Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Too many people - some of them judges - seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to bed tonight.
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Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
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Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.
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There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
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The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
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A recent poll shows that a majority of blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics do not think the Census should be classifying people as black, white, Asian and Hispanic.
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It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'
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Politicians are forever coming up with 'solutions' to virtually every imaginable imperfection in life. But, if we give them more power and more of our money, we are very unlikely to end up better off on net balance.
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Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
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Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice.
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Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as president or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a vice president
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Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
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Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
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The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
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In politics, throwing the taxpayers' money at disasters is supposed to show your compassion. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is not compassion. It is politics.
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Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
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In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
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While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
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No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers' unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism.
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For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
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Reality is not optional.
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Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.
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Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default. ... The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously.
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What makes it possible for politicians to do so many things that are economically counterproductive is that neither the public nor the media know enough of the basics to understand what's wrong with what they're saying.