Thomas Sowell ( 10 of 95 )
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other read more
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?"
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of read more
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it read more
...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would read more
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would you replace it with?" When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
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.
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into read more
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that read more
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception.
Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception.
