Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to whether the price happens to be set higher or lower than it would be otherwise. It represents a net lose to the economy as a whole to the extent that many transactions do not take place at all, because the mutually acceptable possibilities have been reduced.
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Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barac k Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was that it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. president in history.
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
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To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.
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The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
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Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
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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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All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.
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People who think that they are being 'exploited' should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: 'Good riddance?'
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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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What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.
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Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
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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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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 'universal health care' show remarkably little interest - usually none - in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada. For one thing, 'universal health care' in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days.
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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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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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People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
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Since man does not create physical matter, those who handle material objects in the production process are not producers in that sense. Economic benefits result from the transformation of matter in form, location, or availability (intellectually or temporally). It is these transformations that create economic benefits valued by consumers, and whoever arranges such transformations contributes to the value of things, whether his hands actually come into contact with physical objects or not.
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Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.
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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?