Goingbegging

At sixteen, a kid from Harlem used to travel to work down Fifth Avenue, with a close view of both the slum tenements of the Upper East Side and the grand houses and galleries of mid-Manhattan. To him, this looked like the rich starving the poor, and he became a passionate Marxist (what I call 'falling at the first'). No sign yet of the bold, creative thinker who would one day blaspheme against virtually all the principles of the liberal welfare state, so sacred to the intelligentsia.

Ironically, his Road to Damascus came when he worked at the Department of Labor, initially because he was a keen believer in the minimum wage, but then saw how it actually created unemployment, and that these public servants, whom he had viewed as champions of the poor and humble, were in fact chiefly interested in preserving their own jobs, and generally not rocking the boat.

One by one, he questions the tenets of LBJ's 'Great Society' and the War on Poverty, and proves them to be entirely hollow. Affirmative Action just debases the currency, to the detriment of all groups. 'Racism' is essentially meaningless - just a good rabble-rousing word. And as for Reparations, he is not the only black speaker to lose patience with this huge gravy-train, based on economic theories that belong firmly in the kindergarden.

He confirms an unfashionable view that I had always held, that American race relations were at their best during the war and a few years after - the Jim Crow era - and that the new flood of human rights just seemed to spark-off violence everywhere.

He sees the same thing happening in England, a country he regards as a beacon of fairness and decency, and his views about the August Riots (2011) are definitely not in accord with the official explanations about lack of opportunities and racist policing.

Altogether a well-reasoned debate in the best traditions of the long-running Uncommon Knowledge series with the excellent Peter Robinson.