“The Risk of Insult is the Price of Clarity”- Roy Williams Politicians love to use words without meaning, or words they refuse to define. Business people often fall for this trap as well. Such vague usage may seem to make
Read More
John Hawkins lists The 25 Best Quotes from Thomas Sowell in Townhall.com, 4/20/12 Here are my favorites within his list: “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.” “Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and
Read More
Investor’s Business Daily Thomas Sowell writes Obscure Court Decision Gives Government Sweeping Power, 3/26/12. Excerpt: Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him
Read More
In Thomas Sowell’s collection, The Thomas Sowell Reader he offers an interesting idea in the chapter , ‘Reflections on Term Limits’. Pay Congressmen $1,000,000 a year. No benefits, no retirement pension. The biggest problems with the current system, in Sowell’s
Read More
A few gems from Thomas Sowell from the last chapter of the Thomas Sowell Reader. “There is no greater indictment of judges than the fact that honest people are afraid to go into court, while criminals swagger out its revolving
Read More
While our students perform poorly on standardized tests relative to other countries, we have the most desirable institutions of higher education in the world and have a disproportionate share of Nobel Prize winners. How is this so and do we
Read More
I am guilty of associating freedom with democracy. Thomas Sowell writes in his book The Thomas Sowell Reader that there is a distinct difference in the chapter ‘Freedom Versus Democracy.’ Democracy and Freedom are too often confounded. Britain itself did
Read More
Thomas Sowell writes Best Way to Aid Economy? Just Do Nothing in the Investors Business Daily, 9/14/11. Excerpts: The grand myth that’s been taught to whole generations is that the government is “forced” to intervene when there is a downturn
Read More
“Perhaps the most fertile source of misunderstandings about incomes has been the widespread practice of confusing statistical categories with flesh-and-blood human beings. Many statements have been made in the media and in academia, claiming that the rich are gaining not
Read More
We mortals pride ourselves as rational beings, but we act emotionally. We get attached to previous positions, and will discount or filter evidence rather than change our minds. We read the news for confirmation rather than information. We are so
Read More
From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “In short, many things that the Federal Reserve, Congress and the two Presidents did (during the market crash of 1929) were counterproductive. Given these multiple failures of government policy, it is by no means
Read More
From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “Although such discussions have been phrased in terms of people, the actual empirical evidence cited has been about what has been happening over time to statistical categories – and that turns out to be
Read More
From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “Central planning is just one of a more general class of social decision-making processes dependent on the underlying assumption that people with more per capita knowledge (in the special sense) should be guiding their
Read More
(this was published previously in the Macon Telegraph) Being in the middle of a record economic crisis presents a rare learning opportunity. Several books are worthwhile for those seeking to understand what just happened. Too Big to Fail by Andrew
Read More
Thomas Sowell writes in the National Review The ‘Science’ Mantra Excerpt: Today, politicized “science” has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too
Read More
With the clarity of time we can look back at the brink of the collapse that hit us just prior to the last national election. In the midst of the collapse we were stunned and angry, and tended to blame
Read More
“In other words, experts are often called in, not to provide factual information or dispassionate analysis for the purpose of decision-making by responsible officials, but to give political cover for decisions already made and based on other consideration entirely. The
Read More
“People on both sides of the ideological fault line may believe that those with the most knowledge should have the most weight in making decisions that impact society, but they have radically different conceptions of just where in society there
Read More
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that
Read More
1. blaming economic crises on “greed” is like blaming plane crashes on gravity.- Thomas Sowell 2. “crony capitalism” is to capitalism what National Socialism (Nazism) is to socialism- hko 3. ‘Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for
Read More
Recent Comments