Liberal Theory

"What is it about liberals and conservatives that they can both say the same thing but liberals are praised as paragons of enlightenment while conservatives are reviled as green-eyed monsters?

William Bennett was in hot water ... for disputing a theory that a liberal economist has been touting for four years -- that the big drop in crime during the 1990s was a salutary result of legalized abortion.

Steven Levitt, a maverick economist at the University of Chicago, first put forward the theory in a 2001 paper entitled 'The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.' [later included in his book]...

Levitt's thesis is that before abortion was legalized in 1973, only affluent women were able to get abortions. ... [After abortion was legalized] poor women could get abortions as well. As Levitt puts it, this allowed 'poor, unmarried teenage mothers' to abort their children. 'They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals.'

To liberals, Levitt's argument was a home run. ...

But the theory has blatant racial overtones. Although Levitt never comes out and says it, he is obviously talking about blacks. Blacks are hugely overrepresented among 'poor, unmarried teenage mothers.' ... Anyone who spends five minutes studying crime statistics knows that blacks have violent crime rates five or six times that of whites."

William Tucker, writing on "Scapegoating the Messenger," Oct. 3 in the American Enterprise Online at www.taemag.org