media are, are mostly uninformed. No, they're not uninformed. They are misinformed.

and, and they simply do not ch- check the facts, on large issues or small.

right? No, no. Yeah, but,

Well, but I think-... having a long-... more fundamentally, the public that votes has to itself become informed and not be so easily stampeded by slogans and a few numbers thrown around, like, you know, women make X percent of what men make and so on.

and when I was stud- studying that some years ago, for example, I found out that, young, m- female doctors made much less money than young male doctors, and that seemed, like, very odd. And so I... But when you're looking into it, you discover that young male doctors work an average of 500 hours a year more than young female doctors, and they get paid for the 500 hours. -hmm. But there's, there's no reason why the women and men should be doing the same thing. Their circumstances are different

Oh, I would have to write a much larger book to cover them all. the minimum wage law is absolutely devastating. the policy of saying that you cannot have, more kids from one, ethnic group disciplined in the school than from another is nonsense. I mean, you... Th- groups are different from each other in umpteen ways, and t- and to say let's, have the presumption that they are the same except for the way they're, they're treated, is nonsense. It's never been true, and I don't know why we would think it's true here today.

Yes.

no, there was a-... in,

There was a time when, that community wa- consisted of me and Walter Williams. I know Walter used to say, "We, well, the two of us should never fly on the same plane, otherwise the whole movement will, disappear if the plane goes down." Yeah.

Well, you know, in one, in one of the, in one of the chapters there, I have a little section about, the era of apartheid on the Sou- in South Africa. And I, and I had that in there because there's so much argument how much racism is there and so forth. And I said, "Let's test this hypothesis in a setting where there's absolutely no doubt is, of, of it, and that's apartheid in South Africa, where the government, where Blacks are not allowed to vote and so forth. And you then apply the economic principles, and you find that the economic principles apply in South Africa, that, there were some occupations... See, Blacks weren't allowed by law to be in certain occupations more than a certain percentage. -hmm. And in some occupations couldn't be hired at all. In some of those o- occupations where they couldn't be hired at all, well, il- illegal to hire them at all, there were more Blacks hired than there were whites. Because there are economic factors that come in, and you don't just pass a law and that automatically produces the results you want.

Well, it, it... no, it's the competitiveness of the industry. In a competitive industry, discrimination in the, in the, in the sense that we, that we use for anti-discrimination laws, it costs the discriminator as well as the others. Now, insofar as that price can be evaded by the discriminator, he will, he will discrim- For example, minimum wage laws. Let... When you have a minimum wage law, you have more people applying for jobs in those categories, than there are jobs available. -hmm. Because the raising the r- raising the wage rate causes more people to apply and employers to hire fewer, because they're more expensive, and so you have a chronic surplus. Now, if you've got a chronic surplus in an industry, it costs nothing to discriminate.

But if... And I, and... But if, but if you have a competitive market, then of course it does cost something. The, for every person that you discriminate against who's qualified, you've gotta hire somebody else, and you've gotta raise that pay c- raise in order to get, people in. So I show how competitive industries have much less discrimination than, say, regulated public utilities.

Th- this has been happening, I don't know. When I grew up in Harlem, they... when you went into a movie theater, this is a little neighborhood movie theater in Harlem, there would be a kid who would walk be- right down the aisle with you with a flashlight to show you to your seat. You see. And so now, d- now that we have so many compassionate people who wanna, want people to be paid a mi- a living wage-... you got, you stumble down the cha- down the aisle to your seat the best way you can. Yeah. 'Cause they're not gonna pay you the kind of money, you know, that's, that's unrelated to productivity.

Oh, that has been, that is, that, that argument has been made for centuries, and it's, it's been proven wrong for centuries. I would ask the question, what has happened? We've moved in that direction already. We have lots of people who can live off the welfare state and not, and not, and not have to, have to be productive. and h- h- are they better people as a result of that? one of... I saw some time back, and I haven't followed this, that, young pe- the suicide rates among young people were among the negative, consequences of the 1960s. people h- you, you've taken all meaning out of people's lives. And so they find all kinds of crazy things to do, drugs, whatever. and then again, it's not peculiar to the United States. This is, you find this in Britain, other countries. and so, again, people who say this almost never look at any facts about what's happened as we expanded the welfare state. Did people behave better? No. You know, I mean, when One of the, one of the things that, m- moments that I remember very well, when I was, I was back into school in Harlem for some reason, maybe doing research, and I looked out the window and I said, "You know, I, when I was a teenager, I used to walk a dog, my dog in that park." And look of, looks of horror came over the students' faces because that was a different world. And so, and when I tell them that I used to sleep out on a fire escape on hot summer nights, well, who could afford air conditioning, and they think I'm a man from Mars. People did that all over New York. They did it in Washington. They did it in North Carolina. relatives who are in Washington used to go down in that, Haines Point down near the Jefferson Memorial on hot summer nights and sleep there till, you know, sometime after midnight when the, when the, when the heat wouldn't be so bad, and they'd go home at that time. Y- you'd be out of your mind to do that today. It'd be too dangerous.

Yes.

Again, this

it's hard to- This is, again, this is common. One of the s- in Europe, in Eng- England especially, it's a, it's a, it's a special problem because you have the, you have this place where, where your rent is subsidized. And say you're in London, and jobs are disappearing in London, and they're opening up in Manchester. Now, if you go to Manchester, you d- you d- you get on a waiting list for that kind of job. and if you stay in, in London, you're unemployed, but your r- rent is low.

And so p- you, so you slow down the movement of people. You slow down the turnover of people in these apartments. But again, most people who talk about this don't even talk in terms of if this, then that. They talk about it as, "This is how the world ought to be." Well, heck, I, I can think of all kinds of things to how I think the world ought to be. But unfortunately, most of those things involve a cost, a trade-off.

Oh, there may be marginally so. But I think most of the Western world is less free that, than it was, say, 30 years ago or 40 years ago.

Oh, just the amount of re- of regulations, things you could, you... And also by consequences. I, the, I was reading, Milton Friedman's, he and his wife had a joint autobiography, and she's looking, at one point she says she, looking back on the, the days when she would ride the IND subway in Manhattan, and what a joy it was, and she said, "In those long gone days." And, the IND subway goes through Harlem. and Milton Friedman and his, wife, when they were still courting, used to go dancing at the Savoy Ballroom ver- very few people wa- wanted... And, and you know the famous, theme song of Duke Ellington, Take the A Train. -hmm. The A train goes right through Harlem on the IND line. And, so Friedman, who was only five foot two, had no fear of being mu- mugged or, even accosted, and go there. There were... And this was common. There was a, there was a Black actress who, used to get finished with the play and her socializing afterwards, and at 1:00 in the morning, she said she would be taking the, subway up to 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue by herself and wa- and walking home. Nobody does that these days. Right. And so you have to look, one, at what are the facts? How did they change? A- and, and you, and you don't simply say... The other thing is that, this thing, the No Child Left Behind thing with Bush. -hmm. There are kids who go to school to raise hell, and a, and a handful of those can prevent the whole class from learning anything. Now, the logical thing would be to separate those kids out, and let the ones who wanna learn something, learn something. Yeah. You can't do that because the ideology says no. And so, and so f- you sacrifice whole generations of poor and minority kids for this ideology and this utopian notion.

And Milton Friedman used to say, "The best is the enemy of the good."

And of course, it would be better if everybody could be educated at the same time. It can't be done.

Oh, no question about it.

No, no. I- y- you have to lo- look at the s- circumstances. I mean, I've advised some young people, do not go into t- into teaching in the public schools Because, the odds are so stacked against you. And people can write bad references from you, for you, w- when, especially when you're young and you, and what they say about you is all that the, someone sees. Now, by the time I was, teaching at some of these schools, I remember one place where the department chairman used to, threaten one of my colleagues w- that he wouldn't write good r- references for him. I had r- I ha- I had, you know, I'd, I'd published stuff while I was still in graduate school. I had Milton Friedman and, George Stigler write references for me. What this guy said there as cha- chairman of the department wouldn't, wouldn't matter a bit. But most people don't h- don't have that, situation.

And so you have to pick your, you have to pick your fights.

Yes.

It isn't common anymore. I mean, when I was going to school and we'd have fights on the schoolyard grounds, when one s- one guy was clearly beaten, whoever was the toughest kids, in the crowd would simply step in and stop it. Yeah. And the other guys would say, "You wanna fight, you can fight me." You know? now the- And that's

Yes. But with... I mean, the poli- there's only so much the police can do. if you, if you don't have common decency the, the cops ha- are not, not gonna be able to, to handle it. and especially when everyone is second-guessing. I love it when people who have never fired a gun in their lives, say, "Why do the cops fire so many guns?" Now, at one time I taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they shot, fired so many things under those conditions. But people, it's, pe- people can't be knowledgeable about everything, but they can be knowledgeable about the extent of their own ignorance, even if they have PhDs.

Well, thank you very much.