The Thomas Sowell Thread for forums that don't have Thomas Sowell Threads.
Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, and political commentator that comes from poor and oppressive beginnings to become America's premier philosophical and economic genius.
In spite of his race, he is mostly ignored by Establishment figures but especially ignored by certain parties that prefer black people to be victims for their own political purpose. Sowell is hardly that. He's self admittedly not disadvantaged or oppressed. Moderate people of either political leaning embrace him for his solid common sense. He doesn't advocate pie in the sky theories or conspiracies or schemes but obvious realities.
Warning: Sowell has a lot of observational zingers.
A sampling of Sowell Wisdom:
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
"People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated.”
“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”
((A nod to Thomas More who observed that more people were bad than good. ))
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
“I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on income distribution, the cold fact is that most income is not distributed. It is earned.”
"The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”
“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about fairness and social justice, what is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?”
“Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”
“Most officially poor Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars.”
"Competition does a much more effective job than the government at protecting consumers.”
“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.”
