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Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
Thomas Sowell
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Discussions of ethnic minorities tend to drift toward the problems of ethnic minorities, or the problems that ethnic minorities cause other people. Both kinds of problems deserve serious attention. However, the history of American ethnic minorities is not exclusively a history of problems.
Thomas Sowell
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People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising - and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.
Thomas Sowell
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Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those who are killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. Iraq has become a magnet for enemies of the United States, a place where they can be killed wholesale, thousands of miles away.
Thomas Sowell
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Thomas Sowell
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One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.
Thomas Sowell
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Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?.
Thomas Sowell
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The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.
Thomas Sowell
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Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.
Thomas Sowell
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It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
Thomas Sowell
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Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.
Thomas Sowell
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Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
Thomas Sowell
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Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
Thomas Sowell
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The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
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It is amazing how many of the horrors of the 20th century were a result of charismatic quacks misleading millions of people to their own doom. What is even more amazing is that, after a century that saw the likes of Hitler, Lenin and Mao, we still see no need to distrust charisma as a basis for choosing leaders, either in politics or in numerous organizations and movements.
Thomas Sowell
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Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Thomas Sowell
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People who believe in 'universal health care' show remarkably little interest - usually none - in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada. For one thing, 'universal health care' in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days.
Thomas Sowell
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Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier. Many ideas- probably most- will have to be discarded somewhere in the process of producing authenticated knowledge. Authentication is as important as the raw information itself, and the manner and speed of the authentication process can be crucial.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God.This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
Thomas Sowell
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As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.
Thomas Sowell
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Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'.
Thomas Sowell
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No one pushed harder than Congressman Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage lending standards, in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages.
Thomas Sowell
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Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
Thomas Sowell
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Thomas Sowell
Born:
June 30, 1930
(age 94)
Bio:
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author.
Known for:
Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)
A Conflict of Visions (1987)
Intellectuals and Society (2010)
Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)
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