Thomas Sowell Quotes
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As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.
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Those who want to "spread the wealth" almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?
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Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.
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How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
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There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.
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Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.
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As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican - and Democratic - Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election.
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Sellers in general maintain the quality of their products and services for fear of losing customers otherwise. But, when price controls create a situation where the amount demanded is greater than the amount supplied - a shortage - fear of losing customers is no longer as strong an incentive. For example, landlords typically reduce painting and repairs when there is rent control, because there is no need to fear vacancies when there are more tenants looking for apartments than there are apartments available.
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People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
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In the United States, liberals have made it virtually impossible to increase the supply of oil by banning drilling in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
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The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
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Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
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Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots - the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?
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One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians' answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government. ... Having someone else pay for medical care virtually guarantees that a lot more of it will be used. Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen.
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How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?
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Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice.
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One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
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What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
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Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
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One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.
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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 government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.