[anigbrowl]

Right, because things were so awesome back in the day...not. Sowell has made a great living out of pandering to white conservative nostalgia; his rhetoric relies almost exclusively on emotional arguments, wrapped in a thin veneer of objectivity and disinterested logic. Note, for example, the assertion of a vanished status that 'worked,' sidestepping the question of why there was any impetus to change it in the first place.

A reading trick that I find incredibly useful (no matter what your political affiliation) is to mentally highlight all valuable adjectives and implicit adjectives - valuable being 'nice car' as opposed to purely descriptive adjectives like 'blue car', and implicit adjectives being things like 'worked' above, which implies something that worked well rather than worked badly. Some writers, and I think Sowell is an exemplar here, specialize in stating a bunch of logical non-sequiters as a frame for a purely emotional, subjective argument. This is the rhetorical equivalent of the stage magician drawing your attention to the absence of anything being up his sleeve in order to distract your attention from what he's doing with the top hat.

[qnaal]

> because things were so awesome back in the day...not

are you trying to credit technological advance to democratic government?

what are you talking about?