1. "The evidence does not exist" does not mean that I know every atom in the universe, it means that the evidence that would be needed to back up the claim "crime (and other undesirable outcomes) began to rise in the 1960s because of the welfare state" does not exist. You can go at it with whatever social-scientific method you want: you will never find that welfare was the efficient cause of those phenomena. That's even if we ignore from the start the other historical explanations that have mountains of evidence maintaining their plausibility. This gets into the larger thing you don't seem to reckon with: it is very, very difficult to arrive at causality. Let's say we observe a lot of poor people and find that a lot of them lack motivation. It is not possible based on that observation alone to conclude that the causality goes from lack of motivation to poverty. It could be that constant deprivation makes life feel kind of pointless! There could be a third factor causing both poverty and lack of motivation! What you cannot say with confidence, however, is that the lack of motivation is the cause of the material situation. Just because you have two data points and an explanation that makes intuitive sense to you (that is, the idea of welfare disincentives and the fact of a rise in unemployment/crime) does not at all mean you get to draw a causal link between the two. In this case in particular, there is a huge hurdle for the welfare explanation because other explanations (esp. migration, concentration, and deindustrialization, all clouded with racial discrimination) have towering evidence in their favor.
Of course welfare cliffs are bad, but like I initially said—the answer to welfare cliffs is not to get rid of welfare, it's to design it better. And the better design is actually the one conservatives hate the most: get rid of means testing and do universal benefits (like a child allowance or retirement pension) with progressive taxation. That's how the Nordics do it. That's how the most effective American welfare programs do it.
2. There is a huge inconsistency. Sowell's entire explanation is dependent on "cultural malaise" being the central cause, not the effect, of Black people's disadvantaged economic position. I think that is false for the reasons I said in the original essay.
3. Black people are only free to the degree that they are because they fought against unjust laws. I think it's proved to be quite a worthwhile endeavor, to understate wildly. In a broad sense, not a single industrialized country has achieved low poverty without the welfare state. Seems like it's pretty worth spending time on.
