Thomas Sowell (/soʊl/; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author.
Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export. . . . Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.
Everyone should be concerned about Internet anarchy in which anybody can pretend to be anybody else, unless something is done to stop it. If hoaxes like this go unchecked, who can believe anything they see on the Internet? What good would the Internet be then? If the people who control Internet web sites do not do anything, is that not an open invitation for government to step in? And does anybody want politicians to control what can go on the Internet?
Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.
It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle--before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime. . . exempt[ion]. . . from responsibility for what you do thereafter.
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model -- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.
No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
The kinds of people we need in government are precisely the kinds of people who are most reluctant to go into government -- people who understand the inherent dangers of power and feel a distaste for using it, but who may do so for a few years as a civic duty. The worst kind of people to have in government are those who see it as a golden opportunity to impose their own superior wisdom and virtue on others.
American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.
Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.
The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.
Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
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.
For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled. " Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
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