Utterly Meaningless

He said WHAT?!?

Well, I guess he was going on to mention that if you abort every baby of whatever race, the crime rate is bound to drop too. But they didn’t give him the chance.

Truly beyond reprehensible.

I’ve met Bill Bennett, and have disagreed with Bill Bennett, and have spent a lot of time trying to keep homeschoolers from winding up at the wrong end of anti-trust suit with Bill Bennett on the other end of it… but he’s getting lynched for this thing and it is an injustice.

The fact that I disagree with him about cyberschools and am glad to see him off K12 does not mean I can stand by with a clear conscience while he is vilified.

And, just for the record: the Klan burned a cross on my lawn when I was two (not my fault–really!) and my dad lost his job.

I agree with Scott. The plain truth is blacks commit and are convicted of crimes at a higher rate than whites. We can debate the causes all day. Bennett was making the point that the alleged fact that legalized abortion has lowered the crime rate is not an argument for abortion – the same way that lower crime rates would not be an argument for killing black babies.

And 99% of his detractors know this is true. However, they knew they could use this to “eliminate” a conservative and they jumped all over the chance confident that the idiots in the mainstream media would be their willing partners.

Politics in this country has ceased to be an battle of ideas and is now just a battle of public elimination.

Screw them all.

While Bennett may be getting screwed, he brought it on himself to a large extent. The book he claims to be citing, Freakonomics doesn’t claim that you could reduce the crime rate in the future by aborting anyone’s children. Instead, it argues that the crime rate (specifically the murder rate) is lower than it might have been because of abortion. Hoping that I don’t make the same mistake that Bennett did, it goes something like this–

Fact– blacks have more abortions per capita than do whites
Fact– blacks have been victims of more murders per capita than whites
Assuming that none of the abortions had taken place and that the children would have experienced the same odds as the rest of the population, there would have been more folks murdered (because there’d have been more blacks to be the victims).

It’s a subtle difference– Bennett’s argument is prospective; Freakonomics, retrospective.

So, is Bennett a closet racist? Probably not. Does he suffer from poor reading comprehension? Perhaps. Did he stick his size 9 loafers in his mouth? Definitely.

That was I.

BTW, Scott, I’d be very interested to learn a bit more about that cross-burning episode. You know you can’t throw a factoid like that out there without just a bit of explanation.

I don’t remember Freakanomics even bringinig race into it. Poor, single mothers are more likely to have abortions. Poor, single mothers are also more likely to raise criminals, ergo…

Yeah, the unspoken truth there is that a higher percentage of blacks will be poor and unmarried, but I believe Freakanomics made the point that it wasn’t racial, it was cultural. It was the poor and single part that mattered.

Poor, single mothers are more likely to have abortions. Poor, single mothers are also more likely to raise criminals, ergo…

Which just shifts the problem from saying blacks tend to be criminals to poor people tend to be criminals. Why is it more wrong to say one than the other?

At any rate, what he said was not reprehensible because he was calling the idea to solve an economic or criminal problem by killing off members of society a reprehensible idea. And he is correct.