Thomas Sowell

With various people complaining about "price gouging... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is read more

With various people complaining about "price gouging... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is never accused of either "greed" or "gouging" — not even when they bulldoze people's homes in order to turn the land over to businesses that will pay more taxes.

Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and read more

Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and the subtleties of feelings, it is remarkable that one speck in this firmament should be the sole determinant of whether someone is considered knowledgeable or ignorant in general. Yet it is a fact of life that an unlettered person is considered ignorant, however much he may know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human feeling or social complexities.

It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that read more

One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.

To those who feel that their values are the values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," read more

To those who feel that their values are the values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of any specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.