Quotes from Thomas Sowell

why the desire to increase and retain one's own earnings should be characterized negatively as "greed," while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.

Banning the institution of slavery itself long remained only a distant hope in much of Africa and the Middle East, even after it was a reality in the Western Hemisphere.

1914, the coal mines in Wales employed more than a quarter of a million people and supplied approximately one third of the world's coal exports.

The most spectacular-and embittering-of the British suppressions of the Irish was Oliver Cromwell's punitive expedition of 1649

the Britons that Julius Caesar saw were to him primitive exotics with long hair, dyed bodies, and living in a society of shared wives.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

You cannot measure opportunities by outcomes.

When laws and policies make honesty increasingly costly, then government is, in effect, promoting dishonesty. Such dishonesty can then extend beyond the particular laws and policies in question to a more general habit of disobeying laws, to the detriment of the whole economy and society.

lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as simplistic by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex.

Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people's decisions is to use the word "ask"—as in "We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But of course governments do not ask, they tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not "ask" for contributions. It takes.

Economists who looked at the real consequences of a centrally planned economy came to a very different conclusion: that there are too many economic relationships, and it is impossible to take them all into account and carefully coordinate them.

Table 6.1 Median Family Income of Ethnic Groups in the United States, Ranked by Percentage of the National Average, 1969 Jewish 172% Japanese 132% Polish 115% Chinese 112% Italian 112% German 107% Anglo-Saxon 105% Irish 103% National Average 100% Filipino 99% West Indian 94% Cuban 80% Mexican 76% Puerto Rican 63% Black 62% Indian (American) 60%

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied.

What the British had earlier than many other peoples was a framework of law and government that facilitated economic transactions.

When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.

Complex and time-consuming international economic transactions, including long-term investments, are particularly dependent on a reliable framework of law, so that changes of government policy or of individuals in power, do not create large uncertainties as to whether commitments will be honored or foreigners treated on an equal plane with the natives involved in commercial and financial transactions.

Those who have promoted the prevailing social vision, in which lags, gaps or disparities to the detriment of black people are the fault of white people, are trapped in the corollary that these lags, gaps or disparities should disappear, once those other people are constrained by civil rights laws and policies. But nothing of the sort has happened in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

After the political success of the anti-DDT crusade by environmentalists, the banning of this insecticide was followed by a resurgence of malaria, taking millions of lives, even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated. Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army. Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.

23 Two centuries later, the task appears less simple and such expressions as "brain-washing" and "reeducation" camps have chilling overtones in the light of history, though that has not stopped indoctrination efforts in American schools and colleges, led by those who still have the vision of the anointed today.

The dire poverty of the early nineteenth century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years-compared to 36 years for contemporary American slaves-and the fact that slaves in the United States typically lived in houses a little larger than the unventilated huts of the Irish and slept on mattresses, while the Irish slept in piles of

The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.

While some theorists may tend to discuss people in the abstract, actual flesh-and-blood human beings differ enormously in their behavior, not just from individual to individual, but from group to group and from one culture to another. Various tests of honesty reveal very striking differences.

It was in the wake of these erosions of economic controls that intellectual challenges were then made to the role of government in the economy, first by the Physiocrats in France, who coined the term laissez-faire, and then by Adam Smith in Britain, who became its leading champion.