In 1981, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare Patricia Harris wrote in the Washington Post that libertarian economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are “middle class” so they “don’t know what it is to be poor.”

In fact, Williams grew up in a single-parent household in a poor section of Philadelphia. He was raised by his mother, who was a high school dropout. The family spent time on welfare, and eventually moved into the Richard Allen public housing project. (Sowell, whose father died before he was born, was the son of a maid.)

Drafted into the peacetime Army, Williams eventually earned a PhD from UCLA in the late 1960s and quickly became a sought-after researcher and public intellectual. His best known book, 1982’s The State Against Blacks, argues that a major cause of black unemployment is government intervention in the labor market.

Williams’ contrarian views have had wide exposure through documentaries, public appearances, and for the past 30 years, a syndicated weekly column. Since 1992, Williams has also been a frequent guest host of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Now a professor emeritus at George Mason University, Williams has taught at Temple University, California State University-Los Angeles, and other universities. (Go here for his personal web page.)

His new book, Up from the Projects: An Autobiography, is a fascinating look at his childhood, his half-century-long marriage to his recently departed wife, his unusual career path, and the genesis of his views on race, economics, and politics.

Throughout his career, Williams has used his own life to illustrate how government regulations often work to deny opportunities to poor blacks, and his memoir is no exception. For example, Williams recounts that when he was a teenager, he was fired from a great job at a hat factory when a fellow employee complained to the Department of Labor that his boss was violating child labor laws.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie recently sat down with Williams to talk about his life, how his experiences have informed his scholarship, his lead role in turning George Mason University into a center for libertarian scholarship, and whether the Obama presidency has improved the lives of blacks in the United States.

Williams is also an emeritus trustee of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that produces Reason.tv.

For more on Williams’ new memoir, check out Damon Root’s review, which calls the book “a revealing and sometimes hilarious account of his rise from Philadelphia’s Richard Allen housing projects, where his neighbors included a young Bill Cosby, to ‘brown bag’ lunches at the White House where he gave advice to President Ronald Reagan and his staff.”

Produced, shot, and edited by Jim Epstein. Additional camera: Joshua Swain.

Approximately 30 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv’s You Tube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.

“While there is no evidence of systemic market failures that might be remedied or ameliorated by the proposed rules,” the study read, “there is substantial basis for believing that the proposed regulations would harm competition, slow innovation, and reduce consumer welfare.”

Specifically, the study maintains that many of those practices that would be banned by the new regulations generally benefit consumers and foster competition and that the FCC’s existing framework is sufficient for the Commission to adjudicate traffic disputes and the like.

“Regulation can improve economic welfare only in the face of market imperfections, such as market power, externalities, or information asymmetries,” the study read. “While the markets at issue in this proceeding are characterized by product differentiation, high fixed costs and other deviations from the textbook model of ‘perfect competition,’ the evidence provides no support for the existence of market failure sufficient to warrant ex ante regulation of the type proposed by the Commission.”

Days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the FCC lacked sufficient regulatory authority to regulate broadband services, a poll by Rasmussen found 53 percent of Americans in opposition to the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules. Among daily Internet users, that figure rose to 64 percent.

The FCC has announced that the deadline for public comment on the new regulation had been extended to April 26, to allow for additional industry and public consideration.  Interested members of the public can comment here (proceeding 09-191).

In March 2010, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package.  It contained many informational gems:

• Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors);
• Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus;
• On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received.  Democratic districts received 73 percent of the total stimulus funds awarded, and Republican districts received 27 percent of the total amount awarded.

De Rugy claimed that “a district’s representation by a Republican decreases the stimulus funds awarded to it by 41.7 percent.”  She also found that unemployment did not correlate with stimulus funds received.  In other words, much of the money under the stimulus was directed at Democratic districts for political reasons.

The mere suggestion that politics had anything to do with allocations under the stimulus got the journalistic left’s panties in a wad.  Some of the criticism of de Rugy’s study was worthwhile.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out that de Rugy had not taken into account the fact that cash was allocated largely to districts containing state capitols, since money allocated to states generally flows through state capitols (which are overwhelmingly represented by Democrats).  There is something to be said for this criticism, of course, which is why de Rugy proceeded to re-run the study taking into account the effect of allocations to state capitols – and found that the average Democratic district still gets 30 percent more cash than the average Republican district.

Of course, that didn’t stop the rest of the journalistic left from trashing de Rugy with inordinate glee before she had the chance to re-run the numbers.  Partisan hack Jonathan Chait accused de Rugy of “living [a] well-compensated [life] of pure ideological hackery.”  Idiots Paul Krugman and Derek Thompson chimed in, too.  They didn’t bother reading the study, of course – they simply parroted Silver’s point, which de Rugy had already accepted, and was busily integrating into her study.

The key finding of de Rugy’s study went unnoticed, of course: if the stimulus was supposed to stimulate employment, the cash should have gone to districts with the highest unemployment.  It didn’t.  That means that something else was in play – politics.

Ironically, de Rugy’s leftist critics made the argument that something else was in play, namely that states that paid more taxes clearly deserved to get more benefits, even if those states did not have the highest rates of unemployment – an argument that more deservedly belongs on the right side of the spectrum, where we actually care who pays taxes.  Wasn’t the whole point of the stimulus to spread the wealth around, according to the left?

In fact, we can obviate the state capitols question by looking at the stimulus package allocations over the breadth of the states as a whole.  Listed below are the top twenty states by population and the amount allocated under the stimulus package (statistics via Recovery.gov).  Using California as a baseline, I calculated the proportionate amount each state should have received based on population alone, then calculated how much more or less than that amount the state actually received.  I have labeled each state blue or red based on how it voted during the 2004 election, rather than 2008, since Congressional and state political make-up more closely reflect the results of 2004 than 2008.

Think big. Gigantic. This is the latest from Charles Shumer, the Democrat from New York:

When he found out that Adidas was planning to outsource manufacturing of NBA jerseys he “called on the league to terminate its contract with the German-based sportswear giant unless it halts plans to transfer production of game-day jerseys from an upstate New York facility to Thailand.”

Great idea! Let’s make sure that we force companies to produce stuff at the highest possible cost in the name of some lame “buy and make American” nonsensical theory. I am sure that forcing Adidas to give up on the possibility to reduce its production costs will do wonders for this economy.

Besides, as George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux noted in a still unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Daily News yesterday:

“I wonder where Mr. Schumer’s business suits are made.  All in the U.S.?  What about his shoes?  His neckties?  His underwear?  How about the coffee he drinks?  The flowers he buys for his wife in January?  Are these all made in America?

Does Mr. Schumer eat cheese from only Vermont and Wisconsin?  Drink wine from only California and Oregon?  Does he vacation only in places such as Maui and Martha’s Vineyard?  Does he listen to only recordings made by musicians holding U.S. passports?  Does he read books written only by American authors, and decorate his home with only those paintings, vases, and sculptures produced by Americans residing in U.S. locales such as Santa Fe and Manhattan?  Is his life nearly devoid of modern consumer electronics, given that very few of these devices are today manufactured in America?

I don’t know Mr. Schumer personally, but I’ll bet my pension that his everyday consumption consists of countless products containing such large quantities of non-American inputs and labor that, were Mr. Schumer suddenly to rid his existence of these foreign contributions to his living standard, he would soon find himself ignorant and appallingly impoverished.”

And of course we know that Schumer has always had great ideas about how to improve the health of our nation. For instance, his big contribution at the job summit yesterday was to ask that the Census Bureau staff  go to unemployment offices around the state to hire temporary workers for the 2010 population count.

Way to go Charlie!

A particularly curious tale begins with a September 21 letter to Margaret Hamburg, the new Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Director Linda Birnbaum who, among others, was copied on the correspondence.  The letter was penned by Thomas Zoeller, a member of the 2007 Chapel Hill Consensus that advanced theories of danger associated with BPA, and 32 additional signatories.  The letter opens by stating that its signatories are “a group of independent (mostly university) researchers with extensive experience working with endocrine disrupting compounds and in particular bisphenol A (BPA)” but then gives a curious warning to Commissioner Hamburg regarding plans for $10 million in BPA studies by FDA.

“We find it troubling that the FDA is proposing to spend such a large amount of money on such a well-researched chemical,” the letter notes.  It goes on to claim that plans to further research BPA are “disturbing” and that “there is sufficient research and independent review available for the agency to make a decision as to whether, as the law dictates, there is ‘reasonable certainty’ that this chemical is ‘not harmful.’”

At first blush, one might be inclined to give credit to these researchers for their noble stance in defense of government frugality with taxpayer money.  But a cursory understanding of many of the signatories’ past efforts raises an intriguing issue.  Close to half of the signatories had been part of the Chapel Hill Consensus, and some of those have had questions raised about their research methods and the incestuous nature of their scientific work.

The curiosities of the September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Hamburg are compounded by an October 28 news release from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences announcing 10 grants funded by federal economic stimulus money to pay for two years of additional research on BPA.

The NIEHS news release explains, “While recent assessments by authorities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan agree that current food contact uses of BPA are safe, these assessments have identified the need to address data gaps.  For these reasons, NIEHS prioritized BPA research as a Signature initiative in the grants program undertaken with stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

The language of the NIEHS announcement is standard government boilerplate, but its meaning becomes almost surreal when a review of grant money recipients reveals that seven of the ten grants are to be awarded to signatories of the September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Hamburg.  Although the press release referred to an October 6 meeting of researchers receiving stimulus funds, no mention is made in their letter to Hamburg about having applied for any NIEHS grant money or whether any of the signatories had been informed that they were to receive such grants.  They only mention that “the NIEHS has initiated a $7 million program (GO grants) to address several key data gaps.”

According to an analysis by Trevor Butterworth of the George Mason University Statistical Assessment Service, some of the recipients of the stimulus funds and participants in the Chapel Hill Consensus seem to have an “incestuous” relationship.  The scientists who signed the September 21 FDA letter had claimed “there are already over 900 peer-reviewed studies in the published literature,” but the NIEHS press release states, “The innovative two-year grants [of $14 million] provided through the Recovery Act will support human and animal studies that address many of the research gaps identified by expert scientific panels, and provide a better understanding of how this chemical may impact human health.”  Which is correct?

The letter signers wrote, “We are deeply troubled that the agency would announce these research plans in light of its decision to release a reassessment of BPA by November 30^th.  This disconnect between research and reassessment raises concerns about whether the FDA is striving to resolve the critical public health issues raised by widespread exposure to BPA, or is avoiding making a decision because of the pending research, the results of which will not be available for review for many years.”  But will the expected announcement of a “reassessment” declare the dangers of BPA just as an expensive two-year study gets underway?

In justifying the money allocated to the study of BPA, Birnbaum, in the press release was quoted as saying, “’We know that many people are concerned about bisphenol A and we want to support the best science we can to provide answers.’”  This brings up the legitimate and larger question of whether these “concerns” can be adequately addressed by taxpayer research grants to those who raised the concerns in the first place.  And is this going to be “the best science,” when we know that serious questions have been raised about the incestuous nature of some of these scientists?  Is this research going to be done to fit the headlines generated by some of these same scientists?

It took a computer hacker to reveal the less-than-scientific consensus on global warming.  We need a full disclosure on how the “consensus” was arrived at Chapel Hill and how the decision was made to use funds intended to stimulate the economy to continue to fund what seems to be less than objective scientific research.  We need to be sure that we are not paying for the fox to guard the henhouse.

Most recently, BPA came under attack November 2 when Consumers Union, the parent organization of the respected Consumer Reports, sent out a press release announcing the results of its lab tests that purportedly showed high levels of the suspect compound in 19 food products.  The authors of the Consumers Report article did not claim that they had found any harmful effects in anyone, just that BPA had been detected.

The Consumers Union press release inspired panic-inducing headlines.  ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and the New York Times dutifully announced the “results” with alarm.  In a separate commentary, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff compared the danger of BPA to those he has faced as a reporter of “threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas.”

By comparison, the journal Toxicological Sciences (October 2009) published the results of a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which noted that the National Toxicology Program “rated the potential effects of low doses of BPA as an area of ‘some concern,’ whereas most effects were rated as of ‘negligible’ or ‘minimal’ concern.”  But this study, as well as numerous others that demonstrate BPA’s safety, does not make headlines.

At George Mason University’s STATS center, Trevor Butterworth has an entire archive of articles disputing claims and test results raising the alarm about BPA.  He cites an international array of scientists who have repeatedly refuted the claims of such tests.  Of the latest test funded by Consumers Union, Butterworth quotes Wolfgang Dekant, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Wurzburg, who has done testing on BPA for the European Union.  Dekant said he was  “’incredulous’” at the claims made by Consumers Union; the test, he says, was “’highly biased.’”

The Consumers Union’s release is the latest salvo in media campaigns against BPA, despite the fact, as Butterworth writes, that Consumers Union has not released the name of the lab conducting the experiments.  Yet absent this critically important piece of information, the authors of the Consumers Union report claim that current federal guidelines of 50 micrograms is based on outdated research from the 1980s and assert that “a 165-pound adult eating one serving from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts’ recommended daily upper limit” [at 0.0024 micrograms].

Who are these experts?  An examination of the two scientists cited in the article reveals that they are part of a network of left-leaning researchers with political agendas.  A key participant is Pete Myers, described in the article as “chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit group based in Charlottesville, Va.”  According to Environmental Health News, Myers is not only chief scientist but founder and CEO of the group, which he created after serving as director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and co-authoring Our Stolen Future, about endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.  The introduction to this work, considered an environmental polemic by detractors, was written by then Vice President Al Gore.  A search, however, did not reveal a website for Environmental Health Sciences, nor a 990 tax return.

The other scientist cited in the Consumer Reports article is Frederick vom Saal, “a professor of developmental biology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and a leading researcher on BPA.”  A disclosure accompanying an article for the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), noted that vom Sall has served as “expert witness for the defendant in a trial in 2004 regarding the health effects of bisphenol,” served as a “consultant for in-preparation litigation regarding BPA,” and serves as “chief executive officer of XenoAnalytical LLC, which uses a variety of analytical techniques to measure estrogenic activity and BPA in tissues and leachates from products.”

The media and vom Saal are also well acquainted.  The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which in 2008 won several “environmental reporting” prizes, utilized vom Saal’s own laboratory to conduct experiments for the newspaper.  Butterworth notes the bias of the panel awarding the Columbia University’s John B. Oakes award; it featured members of National Public Radio and environmental groups.  Further, it turns out that an “outside expert” called on to evaluate the results, Patricia Hunt, has coauthored articles on BPA with vom Saal.  He, in turn, has championed her research.  Vom Saal and Hunt were also signatories of the “Chapel Hill Consensus,” a meeting in 2007 where 50 seemingly like-minded scientists who had been studying BPA gathered at the University of North Carolina to decide on the dangers of BPA.  This “Consensus” statement shows a network of many scientists who hold similar opinions on BPA and whose names sometimes appear together in work on “green” issues.

The circular relationships between researchers, activist organizations, and media outlets serve to create a continuous flow of questionable information about BPA.  Yet, many of those involved in such eye-brow raising research are set to accelerate anti-BPA research, thanks to stimulus funds from American taxpayers.

NEXT: How Stimulus Spending Fuels the BPA Scare

First, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers include government spending. So, when the government pumps thousands of billions of dollars into the economy it will look as if GDP is growing.

What’s more, the way the GDP accounts for government spending is totally biased: It assumes that if the government is spending $200,000 on a contractor to repave a road in the middle of nowhere that it will create $200,000 of genuine economic value.  By contrast, GDP measures are tougher on private-sector spending. As my George Mason university colleague Garett Jones explained to me recently “So if Exxon Mobil pays an engineer $200,000 per year, that only shows up in GDP if the engineer finds an extra $200,000 of oil to sell, or builds a new machine that sells for $200,000, something like that.  So our GDP measures of “government spending” are awful–and when the government is in a race to spend money as quickly as possible, these measures are going to be even worse than usual.”

This is an very important point. Especially when we think of  this particular data. First, the current dollar GDP increased $150.3 billion in the third quarter.  In the same time period, the government injected about $174 billion dollars into the economy in the form of personal tax cuts, unemployment assistance, student aid and nutritional assistance, and grants. In other words, the amount of cash the government injected in the economy exceeds the current GDP increase.

Another point: the GDP doesn’t capture any changes in personal stock benefits. This is key because high ranking executive are getting the majority of their compensation from that. That’s got to be looking pretty bad right now. But the GDP doesn’t capture that.

GDP also doesn’t capture Research and Development spending. The cuts in this area were large and unaccounted for. Also not included in the GDP figure:  Pension benefits and the flow of funds accounts of the United States Balance sheet information from the Federal Reserve Board.

This is some of what’s wrong with the numbers. And that’s why I would rather find a bar to drown my sorrows than to celebrate right now.