CFACT mourns the loss of economist Dr. Walter Williams who passed away this week.   Dr. Williams was a wise and tireless advocate for freedom.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Williams once after I gave a presentation in Washington.  He was a delightful man.  He has on a number of occasions mentioned CFACT’s work in his nationally-syndicated columns, most recently citing the work of Paul Driessen in a column this past March.

CFACT’s Marc Morano was a former student of Dr. Williams at George Mason University (he got a C).  Marc posted detailed thoughts at Climate Depot and CFACT.org.

Dr. Williams was the author of The State Against Blacks and America: A Minority Viewpoint, which became a PBS documentary.

Here’s a tiny sample of what this great man had to say:

  • Liberty is the rare state of affairs in mankind’s history, arbitrary abuse and control by others is the standard dish even now. All the tendencies are for us to have greater and greater amounts of our liberty usurped by government.
  • The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do, and that is to destroy the black family.
  • Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile … Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation’s youth from kindergarten through college. That’s why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
  • Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
  • Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn’t do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system pales in comparison to utopias. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

Freedom lifts up all people.

So did Dr. Walter Williams.