Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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.
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Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
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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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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
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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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Reality is not optional.
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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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Many people believe in eliminating gaps and eliminating poverty. They don't realize that in some sense those two things are antithetical. If you were to double everyone's income, or if everyone's income were doubled naturally over the course of time, then you would reduce poverty significantly but you would have also increased the gap.
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Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.
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Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
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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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The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
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You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.
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If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
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To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
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Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far.
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I'm always embarrassed when people say that I'm courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.
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If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
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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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Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.
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Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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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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We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.