Dr. Thomas Sowell Discusses "Intellectuals And Race" On "Hannity"
TUCKER CARLSON: This book is packed with all kinds of interesting information that I have never heard before. This jumped out at me, you talked about the grotesque, really disparity, between black and white unemployment rates. The black unemployment rate is much higher than white unemployment rate, but you say that wasn't always the case. You say that black labor participations were higher than that of whites up until about 1930. What changed?
DR. THOMAS SOWELL: What Changed was the government intervention into the labor market. 1930 was the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage. They brought in the Davis-Bacon Act. In fact, people, some of the sponsors of the Davis-Bacon Act said that they were producing that Act precisely because blacks from the South, construction workers were coming up North and the construction companies were able to underbid the Northern companies and get government contracts. And so, this was meant to put a stop to that.
CARLSON: Amazing, so just to be totally clear, up until 1930 under the Roosevelt administration, of course that would have been the Hoover administration, but up until that point, there were lower unemployment rates in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods and that has been the result, you think, of lack of government intervention?
SOWELL: Not always, but in 1930 that was certainly the case, and that was not the first time that it was the case. The huge gap that you see today, that all has occurred under minimum wage laws. (Hannity, March 15, 2013)
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