Quotes from Thomas Sowell

El hecho de que el trabajo sea más barato en Dubái que en Japón no es simplemente una casualidad. El trabajo es más productivo en los países más ricos. Ésa es una de las razones por las que estos países son más prósperos en general. La venta de equipamiento usado de países ricos a países pobres puede ser una manera eficiente de manejar la situación para ambos tipos de países.

As Will Rogers said, everybody is ignorant, but just about different things.

not one private bank was opened in Dublin in the quarter century before 1793.

What words openly declare can be tested against empirical evidence, but what words insinuate can bypass that safeguard. Even an innocent-sounding phrase like "income distribution," endlessly repeated, can suggest a process in which income exists somehow and is then distributed, as one might distribute food at a dinner table or gifts at Christmas.

Back in my old neighborhood, there was a special contempt for the kind of guy who was always trying to get two other guys to fight each other. Today, it is considered a great contribution to society to incite consumers against producers, tenants against landlords, women against men, and the races against each other.

Economic policies need to be analyzed according to the incentives they create, and not according to the hopes that inspired them.

The low and precarious economic conditions of the nineteenth-century Irish were reflected in their living conditions—perhaps the worst of any racial or ethnic group in American history.

Bajo un sistema de precios, la gente se raciona a sí misma. El racionamiento de recursos a través de los precios limita la cantidad que cada individuo puede tomar de la producción de otros a la productividad que cada individuo ha creado por sí mismo para otros, y que por lo tanto se ha ganado en calidad de ingreso. Los controles de precios, subvenciones y otros sustitutos a la asignación de precios, reducen los incentivos para el autorracionamiento.

The prevention of competition is essential to exploitation.

In general, the market is smarter than the smartest of its individual participants. - Robert L. Bartley

Widespread personification of "society" is another verbal tactic that evades issues of individual responsibility. Such use of the term "society" is a more sophisticated version of the notion that "the devil made me do it." Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin

People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. . . Making anything artificially cheap usually means that it will be wasted.

In short, despite the unpromising record of politics as a means of raising a group from poverty to affluence, and despite the dangers of politicizing race, there are built-in incentives for individual political leaders to do just that.

Capital tends to be scarcer and therefore more expensive in poor countries, while labor tends to be more abundant and therefore cheaper. Poor countries tend to save on the most expensive factor, in the same way that rich countries save on a different factor that is more expensive and scarce there, namely labor. In rich countries, it is capital that is more abundant and cheaper, while labor is scarcer and more expensive.

Slaves were among the main commodities traded during this era, which preceded the era of European territorial conquests in sub-Saharan Africa.

en exceso. Muchas veces el mismo producto está en ambas categorías al mismo tiempo: escasea en una

La oferta y la demanda dicen que los precios por encima del mercado crean excedentes invendibles, pero esto no ha evitado que Europa haya insistido durante décadas en la regulación de los mercados de trabajo, lo que ha llevado a un desempleo propio de los tiempos de la depresión. BRYAN CAPLAN

Risk-taking is the mother's milk of capitalism. The Wall Street Journal

La competencia ha sido y será siempre problemática para aquellos que tienen que competir. FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

Cuanto más grande sea la diferencia entre los precios del mercado libre y los precios decretados a través de leyes de control de precios, más graves serán las consecuencias del control de precios.

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans – anything except reason.

You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.