A couple of weeks ago Intellectual Vision published on YouTube a talk made by Tom Woods at the Mises Institute.

Tom Woods is not only a prolific author and speaker, but the star of the Tom Woods Show, a regular podcast which presents itself with the sort of cheerful razzamatazz normally associated with radio programmes, even including advertising. And why not indeed!

Here he presents himself rather more soberly …

More and more organisations, posting speeches on line, ‘clean up’ videos by topping-and-tailing them. It’s understandable: the market is bound to want these things neatly packaged. For my niche purpose though, I want to see the opening and closing – warts and all. Just as when flying an aeroplane the trickiest part is the takeoff and landing, the biggest test of a speaker is in the opening and closing.  Here, sadly for me, we see neither.

Never mind: whatever preamble we’ve lost, he kicks off in this video with a very clear laying out of his stall: he intends to address the oppression that underlies the Political Correctness narrative.

Interestingly for me I still clearly remember the moment, around a quarter of a century ago, when I first heard the expression ‘politically correct’. My instant, spontaneous, horrified reaction was, “That can mean only totalitarian dictatorship.” I went on to reason that politics was about opinion, which by definition is neither right nor wrong – simply disputed. Therefore the very term was a contradiction, and a revolting one at that. My little rant being over, I turned back to the contributor on the radio programme I was presenting at the time.

I find myself puzzled by Woods’ first two minutes as, at the Mises Institute, everyone in his audience already knows and agrees with what he is saying. Is he there merely to massage their views, or is there more and meatier to come?

He does indeed move into a meatier area, and one with which I happen to be familiar – namely economic disparity in different social and ethnic groups. The PC (I detest the term so much that I shall not write it out again) view is that all inequalities are the result of oppression. In debunking this, Woods proceeds to quote data, case histories and examples that I have read in books by the great Thomas Sowell, and therefore I assume that Woods has read them also. (Actually I would assume that anyway, because not to have done so would have been negligent for someone like Woods.)

At 7:40 Woods confirms my assumption by specifically naming Thomas Sowell.

Despite all this meaty data, I find the speech a disappointment. Perhaps because it told me nothing I didn’t happen already to know, but rather I feel my problem is what I’ve long called the ‘semi-memo issue’. Very many decades ago I wrote a memo to my then boss, neatly identifying a string of mistakes that I felt our organisation was making. I received a dry, though courteous reply, suggesting I had omitted the important half of my memo – the bit that suggested ways to remedy those mistakes. He was far too polished to put it this way, but his unmistakable message was that any half-wit can spot problems. What required ability was the finding of ways to solve them.

Woods begins his speech by complaining that PC permits no argument, substituting debate with cretinous name-calling at best and brutal violence at worst. Quite so. Today this insidious, malevolent, misanthropic malaise has infected in varying degrees the establishment, the civil service, academia, the media, and so on. If what I read of last week’s General Synod is to be believed we may even add the church to that sorry list. One could describe it as metastatic. It is as if Antonio Gramsci had personally orchestrated the campaign.

Woods’ missing half should surely concern itself with at least some semblance of a suggestion as to what can be done about it. Or perhaps that was lost in the topping and tailing of the video.