I love Thomas Sowell. Last year I was privileged to attend a Liberty Fund symposium celebrating his 93rd birthday. That Sowell has not received a Nobel Prize is an indictment of the Nobel Committee. If the vacuous Al Gore can be given a Nobel as well as that economic pretender Paul Krugman then in some areas the Nobel is simply a token given to whomever the Committee favors that year. But Sowell is a towering intellect. His early work in history of thought is still required reading. Leaving academia for Hoover has allowed him to let his imagination roam applying basic economics to everyday issues. Like his mentor Milton Friedman, Sowell has the ability to reveal the truth that is often obscured by feel good nostrums. His output has been prodigious. He once wrote a weekly column and just published his 41st book. All are worth reading. Here is a sample of his wisdom.
From Thomas Sowell:
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity”?
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’
What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: “I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.”
Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves,
The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
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.
Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.
People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state
It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with ‘solutions’ to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions.
The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and – perhaps most important – allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who ‘care.’ But, if they really cared, they would want to know what the facts are and what the actual consequences of their various nostrums are.
The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that
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