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Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.
Thomas Sowell
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the
others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
Thomas Sowell
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To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.
Thomas Sowell
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Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.
Thomas Sowell
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To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.
Thomas Sowell
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The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.
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Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of society. These informal relationships not only include important decision-making processes, such as the family, but also produce much of the background social capital without which the other major institutions of society could not function nearly as effectively as they do.
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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.
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Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
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Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.
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The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.
Thomas Sowell
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Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.
Thomas Sowell
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In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
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All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.
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The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
Thomas Sowell
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Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored.
Thomas Sowell
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All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.
Thomas Sowell
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Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
Thomas Sowell
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Race is a biological concept but it is a social reality.
Thomas Sowell
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We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony to the pervasiveness and persistence of this feature of the human condition.
Thomas Sowell
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The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.
Thomas Sowell
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Thomas Sowell
Born:
June 30, 1930
(age 93)
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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