Walter Williams: Intransigent Individualist
Championing Individual Freedom Against Collectivist Dogma
One of America’s leading public intellectuals for nearly half a century, Walter Williams (1936–2020) defended free markets, championed individualism, and fought to liberate blacks and other minorities from destructive ideas and policies. He often opposed the status quo, especially the shibboleths of the left. And he was derided accordingly by journalists and intellectuals. But Williams was never deterred. His mind, wit, and focus on facts—combined with his remarkable ability to communicate in clear, plain English—left his detractors in the dust and taught countless people crucial truths about economics and how the marketplace actually works.
His courageous life story, from the Richard Allen housing project in Philadelphia to the lecture halls of George Mason University, reinforces the ideas Williams spent his life promoting: Government interventions in the economy are destructive and immoral; freedom, more than any other factor, enables social mobility; and capitalism is the only moral economic system. . . .
Upbringing
Walter Williams was born at a time that now seems more like a different world than a different era. That year, Jesse Owens refuted Hitler’s fantasy of “Aryan” superiority on the Olympic track, the cost of a gallon of gas was ten cents, Gone with the Wind was published, and sunscreen was invented. As alien as these events may seem, so were the social conditions of American inner-city black communities. Williams grew up in the Richard Allen housing project of North Philadelphia, where there was little crime, violence, or other social disorder. As he noted:
Back in the ’40s [public housing projects] were not what they were to become—a location known for drugs, killings, and nighttime sounds of gunfire. . . . Most of the children we played with, unlike my sister and I, lived with both parents. More than likely, there were other single-parent households but I can recall none. Fathers worked and the mothers often did as well. The buildings and yards were well kept.1
Inner-city poverty was not then associated with the high levels of crime and other forms of social degradation that it is today.2
Williams’s mother didn’t graduate high school and, after his father deserted the family, she raised two children by herself. However, she knew the importance of a good education and fought to get her son into the best school in their district, which was Andrew Hamilton Elementary School. Hamilton had no black students and was attended predominantly by Jewish children. Another local school, Hoffman Elementary, had black students, and as Williams recalled:
School authorities therefore encouraged my mother to enroll us at Hoffman, because they thought we’d feel more comfortable there. Mom argued that Hamilton was within our school district and insisted that we be enrolled there. . . . Mom was a forceful yet dignified woman who didn’t easily take no for an answer. I don’t know what she said or threatened, but that fall we attended Hamilton.3
His mother’s insistence paid off. Williams’s elementary school education put him well ahead of his junior high classmates, most of whom went to a different elementary school. However, he found high school challenging because his teachers were demanding, especially when they recognized his potential. His English teacher, Dr. Rosenberg, assigned such “classics as Beowulf, Shakespearean plays, The Canterbury Tales, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,” recalled Williams, and Rosenburg also had “high and demanding aspirations for us. He said that we should always aim for the stars because if we failed, we’d fail in style.”4
At the age of thirteen, Williams started working for the U-Needa-Hat company of Philadelphia—a big step up from his former job shining shoes. The owner of the company was one of Williams’s shoeshine customers who offered him a job to run errands and do other tasks. He wrote in his autobiography that this job was pivotal in many ways. He learned how to be resourceful and saw his resourcefulness rewarded in the marketplace.
While doing odd jobs in the shop, he would often see seamstresses working on hats. After they went home on slow days, he would practice what he saw them doing on the machines. Over time, he taught himself how to sew at roughly the same level as the seamstresses. One Saturday afternoon, two of the seamstresses didn’t show up to work, and the company fell behind on orders. Williams, seeing his opportunity, volunteered his newly acquired skill.
Surprised, [the owner’s son] . . . said, “Let’s see you do it.” Within a few minutes, after offering a tip or two along the way, both [the owner and his son] were satisfied with the skills I had picked up on my own. I’m sure I wasn’t paid as much as the seamstresses, but I was happy with the additional money I earned and also with the many compliments I received.5
During this period, Williams also learned about the opportunity-destroying nature of labor laws. When the seamstresses discovered that Williams used the sewing machines after they went home on Sunday, they complained to the Department of Labor that the owner was in violation of child labor laws. Williams, then age thirteen, noted, “When an official from the department interviewed me about my work, I, like most other people, thought they were acting in my interest to get me a higher wage.”6 Williams found out the hard way that the Department of Labor was there to put an end to his employment. This episode informed his later thinking on voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions; the economic preference of skills and productivity over other considerations; and the immorality of government intervention in the private sector. He would observe and record similar examples of government intrusion and the damage it causes for the rest of his career.
Although Williams was raised in a single-parent home with little money, his family instilled in him the values that would fuel his upward socioeconomic mobility. As Williams put it, “if materially poor, we were spiritually rich. . . . Nowadays, very few blacks suffer yesteryear’s material poverty, but many lack its spiritual wealth.”7 In his role as a public figure, he would spend much of his time working to replenish such spiritual wealth by promoting life-affirming values to inner-city black communities.
Intellectual Development
Williams was drafted into the army after high school and after a few years earned an honorable discharge. He then moved to California with his new wife, where he would go on to earn a PhD in economics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). During his time in graduate school, his economic and philosophic thinking matured. Although, as Williams recalled, he looked like “a Black Panther because I wore dashikis, a beret, and a tiger’s tooth necklace,” his political views were closer to mainstream.8 “Like most young people,” he said, “my philosophical leanings were toward the liberal side of the political spectrum. In the 1964 presidential elections, I voted for Lyndon Johnson over conservative Barry Goldwater. I thought that higher minimum wages were the way to help poor people, particularly poor black people.”9
However, his views began to change when a professor posed a pointed question.
That political attitude endured until I had a conversation with a UCLA professor (it might have n Armen Alchian) who asked me whether I cared about the intentions behind a higher minimum wage or its effects. If I was concerned about the effects, he said, I should read studies by Chicago University Professor Yale Brozen and others about the devastating effects of the minimum wage on employment opportunities for minimally skilled workers.10
Such challenges to his thinking along with intensive studies during his years in graduate school helped Williams to understand how government intervention in the economy, in all its manifestations, creates problems rather than solves them. He read the works of free-market economists such as Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman, which further bolstered his leanings toward capitalism.11 And at some point he read Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which he recommended as “one of the best defenses and explanations of capitalism one is likely to read.”12 The influence of Rand on Williams is evident in his later work, where he defended free markets on moral grounds and criticized economic restrictions not merely as impractical but also as immoral. Williams wrote:
What’s moral and immoral conduct can be complicated, but needlessly so. I keep things simple and you tell me where I go wrong.
My initial assumption is that we each own ourselves. I am my private property and you are yours. If we accept the notion that people own themselves, then it’s easy to discover what forms of conduct are moral and immoral. Immoral acts are those that violate self-ownership. Murder, rape, assault and slavery are immoral because those acts violate private property. So is theft, broadly defined as taking the rightful property of one person and giving it to another.
The only way for Congress to give one American one dollar is to first, through the tax code, take that dollar from some other American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American. Forcibly using one person to serve another is one way to describe slavery. As such, it violates self-ownership.13
Williams earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from California State University in 1965; his master’s degree from UCLA in 1967; and his PhD from UCLA in 1972. In 1969, while Williams was working on his PhD, UCLA’s economics department hired a visiting professor named Thomas Sowell.14
Dr. Sowell had received his PhD from the University of Chicago under the guidance of his dissertation adviser, Nobel Laureate George Stigler. Although Williams never attended any of Sowell’s classes, the two met and developed a personal and professional relationship that lasted for the rest of Williams’s life. Having similar social interests, professional goals, and intellectual enemies naturally brought them together. Given that both men were black intellectuals promoting free markets and denouncing the welfare state, including many of the so-called antipoverty programs that were alleged to help black Americans, Williams and Sowell were routinely smeared in the vilest terms by black intellectuals on the left. “It might be difficult nowadays to comprehend the nastiness of the time,” Williams acknowledged, so he provided a few examples, including these:
NAACP General Counsel Thomas Atkins, upon hearing that Reagan was considering appointing Tom Sowell as head of the Council of Economic Advisors, declared that Sowell “would play the same kind of role which historically house niggers played for the plantation owners.”
Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan said, “If you give Thomas l a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [former Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke.”15
While writing his dissertation in 1972, at age thirty-six, Williams accepted a research position at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. This position opened his eyes to the general lack of rigor in policy research. On one occasion, Williams was invited to give his opinion on a project involving day-care programs. As he recounted:
In private conversation with a couple of the authors, I asked my favorite questions of people who argue that we need this or that government program: what did Americans do before the proposed government program, and why is it needed now? In the case at hand, how was the nation able to survive and prosper from 1787 to 1972 without a government-run or -subsidized day-care program?16
Williams noted that the researchers considered only government “solutions” and never weighed the possibility of a free-market solution. In his characteristic way, he pointed out the absurdity of their policy suggestion with one that was even more absurd:
I simply returned the project to its authors with a note saying that the document I’d attached fully expressed my ideas about their concerns with regard to orphans and day care. The attachment was a Xeroxed copy of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which he suggests coping with Ireland’s twin hunger and orphan problems by taking orphans, fattening them up, and eating them.17
Williams soon learned how economic policy can also be a tool of racial segregation. In 1979, he gave his first lecture in South Africa on behalf of the Free Market Foundation, and he continued his lectures there throughout the eighties. In the era of apartheid, white business owners were hiring blacks because their labor typically was cheaper—substantially due to a minimum wage law that applied only to whites. However, South African unions of white workers lobbied to have the same minimum wage law apply also to blacks, and the legislation passed. This ensured that black workers couldn’t compete with white workers by offering to work for lower wages. Williams explained:
During South Africa’s apartheid era, racist unions, which would never accept a black member, were the major supporters of minimum wages for blacks. In 1925, the South African Economic and Wage Commission said, “The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed.” Gert Beetge, secretary of the racist Building Workers’ Union, complained, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans.”18
Williams noted that even in a country governed by apartheid, rational business owners prioritized ability over anything else. His experiences there helped to develop his view that racial discrimination exacts costs that intelligent, self-interested businessmen aren’t willing to pay when they’re free to choose.
Poverty-Causing, Poverty-Exacerbating Legislation
In his 1964 State of the Union address, Lyndon B. Johnson launched his so-called War on Poverty that resulted in a flood of government programs. Williams would spend much of his career crusading against these and similar “antipoverty” programs. As he and others later argued, the poverty rate was in decline before Johnson’s War on Poverty began. These new initiatives not only failed to reduce poverty, they increased it. As Louis Woodhill wrote in 2014,
The stated goal of the War on Poverty . . . was “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” Measured against this objective, the War on Poverty has not just been a failure, it has been a catastrophe. It was supposed to help America’s poor become self-sufficient, and it has made them dependent and dysfunctional. . . . Shortly after the War on Poverty got rolling (1967), about 27% of Americans lived in poverty. In 2012 . . . the number was about 29%. This result would be shocking, even if we had not spent $21.5 trillion “fighting poverty” over the past 50 years.19
In his 1982 documentary, Good Intentions, Williams argued against many programs that cause or exacerbate poverty, among them minimum wage laws, licensing laws, and welfare. Minimum wage laws allegedly provide low-skill workers with greater income by forbidding employers to pay them any wage below a government-mandated minimum. But, Williams argued, what minimum wage laws actually do is price low-skill workers out of the marketplace, decreasing or eliminating their opportunities for employment. If an employee or potential employee can’t produce more value for an employer than the wage the employer pays him, then it makes no economic sense for the employer to hire or to retain him. Employers, in an effort to deal with the rising costs of labor caused by minimum wage laws, either fire low-skill employees or reduce their hours, and they refrain from hiring new employees who can’t yet produce enough value to justify the mandated wage.
For example, if a movie theater owner can afford to pay a total of $12 per hour for ushers, then he can afford three ushers at $4 per hour. However, if a minimum wage law mandates that employers pay no less than $6 per hour, he can afford only two ushers; the third will either be fired if he is currently working or never hired in the first place. A principle in economics, the law of demand, states that as the price of a good increases, demand decreases. Minimum wage legislation increases the price of labor, which decreases demand for it.
As Williams repeatedly pointed out, minimum wage laws disproportionately affect the young—and, because inner-city black communities often lack good schools, they affect black teenagers most of all. He wrote:
In our society, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults. Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable household environments. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.20
Williams saw licensing laws as another obstacle to economic mobility. These laws require individuals to go through a government-authorized certification process before practicing in a given profession. Once certified, practitioners often charge a premium for their services. However, Williams argued, these requirements harm low-income workers by creating barriers to entry. At the time of his documentary in 1982, Williams noted that it cost about $20,000 to get a taxi license in Philadelphia. In Washington, D.C., the licensing cost was less than $50. Consequently, more people were able to enter the taxi business in D.C.—and about 90 percent of them owned their own cars. By contrast, less than 50 percent of the taxis in Philadelphia were driver-owned. Williams noted:
Government licensing closes the door to economic opportunity. Nearly 1,000 occupations in the United States exclude people who do not have licenses. Sometimes the licenses cost money; sometimes they require the applicant to pass complicated tests that have little to do with the job; sometimes getting a license requires a friend in the business. All those licensing laws do just one thing: keep outsiders out. Those outsiders are often members of minority groups.21
Williams saw the destructive nature of welfare programs as well, especially their effects on low-income or no-income young men and women. The welfare system harms the poor, he argued, because it incentivizes behavior that leads to long-term economic hardships. For instance, it tempts low-skill people to collect welfare checks rather than seek employment, thus it disincentives them from going into the workforce. And, if a person never enters the workforce, or never long enough to acquire economically valuable skills, he can never demand much money for his labor. This is one of the many ways in which welfare sets the stage for lifelong dependency and poverty.
Young women have the greatest incentives for becoming long-term dependents on welfare. Welfare programs make it possible for them to get an apartment, medical care, a monthly income, food stamps, legal assistance, and more—all free—if they have a child out of wedlock. Many young women take the bait and wind up dependent on the welfare system for life.22
Williams was a staunch opponent of welfare and “antipoverty” programs because they don’t make economic or moral sense and because they disproportionately harm the people they’re alleged to help.
Black Culture: Causes and Effects
In a 2017 article titled “The Welfare State’s Legacy,” Williams wrote:
The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likely to live in poverty-stricken households.23
What is the cause of the weak family structure among blacks? Williams explained:
In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?
According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Is that supposed to be a delayed response to the legacy of slavery? The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.24
Although Williams routinely researched and discussed the effects of economic policy on behavior, he did not ignore cultural explanations for the financial and spiritual impoverishment of inner-city residents. Since the 1960s, the deterioration of traditionally held values among blacks—values such as personal responsibility, nuclear families, thrift, industry, and morality—has been glaringly apparent. Few intellectuals have openly acknowledged it. Even fewer have been willing to state its cause. Williams did both.
For nearly three-quarters of a century, the nation’s liberals have waged war on traditional values, customs and morality. Our youths have been counseled that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal opinion. During the 1960s, the education establishment began to challenge and undermine lessons children learned from their parents and Sunday school with fads such as “values clarification.”25
Williams was correct that a shift in values caused changes in attitudes and behavior. However, he sometimes implied, as he does above, that morality comes from religion; and he sometimes implied that there are no moral absolutes and that morality is just a tool for tricking people into doing what you want them to do, as he does here: “Normative statements [i.e., statements about how people should or shouldn’t act] are excellent tools for tricking others into doing what you want them to do. I simply caution that in the process of tricking others, there’s no need to trick oneself into believing that one normative statement is better or more righteous than another.”26
Although Williams did not offer much clarity on the source or nature of morality, he was one of the few intellectuals to correctly identify the fact that the absence of moral values is a major cause of the deterioration of inner-city black culture.
A related destructive shift in cultural attitudes that Williams identified was the acceptance of the “victim mentality,” the belief that one is the helpless victim of forces outside of one’s control. According to this belief, if someone winds up successful and wealthy, it’s not his achievement; he was just lucky that things went his way. If someone winds up unsuccessful and poor, it’s not his fault; he’s a victim of “the system” or “the man” or his upbringing.
On a radio program, a host once asked Williams about the pervasiveness of the victim mentality in black communities. “Why is it that so many people in the African American community seem to preach that we’re victims,” asked the host, “that somehow this is not our fault, this is not our responsibility?” “I guess it’s more comfortable to be a victim,” Williams answered. “It’s more comfortable to blame your problems on somebody else than having to be a little more introspective; to say, look, I’m messing up [and we in this community are] not doing things that we’re supposed to be doing.”27
Williams held that the deterioration of black culture was a consequence of government interventions in the economy, of welfare programs, and of the collapse of cultural values.
Williams versus Black Collectivists
Free markets, individual rights, and personal responsibility are not widely valued among prominent black intellectuals. Many of them are not individualists but collectivists, holding that one’s group affiliation is the basis of one’s identity and the source of one’s values. Racial collectivism—or, simply, racism—is an especially primitive variant of this creed, holding that people should be identified and judged by their race or genetic lineage. Unfortunately, and ironically, racism is widespread among today’s black intellectuals, who encourage it in black youths and the culture at large. For example, if a black teenager identifies with his white skateboarding buddies because they have the same interest, namely riding skateboards, a black racist will say something to the effect that he’s “acting white” or betraying his “blackness.” The idea here is that his identity is his race—his “blackness”—and that he should value the values of his race. As Ayn Rand observed:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.28
Williams was part of a small group of individualist black intellectuals. He advocated independent thinking and personal responsibility, and he rejected the notion that blacks should blame their underachievement on racism or “white” institutions. He saw blacks as individuals who are capable of thinking for themselves, choosing their own values, taking advantage of the substantial freedom in America, and working to achieve the American dream of self-sufficiency and personal happiness. Consequently, he opposed racial quotas and affirmative action programs, which he saw as racist and damaging to those whom they’re alleged to benefit. He also opposed “reparations” for slavery, which he saw as a repudiation of individual accountability and moral justice. He wrote:
Let’s pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There’s the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust . . . Are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites—who were a majority of Southern whites—should their descendants be made to pay reparations?29
As indicated above, many black intellectuals resented and smeared Williams for daring to think independently and for coming to conclusions at odds with theirs. Typical of such attacks was the 1984 hit piece by George Jordan of the Cleveland newspaper, the Plain Dealer. In an article titled “Williams Speaks for the Oppressors,” Jordan wrote:
At times I wish the Lord would deliver me back to the days of Stepin Fetchit, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom. The old style black illiterate “handkerchief heads” were an embarrassment, but they were harmless in comparison to “educated” blacks like economist Walter E. Williams, a darling of the far Right. . . . Williams is a butter-tongued apologist for the new oppressors of the most helpless black Americans. . . . I could never really get angry at the old Stepin Fetchits and Aunt Jemimas for they were really uneducated and simply practicing the art of survival. But I have only contempt for people like Williams.30
Unfortunately, in recent years, such attacks against independent-thinking black intellectuals have gotten worse. Uncle Tom, a documentary produced by Larry Elder, details the horrific treatment of many contemporary black intellectuals who are targeted because of their pro-individualist, pro-capitalist, anti-victimhood positions. Elder shows the ways in which black intellectuals who do not embrace groupthink or the welfare state or the multiheaded hydra of black victimhood are constantly smeared in the media. The documentary details attacks on intellectuals such as Brandon Tatum, Candace Owens, Herman Cain, and Allen West for not toeing the leftist line.
But the injustice involved in this new wave of collectivist contempt for individualism among blacks is too vast to document in a single film. The push for compliance continues, with attacks on John McWhorter, Jason Riley, Jason Hill, Coleman Hughes, and every other black intellectual who dares to think for him or herself. These courageous intellectuals carry the torch of intellectual independence that Williams, Sowell, and earlier black intellectuals, such as Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston, held high and carried forward.
Independent Thinker, Individualist, Inspiration
Throughout his professional career, Williams courageously fought for individualism and freedom amid all manner of personal attacks. Yet he always kept his cool and remained civil, even lighthearted. That’s an amazing intellectual feat.
What goes on in the mind of such a remarkable man to make this possible? Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” provides a clue:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!
Williams was an independent thinker, an individualist, and an inspiration. We are fortunate to have a lifetime of his media appearances, books, and articles to consult for a rational, individualist, free-market perspective spanning eight decades. If black intellectuals—and intellectuals in general—live up to the standards that Williams embraced, we can and will achieve a future of individualism, freedom, and prosperity.
It’s a big “if.” But we have a great role model.