Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
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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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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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'Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.
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Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.
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Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.
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The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.
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Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
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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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The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
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It is precisely those members of Congress who have had the most to do with creating the risks that led to the current economic crisis who are making the most noise against others, and summoning people before their committee to be browbeaten and humiliated on nationwide television.
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One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.
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By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.
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If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
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Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, Reduced supply of the same product or service, quality deterioration, black markets.
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Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
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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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Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
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The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts - or even the lives of other people.
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Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
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We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.
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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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More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is the 'Employee Freedom of Choice Act,' a bill that will do away with secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation - which is to say, loss of freedom of choice.
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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.