There’s an old saying that the person who’s an expert with a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Apparently it applies to pundits too.
Specifically, Walter Williams, whose columns focus repeatedly on how government, in his opinion, is screwing up the world. Which is, of course, a valid topic, except that he tends to use it on topics that have only marginal relevance.
When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, for instance, Williams devoted one paragraph to what a bad thing that was, then devoted the rest of his column to all the terrible things government does that drive decent people to terrorism (contrasting this to his post-9/11 screeching about Muslim terrorism is illuminating—apparently being hard on terrorism is a good thing unless the terrorist is a white right-winger).
In his latest column he discusses how Americ has gone from “an 18th century Third World nation into the freest and most prosperous nation in mankind’s entire history … what accounts for what some have called American exceptionalism?”
More specifically, how have we avoided “the level of hideousness seen in other nations … despite the fact that our population consists of people who have for centuries been trying to slaughter one another in their home countries, whether the struggle was between the French and Germans, or the English and Irish, or the Japanese and Chinese, or the Palestinians and Jews” plus of course, longstanding religious conflicts. “Why is the United States an exception?”
His conclusion: It’s because Americans drafted a Constitution that set strict limits on government, and that by unconstitutional acts such as the bailout, “we are losing what has made our country great.”
And the connection with why we’ve not wound up killing ourselves is—what? Does he really imagine that hostility between the Palestinians and the Jews is caused by big government.
Also, while I agree with him it’s amazing we haven’t wound in endless Civil War, the amazement isn’t over all the wars immigrants had back home, it’s because of all the horrors we’ve had here: The slaughter of the native tribes, keeping blacks in slavery for centuries, Jim Crow … That has nothing to do with the wars between Japan and Ireland and Germany and France, it’s something ingrown in us.
But Williams never fusses about discrimination unless it affects straight white males, so it’s not surprising he’d rather not discuss that stuff.

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