Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
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Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.
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Most problems, decisions, and performances are multidimensional, but somehow the results have to be reduced to a few key indicators which are to be institutionally rewarded or penalized... The need to reduce the indicators to a manageable few is based not only on the need to conserve the time (and sanity) of those who assign rewards and penalties, but also to provide those subject to these incentives with some objective indication of what their performance is expected to be and how it will be judged... key indicators can never tell the whole story.
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ANYONE who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them - instead of answering their arguments.
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A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."
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Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.
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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
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Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.
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Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.
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The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
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As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of ugly, twisted metal to be displayed in front of or inside government buildings, in the name of 'art' that was obviously never meant to give the public any enjoyment and often represented a thumbing of the artist's nose at the public.
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A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
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The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.
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As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
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People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians.
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There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
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The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
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Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?"
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A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians-\-\risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has-\-\is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic
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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.
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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.