Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
THOMAS SOWELLWhenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
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The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
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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.
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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
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Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
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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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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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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
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It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
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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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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
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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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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.
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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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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
THOMAS SOWELL