Thomas Sowell Quotes
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If you can't beat them or join them, then do something weird. No matter how much the passengers eat, the weight of the plane stays the same. Do you sometimes feel that you are necessary but not sufficient?
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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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If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
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To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.
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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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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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Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
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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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Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
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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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Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
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If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
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As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.
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Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck - and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television, and a microwave oven - and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs. Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school-lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight more often than other Americans.
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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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People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
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When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
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Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.
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When Congress gets through investigating Attorney General Janet Reno, will her agency become known as the Obstruction of Justice Department? The civil rights movement was one of the great moral crusades in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in more recent times it has become all too much like those it opposed, demanding racial double standards and even condoning verbal and violent attacks against members of other races.
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One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.
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One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
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Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
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Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.