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0a62b55
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Nada es mas facil que tener buenas intenciones. Pero cuando no se entiende como funciona una economia, las buenas intenciones pueden llevar a consecuencias desastrosas
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Thomas Sowell |
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03e3846
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Slippery use of the word "privilege" is part of a vogue of calling achievements "privileges"--a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life."
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Thomas Sowell |
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518b827
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Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left's denunciations of society.
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Thomas Sowell |
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0232584
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People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
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Thomas Sowell |
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9921ff5
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Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.
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Thomas Sowell |
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2469a31
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What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.
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Thomas Sowell |
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f0dad84
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies. Its fundamental concern is with the material standard of living of society as a whole and how that is affected by particular decisions made by individuals and institutions. One of the ways of doing this is to look at economic policies and economic systems in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue. This means that conseq..
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Thomas Sowell |
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16ff5ed
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Government "planning" is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people's plans."
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Thomas Sowell |
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1515078
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Talk about how various people have been "winners" in "the lottery of life" or have things that others don't have just because they "happen to have money" is part of the delegitimizing of property as a prelude to seizing it. Luck certainly plays a very large role in all our lives. But we need to be very clear about what that role is. Very few people just "happen" to have money. Typically, they have it because their fellow human beings have ..
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Thomas Sowell |
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3e77ab9
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But that such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be President of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism--and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand--speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degene..
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Thomas Sowell |
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e2df306
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Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
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reality
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Thomas Sowell |
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121ae07
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The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.
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Thomas Sowell |
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adf8fc0
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beware that] "many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world--differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing."
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the-anointed
social-policy
intellectuals
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Thomas Sowell |
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96e36c3
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As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
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violence
history
politics
ideologue
progressives
revolt
rule
political-philosophy
government
revolution
power
oppression
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Thomas Sowell |
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7fee8c3
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The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.
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Thomas Sowell |
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a6d0e7c
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The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.
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Thomas Sowell |
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be47762
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A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages: STAGE 1. THE "CRISIS": Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a "crisis," even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at han..
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Thomas Sowell |
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b26a344
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While "greed" is one of the most popular--and most fallacious--explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives, when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay in the slightest. Any serious explanation of corporate executives' salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients..
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Thomas Sowell |
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4aeb326
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No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
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norms
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Thomas Sowell |
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f085f0a
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The term "liberal" originally referred politically to those who wanted to liberate people--mainly from the oppressive power of government. That is what it still means in various European countries or in Australia and New Zealand. It is the American meaning that is unusual: People who want to increase the power of government, in order to accomplish various social goals."
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Thomas Sowell |
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ca0d3a9
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Alaska is much larger than France and Germany--combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of "spoiling" Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport."
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Thomas Sowell |
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cdb3a6e
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Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right--creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
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political
fervor
entitlement
reward
right
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Thomas Sowell |
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91ceb6e
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People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. One
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Thomas Sowell |
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d1b0790
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ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. --Jean-Francois Revel1
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Thomas Sowell |
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01ed9ff
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Have you gone crazy, Lefty?" "No. On the contrary, I have become educated." "Sometimes that's worse, these days."
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Thomas Sowell |
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7c929ce
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The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds. What that means is that, even if we somehow manage to survive this man's reckless economic policies at home and his potentially fatal foreign policy actions and inactions, the gullibility and fecklessness of those voters who put him in the White House will still be there to be exploited by the next master of glib demago..
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Thomas Sowell |
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e4cd34f
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Electric cars may be fun at amusement parks, where they don't have to go very far or very fast. But if the consuming public wanted electric cars for regular use, Detroit would be manufacturing them by the millions. Only people infatuated with their own wonderful specialness would think that their job is to coerce both the manufacturers and the consuming public into something that neither of them wants.
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Thomas Sowell |
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e3ac169
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President Obama keeps telling us that he is "creating jobs." But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job." --
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Thomas Sowell |
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0ab0a60
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Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.
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oil
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Thomas Sowell |
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1b577e6
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Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied nor run businesses. In a society where most people are employees and consumers, it is easy to think of businesses as "them" - as impersonal organizations, whose internal operations are largely unknown and whose sums of money may sometimes be so huge as to be unfathomable."
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Thomas Sowell |
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bd059df
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What is called "planning" in political rhetoric is the government's suppression of other people's plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others."
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Thomas Sowell |
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3b81693
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Gun control zealots compare the United States and England to show that murder rates are lower where restrictions on ownership of firearms are more severe. But you could just as easily compare Switzerland and Germany, the Swiss having lower murder rates than the Germans, even though gun ownership is three times higher in Switzerland. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finlan..
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Thomas Sowell |
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264e758
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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115}
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Thomas Sowell |
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0712e0b
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the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
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elite
common-sense
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Thomas Sowell |
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382bed2
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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Thomas Sowell |
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103beec
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Today, there are more people of Irish ancestry in the United States than in Ireland, more Jews than in Israel, more blacks than in most African countries. There are more people of Polish ancestry in Detroit than in most of the leading cities in Poland, and more than twice as many people of Italian ancestry in New York as in Venice.
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Thomas Sowell |
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5bdda05
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The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
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truth
fake-news
journalism
news
propaganda
media
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Thomas Sowell |
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0ba50c5
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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Thomas Sowell |
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3dac554
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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don't.
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Thomas Sowell |
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e7491ad
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Free-loading at emergency rooms--mandated by government--makes being uninsured a viable option.
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Thomas Sowell |
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070d4d2
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Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing--and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.
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Thomas Sowell |
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8cfd89d
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If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" p..
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Thomas Sowell |
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236c9c9
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As in the general society, fertility tends to be greatest where people are poorest: "The rich get richer, and the poor have children." In" --
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Thomas Sowell |
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4bb65b7
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When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.
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Thomas Sowell |