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5c66c98
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I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money." --
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Thomas Sowell |
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9ecabe7
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People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth."
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truth
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Thomas Sowell |
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4b43932
|
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
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Thomas Sowell |
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47c8b1e
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Intellect is not wisdom.
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society
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Thomas Sowell |
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fbdd8b6
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It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
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Thomas Sowell |
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39d5af4
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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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Thomas Sowell |
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7674332
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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Thomas Sowell |
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6b6d44d
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Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker's productivity worth that amount--and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be ..
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minimum-wage
jobs
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Thomas Sowell |
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6c5db31
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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Thomas Sowell |
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a3b00ff
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What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself..
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poverty
politics
class-warfare
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Thomas Sowell |
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52bec2f
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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Thomas Sowell |
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a42b8ca
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Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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socialism
politcal-pandering
economy
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Thomas Sowell |
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e0fec2d
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Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?"
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Thomas Sowell |
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9bafd94
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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.
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Thomas Sowell |
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77b6237
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
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Thomas Sowell |
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e872910
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No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk. What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as ..
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Thomas Sowell |
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27ca725
|
Most officially "poor" Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about--including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning. Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standar..
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Thomas Sowell |
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339dd4d
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I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
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politics
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Thomas Sowell |
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e274e0d
|
Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades."
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Thomas Sowell |
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93945e1
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It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself...
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slavery
the-west
europeans
islam
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Thomas Sowell |
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559570b
|
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
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correlation
statistics
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Thomas Sowell |
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7c481bb
|
The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about "social justice" all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."
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Thomas Sowell |
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9b8b1e4
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If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia."
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Thomas Sowell |
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ff511d9
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To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by "society"."
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Thomas Sowell |
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a45a1fc
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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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Thomas Sowell |
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46c3fb8
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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Thomas Sowell |
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82d1a21
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The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal...change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in g..
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politics
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Thomas Sowell |
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6f6ffd9
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As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.
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Thomas Sowell |
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a0884cc
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Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of "greed" is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned--never to those wanting to take other people's money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as "greed" on the part of government or the clientele of government."
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greed
taxes
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Thomas Sowell |
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9be6cc8
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What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
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Thomas Sowell |
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ac4a373
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Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
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politics
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Thomas Sowell |
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be4bf6f
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Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.
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Thomas Sowell |
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4f1ea5c
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However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.
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racism
civil-rights
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Thomas Sowell |
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59e93e9
|
What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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government
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Thomas Sowell |
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2baf84c
|
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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Thomas Sowell |
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d1478fb
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No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
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Thomas Sowell |
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2c4e8df
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A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence -- often the sole evidence offered -- of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake,..
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Thomas Sowell |
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96df575
|
The government is indeed an institution, but "the market" is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste."
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Thomas Sowell |
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da4f75b
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Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
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Thomas Sowell |
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636b9b8
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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.
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Thomas Sowell |
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744b682
|
Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it.
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Thomas Sowell |
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3268931
|
A society that puts equality--in the sense of equality of outcome--ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.9
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Thomas Sowell |
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1bb5ba7
|
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems--of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
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Thomas Sowell |
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22e7bab
|
The New York Times' long-standing motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" should be changed to reflect today's reality: "Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology."
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Thomas Sowell |