Walter Williams in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!

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No, no, not that one, alas, but I did do a double take when I heard the news. Just the guy from the O'Jays. The libertarian economist will need to spike his columns with a little more funk if he's going to join his namesake.

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Julian Sanchez is a contributing editor at Reason.

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  1. Twba

    Isn’t Walter Williams in the El Rushbo Guest-host Hall of Fame?

  2. CTD

    Awright!

    He is a totally crazy mentally ill black guy!
    He is a rock and roll star to the max!
    His poopoo smells like diamonds!
    Rock and Roll Hall of Faaame!
    Rock and Roll Hall of Faaame!

    Oh… _Walter_Williams_… nevermind.

  3. smacky

    CTD,

    Great Wesley Willis parody! He is sadly missed by college radio stations all across the U.S.

  4. Devin McCullen

    Isn’t Walter Williams the guy who created Mr. Bill? (Geez, this is almost as bad as Jay/Jason/Jayson Williams.)

  5. smacky

    Rock over London
    Rock on Chicago
    Wheaties – the breakfast of champions

  6. Stevo Darkly

    Isn’t Walter Williams in the El Rushbo Guest-host Hall of Fame?

    Yes, he often fills in for Limbaugh on Limbaugh’s show. I wish he would get his own show. Someone once wrote (and it might have been right here in Reason, or it might have been in Liberty) something like, “Rush Limbaugh is a conservative pantywaist with both feet firmly planted in the Republican party, but Williams is more of a real libertarian.”

    I have yet to find a person I agree with on all things, but I like Williams quite a lot.

    (I also have a great deal of respect for Thomas Sowell — “the other black conservative” — reviled as he sometimes is at H&R. Sowell’s columns are pretty polemical when he does the culture war thing, and apparently his later books are too, but a lot of his earlier books I found more sober and well-argued and insightful. A Conflict of Visions made a lot of things more clear for me. Also recommend Preferential Policies and Ethnic America and The Economics and Politics of Race.)

  7. Gary Gunnels

    Stevo Darkly,

    The one book of his that I have perused – Culture and Conquest – didn’t do him much service.

  8. Gary Gunnels

    Conquests and Cultures

  9. Gary Gunnels

    Stevo Darkly,

    It was mediocre, “garbage time,” history. I found Sowell’s tendency to try to draw out tenuous historical analogies to be especially trying. Plus he borders on the sort of stuf one sees in 19th century anthropology when he uses statistics to discern which culture is superior.

  10. Stevo Darkly

    Didn’t read that one. Like I said, I’ve got the impression his later books are more polemical; his earlier ones are more “scholarly” in tone, where he doesn’t appear to take sides as overtly (very different persona from his columns).

  11. Gary Gunnels

    Stevo Darkly,

    One of the major problems I had from the text was how Sowell sported around acting like he was the first person ever to acknowledge that conquests come with benefits as well as costs. This was sort of Conservative PC-speak from what I could tell and a means to bash academia. However, he’s clearly wrong. Many, many academic historians have discussed the benefits and costs of conquests, particularly so with regard to the conquest of the Americas. Indeed, the root of such classic books from the 1970s as Crosby’s The Columbian are such an assessment.

  12. Akira MacKenzie

    Isn’t Walter Williams one of those cyberpunk authors from the 80s?

  13. Steve Darkly

    Ha! At first I thought you meant William Gibson (or didn’t he play baseball?), but then I remember Walter Jon Williams. 🙂

  14. Not a Fan of Shills

    An aside on Limblow. He lost his credibility when he accepted his “honorary Republican Revolutionary” award 10 years ago. He should have stayed on the outside, holding the Rs’ feet to the fire. Instead, he became a shill, and I haven’t had reason to listen to him in years.

    Although I would be interested in his views on the Drug wars these days.

  15. Akira MacKenzie

    “Ha! At first I thought you meant William Gibson (or didn’t he play baseball?), but then I remember Walter Jon Williams. :)”

    I only read “Hardwired,” which wasn’t all that bad although I was a little too young to understand what it was about. I thought that cyborgs were cool at the time, that’s all. I couldn’t really get into cyberpunk anyway. Far too gloomy for my taste.

  16. kevrob

    GG:

    Ethnic America was quite a read back when it was released (1981). It had some good insights on the relative economic progress of various immigrant groups, and backed them up with data. What I learned from reading it 20-some years ago may now seem commonplace, of course.

    Kevin

  17. ed

    It isn’t a Hall of Fame. It’s a mausoleum.
    Rock ‘n’ roll has been extinct for decades.
    Hell, they’re inducting polka and Viennese waltz acts now.

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