“Milton Friedman was the best,” Elon Musk recently posted, sharing the video of the Nobel Laureate listing the many federal agencies he believed should be dismantled. Musk often praises the late Friedman, champion of the classical liberalism conservatives adopted to displace the failures of the Old Right and Rockefeller Republicans.

Another Musk favorite has been Thomas Sowell. In his proclamation for Black History Month, President Donald Trump included Sowell with honorees such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and rightly so. Sowell, who grew up in abject poverty, has produced a mind-boggling and wide-ranging body of popular intellectual work.