The Best of

Thomas Sowell
Quotes by topic

Edited by Dean Kalahar

2008 Dean Kalahar

Who is Dr. Thomas Sowell?

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with
many others in his neighborhood, Thomas Sowell left home early and did not finish high
school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps
and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Thomas Sowell
entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the
science that would become his passion and profession: economics.
Thomas Sowell received his bachelors degree in economics (magna cum laude)
from Harvard in 1958. He went on to receive his master's in economics from Columbia
University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.
In the early '60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor
and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell
University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. His other teaching
assignments include Rutgers University, Cornell, Amherst College, Brandeis University
and the University of California at Los Angeles.
In addition, Sowell was project director at the Urban Institute, 1972-1974, a
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford
University, 197677, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute,
1975-76.
Thomas Sowell has published a large volume of writing much of which is
considered ground-breaking. His has written over 30 books, as well as numerous articles
and essays. His work covers a wide range of topics, Including: classic economic theory,
judicial activism, social policy, ethnicity, civil rights, education, and the history of ideas
to name only a few. His scholarship places him as one of the greatest thinkers of the
second half of the twenty century.
Thomas Sowell was a regular contributor to newspapers beginning in the late '70s,
and he became a newspaper columnist 1984. Writing for the general public with a
sensible and clear voice affords him a venue to discuss and get to the heart of issues in
plain English without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompanies academic writing.
His column is nationally syndicated and appears in more than 150 newspapers from
Boston to Honolulu.
In 2003, Thomas Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement.
Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 1990, he won the
prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute.
Currently Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public
Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Table of Contents
Topic

page #

Achievement
Affirmative action
Africa
Bailouts
Bureaucracy
Charity
Civil rights
Communism
Competition
Corruption
Crime
Culture
Demonizing
Desegregation
Discrimination
Diversity
Double standards
Economics
Education
Employment
Environment
Equality
Exploitation
Fairness
Family
Foreign aid
Freedom
Geography
Government
Guilt
Gun control
Health
History
Human nature
Immigration
Income
Justice
Knowledge
Language
Late talking children
Leadership

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Liberals/the left
Media
Middleman
Miscellany
Morality
Multiculturalism
Native Americans
Outsourcing
Planning
Political correctness
Politics
Poverty
Power
Private property
Pro-choice
Productivity
Prosperity
Race
Racism
Recycling
Religion
Rights
Safety
Self-Anointed
Self-esteem
Sex
Social justice
Social security
Southerners
Slavery
Sports
Taxes
Terrorism
Time
Tolerance
Trust
Unions
Universities
Visions
Volunteerism
Wealth

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Weapons
War

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Achievement
In American society, achievement is what ultimately brings respect, including self
respect. (9 p.63)
If we each sat down and wrote out all the mistakes we have made in our lives, all the
paper needed would require cutting down whole forests. Random thoughts, May 26, 2009
In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such
verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals priorities and efforts
affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. . . A study of incomes of
various groups in Toronto concluded that Canadians of Japanese ancestry were the most
privileged group in that city. That is, people of Japanese ancestry there had higher
incomes than members of other minorities and higher incomes than the white majority in
Toronto. What makes the privileged label a particularly bad joke in this case is a
history of blatant discrimination against the Japanese in Canada in years past, including a
longer internment during World War II than that of Japanese Americans. -Fairness in
education, Feb 10, 2010
Affirmative action
Equal opportunity laws and policies require that individuals be judged on their
qualifications as individuals, without regard to race, sex, age, etc. Affirmative action
requires that they be judged with regard to such group membership, receiving preferential
or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve a more proportional representation
in various institutions and occupations. (6 p.38)
The term affirmative action was first used in a racial discrimination context in
President John F. Kennedys Executive Order No. 10,925 in 1961take affirmative
action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during
employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. (6 p.39)
What is truly surprising- and relatively ignored- is the economic impact of affirmative
action on the disadvantaged, for whom it is most insistently invoked. The relative
position of disadvantaged individuals within the groups singled out for preferential
treatment has generally declined under affirmative action. (6.p.51)
Those blacks with less education and less job experience- the truly disadvantaged- have
been falling farther and farther behind their white counterparts under affirmative action,
during the same years when blacks with more education and job experience have been
advancing economically, both absolutely and relative to their white counterparts. (6 p.
52)
In traditional terms, what preferential policies create is a playing field tilting in favor of
those whose performance on a level playing field would be inadequate. (7 p.163)

5
Ironically, many of the bitter-end defenders of the current public school system and its
educational dogmas are also in favor of preferential admissions of minority students to
colleges and universities. In other words, having denied minority children an opportunity
to develop the kinds of intellectual skills that would make lower admissions standards for
them unnecessary, they then send minority students on to institutions where they are less
likely to meet course standards designed for better prepared students- and where most
minority students do not last long enough to graduate. (9 p.244)
To many of us, a level playing field means that everybody plays by the same rules and is
judged by the same standards. That was the original purpose of the Civil Rights Act of
1964. People were supposed to be hired, fired or promoted "without regard" to their race.
To others, however, a level playing field means that results are to be pre-arranged by
third parties who ration out benefits to various groups. This has been the spirit behind
group preferences and quotas under the "affirmative action" policies. . . Rigging the rules
means that we don't want to reward performance but to create a picture. Playing fair and
square, April 22, 1998
Africa
After the soaring rhetoric and optimistic expectations at the beginning of independence
were followed by bitter disappointments and painful retrogressions that reached into
virtually every aspect of African life, the immediate political response was not so much a
re-evaluation of the assumptions and policies which lead to such disastrous results, but
instead a widespread blaming of the departed imperialists, or racial minorities such as the
Indians, or even the United States, which has had relatively little role in African history,
for good or ill. (5 p.120)
Bailouts
Bankruptcy says: We just dont have the money. End of discussion. Bailouts say:
Give the taxpayers a little rhetoric, and a little smoke and mirrors with the bookkeeping,
and we can keep the party rolling. Budget Crisis Rhetoric, January 18 2011
Why are politicians so focused on one set of people, at the expense of other people?
Because saving one set of people increases the chances of getting those peoples votes.
Letting supply and demand determine what happens in the housing market gets nobodys
votesRescuing particular people at the expense of other people whether the others
are taxpayers, savers, or prospective home buyers produces votes. It also produces
dependency on government, which is good for politicians, but bad for society. That is
why politicians give what Adam Smith called a most unnecessary attention to things
that would sort themselves out better and faster without heavy-handed government
intervention, January 4, 2011, Saving the Housing Market Why should everyone else
pay for the reckless?

6
Bureaucracy
They say cream rises to the top. However, among government employees, the cream
tends to leave after a few years, allowing mediocrity to rise to the top. Random Thoughts,
September 4, 1998
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding
meetings. Random Thoughts, June 26, 1998
What matters to bureaucrats is not whether what they are doing makes sense but whether
it fits the routine. It is both bothersome and dangerous to go beyond the routine because
that means taking personal responsibility for the consequences. One of the main
hallmarks of bureaucrats is avoidance of personal responsibility. The one thing that all
bureaucrats have in common is the notion that the bureaucracy is never wrong. If
anything has gone wrong, it had to be someone else's fault, preferably the fault of
whoever complains about the bureaucracy. Any evidence that would prove them wrong is
likely to be kept under wraps. Tales out of bureaucracies, November 19, 1998
Why is it that so many people who are "pro-choice" when it comes to abortion are against
choice when it comes to letting parents choose where their children go to school?
Random Thoughts, November 23, 1998
Charity
Two centuries ago, Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics, also donated both
money and time to help others. But it was only after his death that his financial help came
to light, when his personal papers were examined. What he had given was considered
remarkable, in light of his own modest wealth. British banker Henry Thornton, one of the
leading monetary economists of the 19th century, routinely gave away more than half of
his annual income before he got married and had a family to support. Even afterwards, he
still made large contributions to charitable causes and helped spearhead the drive to ban
the slave trade. He was part of what would today be called the "religious right."
Compassionate conservatism is old stuff, September 7, 1999
However, with charity as with everything else, it cannot simply be assumed that more is
always better. A safety net can easily become a hammock. Social justice can easily
become class warfare that polarizes a nation, while leading those at the bottom into the
blind alley of resentments, no matter how many broad avenues of achievement may be
available to them. Two Worlds, September 6, 2011
Civil rights
We have to understand the past if we are serious about preparing for the future. You can
re-run all the pictures you want of marches on Selma or fire hoses and police dogs in
Birmingham in the 1960s. But the cold, hard fact is that blacks were rising economically
more rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s than after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. . .
The civil rights revolution was right and overdue but let us not confuse a moral necessity

7
with an economic cause. We have to fight today's problems, not yesterday's, if we want a
better tomorrow. Do minorities really have it that bad? July 16, 1998
Liberals love to point to the civil rights advances of the 1960s as their trump card. But the
desegregation of schools and other institutions began in the 1950s. The fact that the trend
continued in the 1960s is hardly surprising. Nor was the economic rise of blacks a
product of 1960s legislation. That rise was faster in the 1940s and 1950s than in the
1960s or afterward. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
were important pieces of legislation. But a higher percentage of Republicans than of
Democrats voted for these bills in both Houses of Congress. Sixties sentimentalism, June
22, 1998
Communism
Only a few years after seizing power- years marked by numerous economic setbacks and
catastrophes- the Communists too turned to the West for management, engineering, and
technical personnel, as well as for equipment and capital Much of Stalins building of
socialism in the early Five Year Plans was in fact done by capitalists from Europe and
America. (5 p.214)
Three small republics clustered together on the Baltic Sea- Lithuania, Latvia, and
Estonia- have populations that are collectively not as large as that of Tokyo. Yet these
three little nations began the process of secession which ultimately dismembered the
largest nation on earth. The formal decision was made by the presidents of the three
Slavic republics- Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia- without the participation of the dozen
other republics or of Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the union that now disappeared
under him. (5 p.236)
The official ideology that race did not matter under Communism, that all were one
Soviet people, was ultimately exposed as a bitter mockery when the easing of central
government control in the late 1980s released lethal inter-ethnic violence in Soviet
Georgia, in Azerbaijan, and in Central AsiaThe final irony was that racial, ethnic, and
nationality clashes- all regarded as passing anachronisms by Marxist theory, and as
having been abolished by Soviet practice- not only persisted, but themselves played a
major role in abolishing the Soviet Union. (5 p.246)
Competition
There is competition in boxing when the champion agrees to fight the leading challenger
-- even if the champ knocks him out in the first round. Competition is about a set of
initial conditions, not about outcomes. Fast Computers and Slow Anti-trust, June 8, 1998
Corruption
The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation's soul. Dismantling America
part II, August 2010

8
Crime
It is easy to say crime does not pay, but the real question is: Does it pay whom- and
compared to what? (8 p.47)
-criminal activity in general has tended to vary inversely with the risk of imprisonment.
(8 p.48)
-it was during the 1960s that crime rates began skyrocketing among both blacks and
whites, and it was precisely after the historic civil rights laws were passed that blacks
began rioting in cities across the country. (11 p.167)
A majority of the men in prison came from fatherless families. In some cosmic sense, it
may not be entirely their fault that they took the wrong road. But that doesnt change the
fact that it was the wrong road or make it any less dangerous to turn them loose. The
Sources of Inequality, May 25, 2010
People who glibly talk about "hate crimes" ignore both the past and the implications for
the future in what they are advocating. It took centuries of struggle and people putting
their lives on the line to get rid of the idea that a crime against "A" should be treated
differently than the same crime committed against "B." After much sacrifice and
bloodshed, the principle finally prevailed that killing a peasant deserved the same
punishment as killing a baron. Now the "hate crime" advocates want to undo all that and
take us back to the days when punishment did not fit the crime, but varied with who the
crime was committed against. Murder is Murder, October 20, 1998
Magic words do not create magic realities. Innocent people have been killed by
rehabilitated criminals who had been set free. And prevention programs do not
prevent anything other than putting dangerous people behind bars. The Sources of
Inequality, May 25, 2010
As of 1960, the total number of murders in the United States was lower than in 1950,
1940 or 1930. Even though the population of the country was growing and two new states
were added, fewer people were being murdered. Enter the grand new liberal theories of
the "root causes" of crime and the criminals' new "rights" that were created out of thin air
by judges, under the pretense of finding these rights in the constitution. During this
wonderful decade of the 1960s, the murder rate doubled and other rates of violent crime
also began to skyrocket. Liberal Sentimentalism, June 22, 1998
Culture
The culture of this nation is being dismantled, brick by brick, but so gradually that many
will not notice until the walls start to sag -- just before they cave in. Thomas Sowell
Random Thoughts, December 4, 2007

9
Much of the story of the human race has been a story of the massive cultural borrowings,
which have created a modern world technology, as much at home in Japan as in Europe
or the United States. (7 p.61)
What is more disturbing -- indeed, frightening -- is the possibility that years of dumbeddown education and debased popular culture have left us in a mental condition where
unbridled emotional responses are all we have left. Perspective, logic, self-discipline -these things seem to have faded away. What is truly scary is how dangerous it is in a
democracy to have an easily emotionalized populace. Many of the unprecedented mass
horrors of the twentieth century were the work of charismatic political leaders who knew
how to manipulate people's emotions. Lenin, Hitler and Mao each cost millions of
people's lives and debased and dehumanized millions of others, who were in their
merciless power because of these leaders' mastery of the power of words and
emotionsIf there is anything worse than living through the horrors of this century once,
it is needlessly living through them again because our national memory has been erased
and replaced by "exciting" fads. A gullible people cannot indefinitely remain a free
people. Emotional orgies, July 23, 1999
Most of the white population of the American South as a whole came from not only what
has been loosely called the Celtic fringe, but also from that fringe at a particular time
and a particular time and a particular stage of its cultural evolutionThe fringe of British
civilization from which they came was notable not only for its poverty and backwardness,
but also for its lawlessness and violenceIn short, the pattern of ruthless violence
directed by Southern whites against blacks originated long before there were any racial
differences involved and in fact before the people of the Southern backcountry had
boarded the ships in Britain which took them to their new homes in the American South.
(5 p.76-77)
The particular culture or human Capital available to a people has often had more
influence on their economic level than their existing material wealth, natural resources, or
individual geniuses. (5 p.335)
National and group pride and identity have often been assumed to be positive, if not
essential, factors in advancement. Yet some of the most remarkable examples of rapid
advancement have come from peoples painfully aware of their own backwardness and
ashamed of it. (5 p.341)
-the cultural capital of a people is crucial to their economic and social advancement,
whether that people is a racial minority, a nation-state, or a whole civilization. (5 p.368)
Cultural diffusion is an explanation of large disparities among peoples at a given timeand changing world leadership over time- that is more consistent with history than either
genetic or exploitation theories. (5 p.374)

10
What an increasingly common world culture offers is an opportunity for better mutual
understanding. But opportunities alone are not the whole story. It is what people do with
their opportunities that determines the course of history. (5 p.379)
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged
by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a
liberal 25 years ago and a racist today. Random Thoughts, November 23, 1998
Each group trails the long shadow of its own history and culture, which influences its
habits, priorities, and social patterns, which in turn affect its fateLamenting the
vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many
escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of
specific societies. This turns the insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently
more manageable issue of social justice. (9 p.264)
Clinging to a counterproductive culture in the name of group pride and avoiding changes
because they could be labeled self-hate are patterns that have no track record that
would justify optimism. (9 p.263)
Where a particular group culture is itself a handicap impeding the acquisition of the
education, skills, and experience required for economic and other advancement, group
solidarity can have huge and lifelong consequences with staggering costsGroup
solidarity may not only seal them off from the larger surrounding society, it may seal
them off from the truth about the internal causes of their own problems, making a
solution more remote. (9 p.285)
The thuggish gutter words and brutal hoodlum lifestyle of gangsta rap musicians are
not merely condoned but glorified by many white intellectuals- and understood by
others lacking the courage to take responsibility for siding with savagery.Even such a
modern ghetto creation as gangsta rap echoes the violence, arrogance, loose sexuality,
and self dramatization common for centuries in white redneck culture and speaks in
exaggerated cadences common in the oratory of rednecks in both the antebellum South
and those parts of Britain from which their ancestors came. (9 p.55/59)
Demonizing
A blanket prohibition against bills of attainder was put into the Constitution for a reason.
Nothing is easier than to formalize lynch law against individuals or groups who have
been demonized. And nothing is more dangerous. Laws become a mockery when this
happens. Today it may be tobacco companies or firearms manufacturers, but no one can
predict who it will be tomorrow. Even totalitarianism did not become totalitarianism in
one big step. The totalitarians started out demonizing their victims and then playing fast
and loose with the laws to crack down on them. That is what is being done now by those
who are demonizing for dollars. The Communists demonized the capitalists, the Nazis
demonized the Jews and other opportunists have demonized whoever was handy. What
they all have in common is brushing aside the principles of a rule of law by unleashing

11
passions that overwhelm those principlesonce you have turned the rule of law into just
some stuffy old technicalities to be winked at and finessed, you have taken a fatal step for
the whole society, regardless of who the particular target happens to be at the moment.
Demonizing for dollars, June 1, 1999
Desegregation
An airport, a hospital, or a sports arena is considered desegregated when everyone has the
opportunity to use it. Regardless of what proportions of people from what groups actually
use it. But a school with exactly the same racial proportions as an audience attending an
opera or passengers using Dulles Airport could easily be served with a federal court order
to desegregate, while other institutions would not be. (6 p.64)
Green (v. County School Board of New Kent County) was in many ways as decisive a
case as Brown-it was a substitution of a very different process- one in which children
were to be assigned to schools by race instead of without regard to race. (6 p.68)
The central assumption behind busing was perhaps no where better expressed than by
Los Angeles Judge Paul V. Egly, when he declared that minority students would be
irreparably damaged if busing were even delayed, and that his task was to make the
most efficient use of increasingly scarce white students as possible by spreading them
around for the benefit of the many minority youngsters who constituted a majority of the
citys school children. Kiplings doctrine of the white mans burden was now
transformed into a judicial doctrine of the white childs burden- a doctrine that came very
close to fighting racism with racism. (6 p.69)
When the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1954 that separate schools were inherently
inferior, within walking distance of the Court was an all-black public school whose
performance had equaled or surpassed that of white schools in the District of Columbia
for more than 80 years. (6 p.83)
Discrimination
Distinguishing discrimination from differences in qualifications and performance is not
easy in practice, though the distinction is fundamental in principle. (3 p.140)
Empirical evidence strongly indicates that racial discrimination tends to be greater when
the costs are lower and lower when the costs are greater. (3 p.142)
In countries around the world, discrimination by government has been greater than
discrimination by businesses operating in competitive markets. (3 p.143)
Again, it is necessary to note how price is a factor even in racial discrimination. That is,
surplus labor resulting from minimum wage laws makes it cheaper to discriminate against
minority workers than it would be in a free market, where there is no chronic excess
supply of labor. (3 p.158)

12
Groups with a demonstrable history of being discriminated against have, in many
countries and in many periods of history, had higher incomes, better educational
performance, and more representation in high-level positions than those doing the
discriminating. (6 p.20)
If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there
so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today? (6
p.85)
-sweeping Jim Crow laws were used in the South to keep blacks in their place precisely
because of the futility of trying to do so in a competitive market. (6 p.112)
-while man may discriminate against various minorities, nature discriminates against
whole nations and continents. (5 p.348)
-whether judgments or actions toward particular groups are favorable or unfavorable,
these actions cannot be automatically equated with prejudgments. Indeed, it is a sweeping
prejudgment to do so, especially when those who attribute prejudice to others often have
less direct knowledge of the groups in question at the times in question, than those who
made the favorable or unfavorable judgments. (8 p. 164)
Another and very different kind of bias is based on favoritism for ones own group,
which may exist independently of any belief, presumption, or bias about inferior abilities
in other groups. (8 p.166)
It is not only theoretically possible to have more discrimination where there is less bias or
prejudice, and less discrimination where there more bias and prejudice, this has in fact
happened in more than one country. The degree to which subjective attitudes are
translated into overt acts of discrimination depends on the costs of doing so. Where those
costs are very high, even very prejudiced or biased people may engage in little or no
discriminationPersonal costs can lead to actions either more adverse or less adverse
than the individuals own beliefs or feelings. (8 p.168-169)
Too often, those opposed to discrimination are also opposed to free competitive markets
that make discrimination more costly. They do not think beyond stage one. (8 p.177)
-the crucial factors in the cost of discrimination have been the presence or absence of
competition and whether those making the decisions have been spending their own
money or someone elses money. (8 p.178)
Focussing on discrimination is fine if you are more interested in smiting the wicked than
in advancing the less fortunate. Laying a guilt trip on people who are more successful is
fine if your goal is to score political points and maybe get a few crumbs from their table.
But don't expect to advance a whole race that way. Do minorities really have it that
bad?July 16, 1998

13
Where discrimination is distinguished from differences in life chances, the empirical
question is whether individuals of similar qualifications have similar prospects of
employment, college admission, and other benefits when they come from different
groups. Where there are substantial differences in qualifying characteristics among
groups, as there often are, the question then becomes: What of those particular
individuals who have the same qualifying characteristics as members of other groups? Do
they have the same prospects or results? (8 p.180)
For much of the media- and often even in academia- it is sufficient to find inter-group
differences in outcomes to conclude that there has been discrimination. This happens,
however, only when the conclusion fits existing preconceptions. (8 p.184)
-clearly neither racial discrimination nor racial inferiority can explain similar differences
between whites in the North and the South in earlier centuries. This should at least raise
questions about such explanations when applied to blacks of a later era who inherited the
culture of white Southerners. (9 p.25)
The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employers products, the
higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has
for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial
survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a
competitive market- monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies- have
greater leeway. (11 p.74)
Back in 1973, the equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a sex discrimination
lawsuit against Sears, based solely on statistical disparities, rather than on any women
who claimed that a man of lower qualifications than her own was hired or promoted
when she was notThe court pointed out that the EEOC did not present in evidence
even one specific instance of discrimination in a company with hundreds of stores from
coast to coast. (11 p.81)
-hundreds of black chemists were employed in private industry before World War II,
when not a single major university had a black professor of chemistry. (11 p.123)
Discrimination entails costs on the discriminators, as well as on those discriminated
against, but such costs are borne by other people- not by those who make discriminatory
decisions- in the case of non-profit organizations. By the same token, the costs of racial
or ethnic preferences in a later era have also been borne by other people, so that the same
non-profit organizations which once discriminated against blacks, for example, could
now afford to show preferences for blacks as students or professors because the costs of
these preferences are likewise paid by others. (11 p.123)
Before racial discrimination became illegal and socially unacceptable in the United
States, non-profit organizations like universities, foundations, and hospitals could
discriminate more readily, and against more groups, because their survival did not depend

14
on making a profit, and the implicit costs of their decisions were paid out of the
endowments and donations supplied by others. (11 p.171)
It is bitter medicine to the fully qualified individual to be denied employment because of
the racial, ethnic, or other group to which he belongs. It is economically fallacious,
however, to say that the below average earnings of the group as a whole are due to such
discrimination. (2 p.89)
Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing
whether a mental test or an institution is conveying a difference that already exists
and saying that it is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise. Creating a
difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done
about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost
automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for
disparities between individuals and groups. Natures discrimination completely dwarfs
man. Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used
for college admissions or for employment were biased and unfair to many individuals
or groups. Fortunately, there was one voice of sanity David Riesman, I believe who
said: The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results. . . If by
fair, you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has
never been anywhere close to being fair, at any place or time. The fallacy of fairness, Feb
9, 2010
Man may discriminate but nature discriminates on a scale that dwarfs what human beings
can do. Too many people take "nature" to mean genes but geography is also nature and it
is by no means egalitarian. Do minorities really have it that bad? July 16, 1998
Diversity
Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard
gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen -- written in blood -- from Iraq
to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many
people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word. Thomas Sowell, Random
Thoughts, August 29, 2006
Advocates of diversity in a race or gender sense are often quite hostile to ideological
diversity, when it includes traditional or conservative values and beliefs. (4 p.95)
Many years ago, there was a comic book character who could say the magic word
"Shazam" and turn into Captain Marvel, a character with powers like Superman's. Today,
you can say the magic word "diversity" and turn reverse discrimination into social justice.
Random thoughts, August 11, 2009
The next time some academics tell you how important "diversity" is, ask how many
Republicans there are in their sociology department. Random Thoughts, July 31, 1998

15
Double standards
Ideological double standards have become so common in the academic world that any
criticism of them is treated as an attack on their particular groups receiving benefits.
Those who criticize double standards for minorities are almost certain t be labeled
racist while those who criticize double standards for homosexuals will automatically be
labeled homophobic and those who criticize double standards for radical feminists will
be labeled sexist. (10 p.278)
-what is called sensitivity often involves being less sensitive, in order to be more
ideologically in fashion. (10 p.83)
Economics
Amid all the media hysteria over the price of gasoline and the profits of "Big Oil," one
simple fact has been repeatedly overlooked: The oil companies' earnings are just under 10
percent of the price of a gallon of gas, while taxes take 17 percent. Yet who ever accuses
the government of "greed"? Thomas Sowell, Is Thinking Obsolete, May 10, 2006.
The moral justification of the market process rests on the general prosperity and freedom
it produces. (1 p.130)
By and large, it pays Americans to junk their cars, refrigerators, trolleys, and other capital
equipment in a shorter time than it would pay people in poorer countries to do so. Nor is
this a matter of being able to afford waste. It would be a waste to keep repairing this
equipment, when the same efforts elsewhere in the American economy would produce
more than enough wealth to buy replacements. (3 p.146)
In short, loose use of the word monopoly, in a political sense quite different from its
economic meaning, often leads to policies reducing competition and thus producing the
very monopolistic results so loudly denounced. (2 p.109)
In economics, as elsewhere in life, while we are free to do whatever we wish, we are not
free to have the consequences be whatever we want them to be. We can leap off a
skyscraper, if we wish, but the law of gravity will determine what the consequences will
be. (3 p.45)
If everything were made affordable, there would still not be any more to go around then
when things were prohibitively expensive. (3 p.46)
In short, while capitalism has a visible cost-profit-that does not exist under socialism,
socialism has an invisible cost-inefficiency-that gets weeded out by losses and
bankruptcy in capitalism. The fact that more goods are available more cheaply in a
capitalist economy implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency. Put differently,
profit is a price paid for efficiency. (3 p.75)

16
Doing 90 percent of what is required is one of the biggest wastes because you have
nothing to show for all your efforts. But doing 110 percent of what is expected is one of
the smartest investments because it can pay off with a big reputation for just a little more
effort. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, August 29, 2006
Black-owned banks in the United States have tended to have high rates of failure and the
surviving black banks have tended to invest outside their community even more than
white banks. . .Here too, often the poor pay more because they live in neighborhoods
with higher costs of providing those goods and services. (2 p.111-112)
Economics is not about the financial fate of individuals. It is about the material wellbeing of society as a whole. (3 p.3)
Government is the ultimate repository of force in a society. That force can be used to see
that a general framework of laws is followed and that contracts between private
individuals are enforced. This is basically an umpire's role. Free market economists are
against the government being a player-umpire. In some sports there are player-managers
but in no sports are there player-umpires. The two roles are incompatible. Bundling and
unbundling, April 13, 1998
Sometimes it doesnt matter that you have a better product, if your competitors have
better salesmen. What the GOP needs, January 20, 2010
It has been almost axiomatic, for at least a century, that the American economy produces
more output than any other economy in the world. All this is so much taken for granted
that no one considers it worth commenting on the fact that 300 million Americans today
produce more output than more than a billion people in India or an even larger population
in China indeed, more than these two countries which, put together, have more than
eight times the population of the United States. We also produce more than Japan,
Germany, Britain, and France combined. Housing Boom and Bust, May 11 2010.
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is just one of the
ways of trying to make the most of those options. (3 p.4)
Efficiency is the difference between having the necessities, comforts and amenities of
high income countries and suffering the hunger and deprivations too often found in poor
countries. (3 p.117)
Anyone who saw East Berlin and West Berlin during the years when communism
prevailed in the eastern part of the city and a market economy in the rest of it could not
help noticing the sharp contrast between the prosperity of West Berlin and the poverty in
East Berlin. (3 p.118)
What is called capitalism might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the
consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to
learn to dance to it. (3 p.122)

17
Nevertheless, most Americans earn their livings by renting their time and talents-and live
much better than peoples in many other countries where most adults own their own land
and work only for themselves. (3 p.127)
In order to have capital gains, you first must invest --- which is to say, create jobs,
products and industry. Nothing trickles down to the working class. It is the workers who
first get the money and only later do the investors find out whether they have made
money or lost money. Benefits trickle up -- not down -- if and when the investment pays
off. There are no capital gains to tax until afterwards. Why economists visit dentists so
often, February 5, 1999
Suppose someone left you an inheritance of a million dollars with the proviso that every
cent of it had to be spent on tickets for you to go watch professional wrestling matches. If
you happened to be a professional wrestling fan, you would be in hog heaven. But what if
you were not? How much would that million dollars be worth to you? Certainly a lot less
than a million dollars. What if there was a clause in the will which said that you could
forfeit the million dollars and instead receive a cash amount of $100,000 to spend as you
pleased? Many of us would take the hundred grand without strings, even if that was only
ten cents on the dollar compared to the million for watching wrestling. In short, money
with strings is worth less than money without strings sometimes a lot less. Thomas
Sowell, Something for Nothing: Social Security, February 28, 2006
The Soviet Union did not lack resources, but was in fact one of the most richly endowed
nations on earth. What it lacked was an efficient economic system that made efficient use
of scarce resources. (3 p.12)
Economists are often asked to predict what the economy is going to do. But economic
predictions require predicting what politicians are going to do-- and nothing is more
unpredictable." 2. 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. -Thomas Sowell, from Mark Perry, Carpe Diem Blog
Someone pointed out that blaming economic crises on "greed" is like blaming plane
crashes on gravity. Certainly planes wouldn't crash if it wasn't for gravity. But when
thousands of planes fly millions of miles every day without crashing, explaining why a
particular plane crashed because of gravity gets you nowhere. Neither does talking about
"greed," which is constant like gravity. Random Thoughts August 11, 2009
Just as primitive peoples have tended to attribute such things as the swaying of trees in
the wind to some intentional action by an invisible spirit, rather than to such systemic
causes as variations in atmospheric pressure, so there is a tendency toward intentional
explanations of systemic events in the economy, when people are unaware of the basic
principles. (3 p.39)
A renowned economist of the past, J. A. Schumpeter, used to refer to progress under
capitalism as creative destruction the replacement of businesses that have outlived

18
their usefulness with businesses that carry technological and organizational creativity
forward, raising standards of living in the process. Indeed, this is very much like what
happened a hundred years ago, when that new technological wonder, the automobile,
wreaked havoc on all the forms of transportation built up around horses. For thousands of
years, horses had been the way to go, whether in buggies or royal coaches, whether
pulling trolleys in the cities or plows on the farms. People had bet their futures on
something with a track record of reliable success going back many centuries. Were all
these people to be left high and dry? What about all the other people who supplied the
things used with horses oats, saddles, horse shoes, and buggies? Wouldnt they all go
falling like dominoes when horses were replaced by cars? Unfortunately for all the good
people who had in good faith gone into all the various lines of work revolving around
horses, there was no compassionate government to step in with a bailout or a stimulus
package. Postponing Reality: The triumph of the non-judgmental philosophy of hightoned circles, December 17, 2008
To say that prices are due to greed is to imply that sellers can set prices by an act of will.
If so, no company would go bankrupt, since it could simply raise its prices to cover
whatever costs happened to be. (3 p.40)
Seldom have the crusades of social reformers been directed toward enlarging the set of
options available to the groups whose housing the reformers disapproved. More
commonly, housing reform efforts have reduced the existing options . . . in all these
ways, less fortunate groups were forced to pay more for housing then they themselves
chose. Their incomes could no longer be used to maximize their own satisfactions,
according to their own values, goals, and trades-offs, but were partially diverted to
making observers feel better. (2 p. 101)
-if everybody is greedy, then the word is virtually meaningless. (3 p.322)
Some people consider it a valid criticism of corporations that they are just in the
business to make profits. By this kind of reasoning, workers are just working to earn
their pay. (3 p.332)
Carrying safety-first to such extremes on all the millions of products in the economy
would raise costs in general and correspondingly lower real income and living standard
of the public. (4 p.71)
-motor vehicle death rates per million passenger miles fell over the years from 17.9 in
1925 to 5.5 in 1965, the year Unsafe at Any Speed was published, and this trend
continued at a rate of 4.9 five years laterIn short, the era of corporate greed and the
presumably ignorant and helpless consumer saw dramatic improvements in safety, before
the anointed came to the rescue. (4 p.73)
Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of greed is why it is a
term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what

19
they have already earned-never to those wanting to take other peoples money in taxes or
to those wishing to live on the largess dispenses from such taxation. (4 p.186)
Despite the name, capitalism is not an ism. It is not a philosophy but an economy. (4
p.207)
To say that a shoe shine boy earns too little or a surgeon too much is to say that third
parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who elected to spend their
money on shoes or surgery. (4 p.212)
-those who deliver tons of life-sustaining food to supermarkets are not engaged in public
service, as the anointed use the term. (4 p.184)
When the government creates some new program, nothing is easier than to show
whatever the benefits that program produces. Indeed, those who run the program will be
more than cooperative in bringing those benefits to the attention of the media. But it is
virtually impossible to trace the taxes that paid for the program back to their source and
to show the alternative uses of that same money that could have been far more beneficial.
(4 p.257)
-the same story can be told of reformers who decry sweatshop labor in Third World
countries who export their products to the United States to be sold in American stores.
Nothing is easier than to take cheap shots at those stores for exploiting Third World
people- and nothing will hurt those Third World people more surely than losing one of
their few meager opportunities to earn incomes by producing at lower costs than more
fortunate people in more industrial countries. (7 p.130)
In Britain, as elsewhere in medieval Europe, a market meant a specifically authorized
gathering place for selling on days specified by the authorities, in places specified by the
authorities, and at prices specified by authoritiesAs large scheduled markets and fairs
gave way to innumerable, smaller, scattered, and continuously-operating shops and
stores, official control of prices and conditions became much more tenuous as a practical
matterIt 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. By the mid-nineteenth century, widespread
support of free trade internationally, and of freeing the domestic economy from many
political controls, were on the ascendancy in Britain. (5 p.33-34)
Since no group of human beings has been without sin, anecdotal evidence for various
accusations will never be lacking, even when these sins are less of an explanatory factor
than a fatal distraction from the hard work needed to acquire the human capital needed to
turn poverty to prosperity. (5 p.338)

20
Alternatives to a market economy may express nobler sentiments but the bottom line is
whether this in fact leads to better behavior in terms of serving their fellow human being.
(8 p.25)
The normal weighing of costs against benefits, which causes more urgent things to be
done ahead of less important things when prices ration scarce resources, is less effective
when costs are paid by someone other than the actual decision-makers. (8 p.74)
Following the kind of reasoning used by those who say it is futile to build more roads to
cope with traffic congestion, it would be possible to say that it is futile to deal with
hunger by eating because people just get hungry again later on. (11 p.19)
Education
Most people have no idea what an all-out war against morality has been conducted in our
public schools from coast to coast over the past generation. Values clarification"
programs under a variety of names encourage children to create their own personal rules
of conduct, independent of the traditional morality taught to them by their families,
churches and other social institutions. That is what the young murderers at Columbine
High School did. That is what was done by the Unabomber and by those who bombed the
government building in Oklahoma City and those who are now shooting up all sorts of
people they don't likeThe high price of moral anarchy has yet to be recognized by
those giddy with these dangerous experiments with children's minds and with the future
of American society. Moral Anarchy and its consequences; August 17, 1999
Just as any village idiot can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and fad-ridden
people in our public schools can undermine and ultimately destroy a civilization that took
centuries of effort and sacrifice to create and maintain. Random Thoughts; January 15,
2004
Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate
against students who did not study. Disregarding criteria in the interest of fairness in
the sense of outcomes independent of inputs adds to the handicaps of those who
already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and
the things they need to do to make their situation better.- Rawls and Fairness, February
11, 2010
In Washington D.C., in the 1890s there were four academic public high schools- one
black and three white. The black high school was called the M Street School and after
1916 it was renamed Dunbar High School. In standardized tests given in 1899, Dunbar
averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white schools. . . I have
followed 85 years of of the history of this black high school- From 1870 to 1955- and
found it repeatedly equaling or exceeding national performances on standardized tests. . .
What are the secrets of such schools? The biggest secret is that there are no secrets,
unless work is a secret. Minority Schools and the Politics of Education, Imprimus,
January 1999

21
A segment of todays black and white intelligentsia excuses contemporary blacks who
distain education as acting white or who abandon their families-both patterns being
represented as being a legacy of slavery, though blacks born under slavery or living
immediately after emancipation did not exhibit this pattern to the extent seen today. (2
21)
Today, schools across the country are teaching students what to think---political
correctness. Instead of knowledge, students are given "self-esteem," so that they can vent
their ignorance with confidence. Thomas Sowell, The Lefts Vocabulary, August 5, 2004
Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from
reality. Thomas Sowell, Abolish Adolescence, May 1, 1998
Why is it that, as the education in our public schools gets more watered down and
worthless, graduation ceremonies and proms get more and more elaborate and expensive?
Random thoughts, August 24, 1999
Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered
from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been
spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their
golden retirement years. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, May 1, 2004
The education establishment wants those children kept in schools for the same reason that
cattle barons want their livestock in a corral. Thats how they make their money. Thomas
Sowell, When Success Fails, April 13,1999
Institutions that force-feed students the new trinity of race, class, and gender victimhood
throughout the academic year are often unwilling to risk allowing even one lecture by a
visiting spokesman for an opposing viewpoint. Like the Communist regimes which
electronically jammed broadcasts from the Voice of America during the Cold War, the
new academic totalitarians apparently fear lest their years-long propaganda efforts be
knocked over like a house of cards by one brief exposure to a few facts and a different
vision. Thomas Sowell, Stereotypes about stereotypes, May 20, 2002
In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity. In an age of artificial
intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity, in the sense of
ideas and attitudes far more foolish than young people would have arrived at on their
own. Thomas Sowell, Artificial Stupidly, March 25, 2003
No one cares that the most black students who go on to become doctors come from a
small black institution named Xavier University in New Orleans. Although black colleges
enrol only 25 percent of all black college students, their students receive 40 percent of all
science and engineering degrees received by black students. Of the ten undergraduate
institutions whose black students go on to receive the most Ph.D.s in science, six are
black institutions. This is far more remarkable today than it would have been during the

22
Jim Crow era, when most black students went to black colleges. But today there are more
blacks at Ohio State than at Xavier. When success fails, April 16, 1999
Innumerable subsequent studies of the self-esteem of black youngsters in integrated
school settings have shown no general pattern of higher self-esteem. Some studies show
less self-esteem, some show more, and other studies show mixed results. (6 p.64)
Differing incidences of malnutrition, alcohol and drug usage, cigarette smoking, and
other behavioral of mothers during pregnancy can lead to babies with the same genetic
potential at the moment of conception entering the world at birth already differing
biologically in their mental capacities. (5 p.369)
Among Americans in 1980, 31 percent of all black first-born children were born to
teenage mothers, compared to only 12 percent among whites. In both races, children born
to teenage mothers tended to have lower I.Q.s. (5 p.370)
Nothing upsets the teachers' unions like being held accountable for results. They want to
hang on to a cushy system where they have iron-clad tenure and automatic raises,
whether the students can read or count or do anything else. In the system that they are
defending, every academic failure becomes a reason to get more money, in the name of
"investing in our children's future." But the years of huge increases in spending per pupil,
beginning in the 1960s, were the very same years when test scores kept going down every
year for more than a decade. The education establishment is crying out that putting
emphasis on test scores will mean that schools will have to "teach to the test." In other
words, the educational system will no longer be able to indulge itself in fads and fetishes
that strike its fancy, because there would now be a day of reckoning. Most of us face a
day of reckoning every day we go to work. The time is long overdue for the educational
establishment to have to do the same. School choice wars, September 14, 1999
During World War I, for example, black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and
Pennsylvania scored higher on mental tests than did white soldiers from Georgia,
Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi, even though whites nationwide scored higher than
blacks nationwide. (5 p.371)
The general decline in educational performance that began in the 1960s encompassed
elementary and secondary education, as well as education at the college levelThe most
widely known decline was in the scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test
(SAT)Significantly, this era of declining academic performance has also been a period
of rising gradesThese two trends- grade inflation and declining test scores- are by no
means unconnected. Without the systematic deception of parents and the public by rising
grades, it is highly unlikely that the decline in performance could have continued so long.
(10 p.1-2)
The phrase I feel is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather
than say I think, or I know, much less I conclude The net result, as in

23
mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social
issues, world events, or other subjects. (10 p.5)
One of the reasons why basics are not learned is that they are not taught- at least not at
the same level or with the same emphasis as in the pastSome idea of how far the
deliberate erosion of standards has gone may be gotten from looking at the once-standard
McGuffeys Readers from generations ago, or by looking at examinations from that bygone era. (10 p.7)
The kind of broad exposure to a variety of views that used to be called a "liberal
education" is now available largely at conservative academic institutions. Random
thoughts, march 23, 1999
The responses of the educational establishment to the academic deficiencies of their
students today include: (1) secrecy, (2) camouflage, (3) denial, (4) shifting the blame
elsewhere, and (5) demanding more money. (10 p.8)
States that spend more per pupil in the public schools do not generally have any better
educational performance to show for it. (10 p.11)
Affective education is not to be confused with effective education. Indeed, it is one of the
many agendas which distract schools from effective education. The emotionalizing of
education not only takes time away from intellectual development; it also cast teachers in
the role of amateur psychologists. (10 p.17)
Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have
been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them
have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or
university. (10 p.23)
It as if Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being the most likely to survive as
public school teachers. (10 p.26)
If you are not going to change that, then you are not going to change the low quality of
American public schools. Education courses are a filter. They filter out intelligent
students and let mediocrities pass through. The Wrong Filter, February 26, 1998
Just as you are not going to catch ocean fish in mountain lakes, no matter how expensive
your fishing equipment, so you are not going to get an academically proficient or even
academically oriented class of people coming out of education schools and education
courses. First-rate people do not come out of such places because they do not go into
such places or do not stay if they do. The Wrong Filter, February 26, 1998
Raising teachers' salaries will not do it. You will just get more expensive mediocrities in
the classroom and more expensive incompetents being graduated from our schools. The
Wrong Filter, February 26, 1998

24
That outside interests should see 40 million school children as a captive audience to be
exploited is not so difficult to comprehend as the fact that educators themselves are not
merely acquiescent, but are often enthusiastic apostles of these innumerable nonacademic courses and programs. (10 p.32)
Today, not only the classroom but also the dormitories, administrative committees, and
the platform for invited speakers are all used to express the prevailing ideologies and to
stifle opposing views. (10 p.188)
Orwellian use of the word harassment to cover situations in which no one approached,
addressed, or even notices the supposed target of this harassment: has enabled colleges
and universities to punish behavior to which the only real objection is ideological. (10
p.189)
Teaching is both one of the hardest and one of the easiest jobs in the world, depending on
how conscientiously it is done. It is also one of the noblest and one of the most corrupt
occupations- again, depending on how it is done Cheap popularity, ego trips, and
ideological indoctrination are just some of the pitfalls of teaching. (10 p.202-203)
Even though educators consider themselves to be thinking people, there is a remarkable
absence of substantive arguments in their response to critics. These responses include
evading the specifics of the criticisms and arbitrarily attributing Utopian beliefs to critics.
(10 p.249)
Over the past two decades, in every field surveyed by the Council of Graduate Schools,
the proportion of graduate degrees in the United States going to Americans has declined.
(10 p.269)
The assets and liabilities of American education are attitudinal, as well as institutional.
One of its chief assets- the publics generosity to a fault- can become a liability when it
becomes a blank-check subsidy of spoiled brat attitudes on the part of the educators. (10
p.287)
In 2001, for example, there were more than 16,000 Asian American students who scored
above 700 on the mathematics SAT, while fewer than 700 black students scored that
high- even though blacks outnumbered Asian Americans several times over. This cannot
be explained away by poverty, racism, or innate inferiority. (9 p.226)
Frederick Law Olmsteds response to the claim that blacks were no more capable of
being educated than animals were was to ask why there were no laws forbidding animals
from being educated. The very need for such a law undermined the belief that was used
to justify the law. (9 p.168)
In 1899, there were four academic public high schools in Washington, D.C.- one black
and three white. In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school
averaged higher test scores than students in two of three white schools. (9 p.204)

25
Studies from more recent times have shown that the education of black students has been
negatively affected by the presence of large numbers of other black students. (9 p.223)
Aside from work and discipline, the various successful schools for minority children have
had little in common with one another- and even less in common with the fashionable
educational theories of our times. (9 p.221)
Perfect students with perfect parents in a perfect society cannot learn things that they are
not being taught- and that includes an increasing number of basic things in our public
schools. (9 p.217)
The peculiarities of ghetto speech, often imitated even among contemporary black
middle-class youth, are said to derive from African speech patterns, when in fact most of
those very same words and phrases were part of the speech patterns in those parts of
Britain from which Southerners came, centuries ago. (9 p.225)
Even in the twenty-first century, two-thirds of the worlds illiterate adults are women,
according to the Economist magazine. However, at the other end of the educational
spectrum, women in the most industrially advanced countries are going on to higher
education in numbers comparable to men- and, in some countries, more often than men.
(11 p.56)
-female academics have been common far longer than black academics, reaching a peak
proportion of all academics back in 1879 that was not equaled again in the next ninety
yearsWomen with doctorates have for years received those degrees from prestigious
institutions about as often as men have, so that they have long been in the so-called old
boy network of academic recruitment just like male Ph.D.s. (11 p.82-83)
As is common with accrediting organizations, all the things cited as factors in the
American Bar Associations accreditation decisions are inputs into the educational
process, rather than the outputs of qualified graduates. (11 p.99)
Although Hispanics have overtaken blacks numerically as part of the population, blacks
still receive more doctorates than Hispanics. While the Asian American population is
only a fraction of the size of either the black or Hispanic population, Asian Americans
receive more doctorates than Hispanics and nearly as many as blacks. (11 p.155)
Professor Dewey, the godfather of "progressive" education, said it all, 70 years ago: "The
great task of the school," he said "is to counteract and transform" the beliefs and values
that the child brings from "the home and the Church." That is what the educational trends
of the past two generations have been all about, whether the specifics were called "values
clarification," "community service," "outcome-based education" or a thousand other
pretty names. Once you look behind these glittering labels to the specific things that are
said and done, the agenda becomes clear: Undermining the values and beliefs that parents
have taught their children and replacing them with politically correct notions from the
counter-culture. "Community service" is not about the community or about service. It is

26
about using children for ideological agendas and using those agendas to insinuate the
welfare-state view of the world on impressionable young minds. This is not about
educating children. It is about using children as cannon fodder in ideological battles and
as guinea pigs for experiments. Children are also being used by the schools as entering
wedges through which to invade the family itself and insinuate and impose the agenda of
the anointed on the unwary. Are we sheep; September 18, 1998
Why are dumb teachers dangerous? Because nature abhors a vacuum. If teachers' minds
are not filled with knowledge and understanding, they will be filled with other things -the kinds of things that appeal to shallow minds. . . We hear a lot of talk about "artificial
intelligence" being created by computers but a far more important issue is artificial
stupidity being created and spread to students by teachers who abandon academics in
favor of glittering social theories. . . The neglect of hard knowledge and the failure to
develop intellectual qualities in students is just part of the high price of allowing shallow
people to set the norms in our public schools. Dumbness is dangerous. And tenured
dumbness is doubly dangerous. Dumb is dangerous, July 9, 1998
You would risk a hernia if you tried to carry all the studies which show that more money
has virtually no effect on the quality of American education. Ed-u-kai-tchun, October 23,
1998
From the days of John Dewey on to the present, educational gurus have produced an
unending succession of vague, slippery and piously lofty writings -- all leading off on a
tangent from the hard job of teaching basic skills. Failure and Fraud, November 16, 1999
Of all the frauds which pervade the public schools, none is more hypocritical -- or more
destructive -- than the pretense that they are trying to avoid the unfairness of subjecting
disadvantaged children to standards and tests that they are not equipped to handle. What
makes these people think that life will be any easier for the disadvantaged to handle?
Certainly not when they are sent out into the world educationally unprepared and full of
"self-esteem" that is going to have a brutal head-on collision with reality. Failure and
Fraud, November 16, 1999
Whatever its educational failures, the system is world class when it comes to excusemaking. Maybe that is because they have had so many years of experience at it. There are
whole layers of defenses. The first layer is that somebody else is to blame. If it is not the
"unrealistically difficult" tests or "a flawed scoring system," then it must be the parents,
television, or "society." It can't possibly be us. At a more sophisticated level, educational
gurus question the very concept of intelligence and the tests used to measure it. Professor
Howard Gardner of Harvard's school of education writes of "multiple intelligences"
beyond the range of tests. However, if there are multiple intelligences, then there can also
be multiple stupidities. But educators don't go that route. Whatever Professor Gardner
means or intends -- and clarity is not his strong suit -- the notion of multiple intelligences
is a great escape hatch for those who avoid accountability. Iron-clad tenure, lockstep pay
scales and education gurus serve that purpose. Failure and Fraud, November 16, 1999

27
Although testing students is depicted as something "new" and "harsh," New York State
has had Regents exams for more than half a century, and generation after generation of
students took them. Of course, it was a lot easier to pass these exams back when schools
taught basic subjects like English, math and history, instead of becoming little
propaganda centers for the latest fads in environmentalist hysteria, New Age attitudes,
and politically correct views on everything from sex to race. The tests made me do it,
December 20, 1999
Inflated grades and bumper stickers that say, "My child was student of the month at
Jordan Middle School" may be enough to keep some parents fat, dumb and happy. But
smiley public relations will not turn out educated Americans. Neither will excuses for bad
education or for cheating to escape responsibility for it. The tests made me do it,
December 20, 1999
Employment
In reality, the proportion of women in the professions and other higher level positions
was greater during the first decades of the twentieth century than in the middle of the
twentieth century- and all of this was before either anti-discrimination laws or the rise of
the feminist movement. (11 p.58)
During the early decades of the twentieth century, when womens representation in
higher level occupations and in postgraduate education required for such occupations was
higher than in the 1950s, the median age at which women first married was also higher
than at mid-centuryAs the median age of marriage began to decline, the representation
of women in high-level occupations and among recipients of postgraduate degrees also
declined. (11 p.59)
The rise of blacks into professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the
years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than the years following passage
of that act. (9 p.241)
The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers rose
less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years
preceding it. (6 p.49)
-numerous empirical studies by economists over the past few decades have repeatedly
concluded that minimum wage laws have their most devastating impact on black
teenagers. (6 p.87)
Unionization drove out blacks in two ways: (1) directly through discriminatory rules and
policies, and (2) indirectly, by artificially raising the wage rates and making them
uniform. (6 p.89)
Among Yale alumni in their forties, only 56 percent of the women still worked,
compared with 90% of the men, according to the New York Times. (11 p.70)

28
There is also what might be called negative human capital in the form of attitudes which
prevent or impede the performance of economic tasks that people are otherwise quite
capable of performing, both physically and intellectually In modern Western welfare
states, a whole range of low-level occupations may be left to foreigners, as the native
citizens come to consider living off the state less demeaning than doing such work. In
some countries, such negative human capital is increased by education, so that those who
have been to schools or universities now regard a wider range of occupations as beneath
them. (5 p.339)
Where a group is less in demand (whether because of lower skill levels, less energetic or
less conscientious work, or because of others aversion to associating with them), an
artificially imposed wage-rate increase tends to increase their unemployment rate more
than the unemployment rate of the general population, or of other workers in the same
population. (1 p.95)
The extent to which there are additional costs associated with unsegregated hiring is an
empirical question, and no doubt varies from place to place and from time to time.
However, even during the Jim Crow era in the American South, blacks were seldom paid
less by an employer for doing the same job as white employees. Rather, black were
excluded from certain higher paying jobs that would have put them on the same plane as
whites. (2 p.87)
To say that women are paid 60 percent of what men receive for doing the same work is to
say that employers can afford to pay two male workers more than they pay three female
workers- the women producing 50 percent more output- and still survive economically in
a system so competitive that most businesses go under inside of a decade. (4 p.187)
Environment
People who already own their homes in an upscale community pay no price for making it
hard for others to move into their community. On the contrary, the value of the homes
they already own shoots up when they restrict the supply of new homes. In other words,
they can keep out the less affluent people &; or, as they put it, "preserve the character of
the community" &; while benefiting themselves economically in the name of green
idealism. Green "Disparate Impact", January 16, 2008
A reader says that he had a T-shirt made that said: "Stop Continental Drift!" It made as
much sense as "Stop Global Warming. Random Thoughts, March 20, 2007.
The next time you hear an alarming speech about "global warming" on Earth Day, just
remember that the first Earth Day featured alarms about the danger of a new ice age.
Random Thoughts, May 9, 2004
Despite the shameless propaganda of the environmentalist zealots about the loss of
animal habitat, more than 90 percent of the land in the United States is undeveloped.

29
Animals already have vastly more habitat than human beings have. How much is
enough? January 9, 2007
-trees that newspapers are made from automatically recycled themselves for thousands of
years before human being figured out how to plant seeds. (3 p.312)
In reality, the entire population of the world today could be housed in the state of Texas,
in a single-story, single-family houses-four to a house-and with a typical yard around
each home. (4 p.67)
Among these claims is that laws limiting growth are necessary in order in order to
preserve fast disappearing open space from being paved over. But, as noted earlier, only
about 5 percent of the land in the United States has been developed. In other words, if
every city and town in America doubled in size- which could take generations- that
would still leave 90percent of the land undeveloped. (11 p.49)
The environmental Nazis treat national parks as their own personal property and want the
millions of other taxpayers who pay for these parks to be treated as interlopers, who are
to be kept out if possible, and admitted if necessary, only if they conform to the vision of
the environmental Nazis. Random Thoughts, July 31, 1998
People today who complain about the automobiles pollution have no idea how much
more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for
example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the citys transportation before the
automobile produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of
urine. New heros vs. Old, January 25, 2011
Equality
Processes designed to create greater equality cannot be judged by that goal but must be
examined in terms of the processes created in pursuit of that goal. (7 p.51)
The factors operating against performance equality are far too numerous, beginning with
the physical settings in which different peoples have evolved culturally and
economically. Geography is not egalitarian. (7 p.63)
One of the ways to promote the ideology of equality is by defining various inequalities of
performance out of existence. This cultural relativism refuses to classify some societies
as civilized and others as backward or primitive. Whether comparing nations or
subgroups within nations, cultural relativists proclaim all cultures and subcultures to be
equally valid and entitled to equal respect as we celebrate diversity The bitter
irony is that all this philosophical self-indulgence widens the empirical gap in the name
of narrowing it. (7 p.74, 75)
There has now been created a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather
than an example-equality can be achieved only by either divorcing performance from

30
reward or by producing equal performances. Since the latter is all but impossible, if only
because everyone is not equally interested in the same kinds of performances, the passion
for equality leads toward a divorce of performance and reward- which is to say a divorce
of incentive and behavior, and even a divorce of cause and effect in out minds. (7 p.94)
The most that we can hope for is equality of opportunity. But when different individuals
and groups do not even want the same things, how can they be expected to achieve the
same things? Do minorities really have it that bad? July 16, 1998
-the inherent conflict between equal rules and equal results has been recognized in theory
for at least two centuries, even though many of our contemporaries proclaim, as if it were
some new discovery or deeper insight of theirs, that laws that are formally equal may
affect different groups differently. From this they conclude that real equality must
supersede merely formal equality- which is to say that cosmic justice must trump
traditional justice. (7 p.153)
A heartbreaking social statistic is that children on welfare have only about half as many
words per day directed at them as the children of working-class families and less than
one-third as many words as children whose parents are professionals. This is especially
painful in view of the fact that scientists have found that the actual physical development
of the brain is affected by how much interaction young children receive. Even if every
child entered the world with equal innate ability, by the time they were grown they would
nevertheless have very different mental capabilities. Innate ability is the ability that exists
at the moment of conception, but nobody applies for a job or for college admission at the
moment of conception. Even between conception and birth, other influences affect the
development of the brain, as well as the rest of the body . . . The mothers diet and her
intake of alcohol or drugs affect the unborn child. Differences in the amount of nutrition
received in the womb create differences even between identical twins. Where one of
these identical twins is born significantly heavier than the other, and the lighter one falls
below some critical weight, the heavier one tends to have a higher IQ in later years. They
may be the same weight when they become adults, but they didnt get the same nutrition
back when their brains were first developing. . . Inequalities have so many sources that
this fact undermines the simple dichotomy between believing that some people are
innately inferior and believing that discrimination or other social injustices account for
economic and social differences. Yet people who are afraid of being considered racists,
or believers that the lower classes are born inferior, often buy the notion that only the sins
of society can explain why some people end up so much better off than others. The
Sources of Inequality; May 25, 2010
Like freedom and justice, equality is a process characteristic in the constrained vision and
a result characteristic in the unconstrained vision. (1 p.121)
Exploitation
Sadly, however, many of those who are said to be exploited have very little to exploit and
many of those described as dispossessed have never possessed very much in the first

31
place. Moreover, the actual behavior of those described as exploiters often shows them
shunning those that they are said to exploit, in favor of dealing with more prosperous
people, from whom they expect to earn more money. (8 p.219)
Contrary to theories of exploitation, most multinational corporations focus the bulk of
their operations in countries where pay scales are high rather than in countries where pay
scales are low. (8 p.42)
Radical feminists seem to assume that men are hostile to women. But what would they
say to the fact that most of the women on the Titanic were saved, and most of the men
perished due to rules written by men and enforced by men on the sinking ship?
Spreading the wealth, October 18, 2011
Fairness
A fair fight is one in which both combatants observe the rules, regardless of whether
that leads to a draw or a one sided battle. (7 p.9)
Fair is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to
agree on what is "fair," this means that there must be some third party with power -- the
government -- to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with "fairness."
Random Thoughts, July 31, 1998
My seventh-grade English teacher, for example, used to require everyone who misspelled
a word to write that word 50 times as part of his homework and bring it in the next
morning. Misspell three or four words, on top of the rest of your homework, and you had
quite an evening ahead of you. Was this fair? Of course not. Kids on Park Avenue
probably heard those words at home far more often than I did. The magazines and books
in their homes probably contained many of those words, while my family couldn't afford
to subscribe to magazines or buy books. Fairness was never an option. The only choice
was between the temporary unfairness of forcing us to learn things that were a little
harder for us to learn and the permanent unfairness of sending us out into the world
unprepared and doomed to failure Although I never finished high school and struggled
to make ends meet for a few years before going to college, when I took the Scholastic
Aptitude Test I scored higher on the verbal portion than the average Harvard student.
That was probably why Harvard admitted me. No doubt much of that was due to Miss
Simon and other teachers like her who were "unfair" to me. Lets hear it for unfairness,
October 15, 1999
Family
In a given year, the number of divorces may well be half as large as the number of
marriages that year, but this is comparing apples to oranges. The marriages being counted
are only those marriages taking place within a given year, while the divorces that year are
from marriages that took place over a period of decades. To say that half of marriages

32
end in divorce, based on such statistics, would be like saying that half of the population
died last year id deaths were half as large as births. (4 p.59)
The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes.
Therefore the anointed necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with
the family. It is not a matter of any subjective animus on their part against families. The
anointed may in fact be willing to shower government largess upon families, as they do
other social entities. But the preservation of the family as an autonomous decisionmaking unit is incompatible with the third-party decision making that is at the heart of the
vision of the anointed. (4 p.62)
Nationwide, a majority54 percent-of all black children were living only with their
mothers in 1992. However, this was not a legacy of slavery as sometimes claimed. As
recently as 1970, a majority of black children were still living with both parents. (4 p.61)
Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we
find that the census data of that era showed that slightly higher percentage of black adults
had married than had white adultsAs late as 1950, 72 percent of all black men and 81
percent of black women had been married. But the 1960 census showed the first signs of
a decline that accelerated in later years-as so many other social declines began in the
1960s This new trend, beginning a century after emancipation, can hardly be explained
as a legacy of slavery and might more reasonably be explained as a legacy of the social
policies promoted by the anointed,.. (4 p.81)
-the rate of violence among lesbians living together-about the same as in heterosexual
relationships- is of no interest to those seeking to depict male-female relationships as
violence prone. (4 p.173)
In the United States, for example, many of the social problems of the contemporary black
underclass are almost automatically attributed to a legacy of slavery. The prevalence of
fatherless families in the black ghettos, for example, has been widely explained to the
lack of legally constituted families under slavery. But if one proceeds beyond plausibility
and guilt to actually seek out the facts, an entirely different picture emerges. (7 p.16)
One of the largest organizations, with one of the oldest and most thoroughly elaborated
ideologies and most sophisticated promotional operations, is Planned Parenthood. The
very name is deceiving, for the last thing they are planning is parenthood. (10 p.60)
Teenage pregnancy was declining, over a period of more than a dozen years, before socalled sex education programs spread rapidly through American schools in the 1970s.
Teenage pregnancies then rose sharply, along with federal expenditures on sex
education programs and family-planning clinics, many located in schools. (10 p.63)
Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the
present, it is clear that broken homes were more common among blacks at the end of the
twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that

33
century- even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one
generation out of slavery. (9 p.34-25)
In Chicago, as late as 1910, more than two-thirds of the black population liven in
neighborhoods where most residents were white but, after the mass migrations of blacks
from the South, attempts by blacks to move into white neighborhoods in Chicago were
met with violence, including bombings. (9 p.48)
From 1930 to 1934, 31 percent of first births to black women were premarital, while from
1990 to 1994, 77 percent were. (9 p.163)
In every census from 1890 to 1950, black labor force participation rates were higher than
those of whites. Only since the 1960s has that reversed. The marriage rates of black
males was never as much as 5 percentage points different from those of white males until
the 1960s. Now fatherless families have become a ghetto norm. Liberal Sentimentalism,
June 22, 1998
The Eugenics movement sought to limit the reproduction of inferior individuals and
races, so as to prevent the lowering of the national intelligence in future generations.
Planned Parenthood was founded not simply as an organization for limiting the size of
families in general but more particularly to reduce the reproduction of the black
population in the United States, as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger herself
noted. (9 p.193)
Having it all- a career and a family and an upscale lifestyle- is fine but doing it all is often
harder for a woman, given the usual division of domestic responsibilities between the
sexes and the inevitable differences in childbearing. (11 p.68)
A child raised in a home where physical prowess is valued more than intellectual prowess
is unlikely to have the same goals and priorities as a child raised in a home where the
reverse is true. (11 p.146)
Foreign aid
The failure of massive amounts of foreign aid to create any comparable economic
development in most of the Third World has not dimmed the luster of foreign aid in the
eyes of those who refuse to re-examine the assumptions on which it is based. (11 p.207)
Both journalistic anecdotes and scholarly studies often show vast amounts of money
being transferred to Third World governments without producing any significant
economic growth and, in some cases, there are actual declines in real incomes in the
wake of grandiose projects financed by foreign aid. (11 p.211)
Loans from international agencies are often not repaid, except in the cosmetic sense that
existing loans are repaid from still larger loans made by the same agency to the same
country. Under the imposing but uninformative title of structural adjustment loans, the

34
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, between them, gave the Ivory Coast
26 structural adjustment loans during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, while per
capita income declined and the country collapsed into civil war. (11 212)
Calls for forgiveness of loans to Third World governments are frequently heard and
heeded, as if rewarding financial irresponsibility by officials doing the borrowing is
going to lift poor countries out of poverty. (11 p.212)
Freedom
The more the American vision of individual freedom prevails, the more the vision of the
anointed fails. Ever wonder why? Part II, July 2, 2004
Only God could have a free choice- and only on the first day of creation, since He would
be confronted on the second day by what He had already done on the first. (4 p.223)
As many have warned in the past, freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It
is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions
of noble ideas. (7 p.184)
-power is the ability to restrict peoples options and freedom is an exemption from having
ones options restricted in such matters as religion or the expression of ideas. (7 p.176)
Freedom, wherever it exists in the world today, owes much to developments in Britain.
These include not only the historic evolution of a free society in the United Kingdom
itself, providing political models and legal precedents for other free societies around the
world, but also Britains key role in destroying the international slave trade in the
nineteenth century, and its crucial role when the survival of freedom in the world was
threatened in the early and dark days of World War II. (5 p.87)
The essence of bigotry is refusing to others the rights that you demand for yourself. Such
bigotry is inherently incompatible with freedom, even though many on the Left would be
shocked to be considered opposed to freedom. Whats Left of Freedom: A nonopposition position, December 2, 2008
Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused. (5 p.91)
The degree of freedom has been correlated with the rate of economic growth for nations
in general. (5 p.173)
Freedom began to emerge where governments were too fragmented, too poorly
organized, or too much in need of voluntary cooperation to prevent its emergence. (5
p.353)

35
When the majority of the people become like sheep, who will tolerate intolerance rather
than make a fuss, then there is no limit to how far any group will go. The Right to Win,
November 18, 2008
Freedom did not begin as an idea bur as a reality that was then treasured and analyzed by
those who possessed it. Only after centuries of habituation to freedom did it become
regarded as a norm, and violation of that norm seen as intolerable- among those peoples
with this historical experience. (5 p.356)
The only people who seem not to understand the worldwide significance of American
society are our own intelligentsia. To them the Fourth of July is at best an
embarrassment, if not something to sneer at. The flag-waving, the proud speeches and the
Horatio Alger stories are just part of a nationalist "myth," as far as the intellectuals are
concerned. . . America symbolizes, above all, freedom and opportunity for ordinary
people. That is what makes it a beacon to those in other lands who are seeking freedom
and opportunity. But this individual independence that attracts others is also what turns
off the intelligentsia. Those convinced of their own superiority and itching to run other
people's lives -- "making a differences," as it is called -- can never feel comfortable in a
country where other people can live their own lives in their own way, without bending
the knee to the environmentalists, the radical feminists and all the other self-anointed
saviors and avengers. These smug elites are not overtly plotting the repeal of the
American revolution. They are just dismantling it piece by piece, in pursuit of their own
particular goals. No wonder the Fourth of July makes the intelligentsia uncomfortable. It
celebrates the revolution that gave ordinary people freedom from the rampaging
presumptions of their "betters." The Fourth of July, July 2, 1999
Geography
Geographic accessibility to the advances of the rest of the world seems to have had more
effect on economic development than possession of rich natural resources. Knowledge is,
after all, what makes something a natural resource. The cave man lived amid the same
physical resources we have today- and had them in greater abundance- but they were not
natural resources in any economically meaningful sense until human beings acquired the
knowledge to use them and the cultures to organize their use. (11 p194)
Government
Contrary to the notion that deficits have resulted from tax receipts by the federal
government, those receipts in fact reached new record highs during the Reagan
administrationBy the last year of the Reagan administration in1988, the federal
government collected over $391 billion more than during any year of the Carter
administration-in percentage terms, the government took in 76 percent more that year
than it had ever collected in any year of any other administration. (4 p.83)
The Constitution of the United States, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly
reflected the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power. This was in

36
sharp contrast to the French Revolution, which gave sweeping powers, including the
power of life and death, to those who spoke in the name of the people (1 p.32)
The next time somebody says that the government is forced to intervene in the economy
to protect the poor, ask why the government is forcing taxpayers to subsidize municipal
golf courses, the ballet, opera and -- the biggest subsidy of all -- surrounding affluent
communities with vast amounts of expensive "open space. Random Thoughts, January 9,
2007
A government which proceeds as if the planned effect of its policies is the only effect
often finds itself surprised or shocked because those subject to the policies react in ways
that benefit or protect themselves, often with the side effect of causing the policies to
produce very different results from what was planned. (3 p.211)
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like
something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road,
don't expect freedom to survive very long. Thomas Sowell (no citation)
To get the protection of rules, you have to play by the rules. Supporting the troops,
November 18, 2004
Some seem to argue as if any historical or contemporary source of unhappiness which a
government could have prevented is something for which it should be held morally
accountable-regardless of whether the government or the society created the source of
unhappiness. (2 p.249)
When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to
be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap. Criminalizing Business,
April 22, 2004
In the first half of the century, the great unions were in mining, automobiles, steel, and
trucking. But as the twentieth century drew to a close, the large and growing unions were
those of government employees. (3 p.164)
The big problem with money created by the government is that those who run the
government always face the temptation to create more and spend it. (3 p.225)
The Constitution cannot protect us and our freedoms as a self-governing people unless
we protect the Constitution. Forgetting the Constitution, October 28, 2010
Government is neither a monolith nor simply the public interest personified. (3 p.238)
There is a fundamental difference between a society where a ruler can seize the wealth or
the wife of any subject and one in which the poorest citizen can refuse to allow the
highest official of the land inside their home. (4 p.219)

37
The rule of law- a government of laws and not of men- implies rules known in
advance, applied generally, and constraining the rulers as well as the ruled. Freedom
implies exemptions from the power of the rulers and a corresponding limitation on the
scope of all laws, even those of democratically elected governments. (7 p.151)
A society in which some authorities can weigh millions of their fellow human beings in
balance, determine their worth, and unilaterally dispense their livelihoods as largess from
the government is a profoundly different kind of society from that created and maintained
in the United States of America for more than two centuries. (7 p.72)
Why Britain became the first industrial nation and retained its preeminence for a century
is one of the great questions of history-What the British had earlier than many other
peoples was a framework of law and government that facilitated economic transactions.
(5 p.32)
Those who cannot bring themselves to face the tough choices that reality presents often
seek escape to some kind of fairy godmother the government or, more realistically, the
taxpayers. Right-Sizing the College Market, April 24, 2008.
The ideas that government intervention improves the situation is a notion which has been
repeated innumerable times in many ways, but endless repetition is not a coherent
argument, much less proofIt is precisely government intervention in housing markets
which has made previously affordable housing unaffordable. (11 p.23)
Guilt
Guilt is a bad feeling for the individual, but vitally important for society. . . guilt has kept
many of us from succumbing to temptations to do far worse things than some of the
trivialities we felt guilty about. . . Guilt, like physical pain, serves a purpose. . . Guilt is
the pain that saves us -- and society -- from many dangers. In particular times with
particular people, it can be overdone, as everything human can be. But the attempt to
banish it completely is recklessly shallow and short-sighted. . . Guilt is an inescapable
consequence of personal responsibility. Like other aspects of personal responsibility, it is
deplored by those who set the standards of political correctness today. The only kind of
guilt that is acceptable to them is collective guilt -- guilt as part of "society," guilt for
what long-dead ancestors did, guilt for everything except what you yourself did.
Collective guilt is politically useful for extracting money from the government or special
favors or exemptions from others. So what if it won't stand up under logical scrutiny? Its
purpose is not truth but power. No society can monitor all its members all the time. Guilt
forces them to monitor themselves. It is far more effective than police and courts, which
have all they can do to cope with those in whom all morality has been extinguished. Guilt
and cop-outs, April 26, 1999

38
Gun Control
When people ask emotionally, "How can we stop these things?" [Shooting sprees] the
most straightforward answer is to ask: How was it in fact stopped? It was stopped, like
most shooting sprees, by the arrival on the scene of other people with guns. Gunning for
guns, August 5, 1999
It is the monopoly of guns by people with evil intentions that is dangerous. Some of the
most dangerous places in America are places where strict gun-control laws provide
assurance to violent criminals that their victims will not be able to defend
themselvesThere are communities whose gun laws permit law-abiding citizens to have
ready access to firearms and where many citizens accordingly have registered guns.
These communities have less violence in general and fewer shooting sprees like this in
particular one thing that so-called "gun control" laws do not do is control guns. They
disarm potential victims. People who do not care about the law can always get guns in a
country with 200 million guns and more coming in, both legally and illegallyStudies at
the University of Chicago show that violence drops immediately in communities that pass
laws permitting law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons If the real purpose of
gun control laws was to prevent crime, then we would expect their most zealous
advocates to be zealous about other anti-crime measures as well. They are not. On the
contrary, those who are most vocal against guns are generally the most reluctant to put
criminals behind bars and keep them there. How many gun-control advocates have even
noticed -- much less protested -- the fact that John Hinckley, who attempted to
assassinate President Reagan and grievously wounded press secretary Jim Brady in the
process, is now walking the streets again on furlough? Instead, they have exploited the
shooting of Jim Brady to pass laws disarming more citizens who have never shot
anybody. Gunning for guns, August 5, 1999
Wouldn't it be better if nobody had guns? Of course it would. It would be better if man
had never invented the bow and arrow, much less modern weapons. But that is not a
serious option. Gunning for guns, August 5, 1999
Heath
-absolute certainty is still not achievable by human beings, no matter how much testing
goes onIf a thousand children die from a new drug allowed into the market will less
testing and ten thousand would die while more testing was going on, the public outcry
over the deaths of those thousand children would bring the wrath of the whole political
system down on the heads of those officials who permitted the drug to be approved with
inadequate testing. But if ten or a hundred times as many people die while prolonged
testing goes on, there will be few, if any, stories about those people in the
mediaSometimes safety precautions can be carried to the point where they are fatal (8
p.90-91)

39
Doctors and the producers of modern pharmaceutical drugs have been rhetorically
transformed into villains by those who would present themselves as our rescuers in
politics or in the courtrooms. (8 p.94)
One of the many phony arguments for government-controlled medical care is that
Americans do not have any longer life expectancy than people in many other countries,
despite much higher medical expenditures. This argument is phony because longevity
depends on health and health care and medical care are not the same, no matter
how many times the two are confused in the media or in politics. Health care includes
things that doctors cannot do much about. Homicide affects your longevity, but there is
not much that doctors can do about it when they arrive on the scene after you have been
shot through the heart, except fill out the paperwork. Rates of homicide, obesity, and
narcotics usage are higher here than in many other countries, reducing our longevity.
Thats where the money, August 19, 2009
An aging human body is all too much like an aging automobile. This week the carburetor
needs repair, next week the transmission starts acting up, then the spark plugs need
replacing. And then, even after everything is taken care of, the acceleration is never the
same as it once was. Random Thoughts, April 6, 1999
It is clear that homicide and car crashes are not things that doctors can prevent.
Moreover, if you compare longevity among countries, leaving out homicide and car
crashes, Americans have the longest lifespan in the western world. The money of fools,
part II, September 15, 2010
In those things that are crucially affected by medical care, such as cancer survival rates,
the United States leads the way. In things that doctors can do little about such as
obesity, homicide, or drug addiction Americans shorten their own lives, more so than
people in other comparable societies. Thomas Sowell
You are free to take your lifes savings and gamble it away in a casino, if you want to
but you are not free to use your lifes savings to save your life. -Thomas Sowell, Liberal
visions for health care Sept, 7 2011
History
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved
replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area- crime, education,
housing, race relations- the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were
put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has
neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them. Is reality optional?, 1993
If nothing else, history can help dissolve the provincialism of time and place, and the
hypocrisy of selective moral indignation. (2 p.224)

40
History cannot be a reality check for today's fashionable visions when history is itself
shaped by those visions. When that happens, we are sealing ourselves up in a closed
world of assumptions. The Wright stuff, December 10, 2003
A whole new class of intellectuals has arisen to supply a history geared to what people
currently wish to believe, rather than to the record of the past. . . To allow those with a
purely instrumental view of history to erase the national memory, or to record over it the
ideological fashions of the day, is to discard an anchor in reality, and to set sail with light
ballast and a reckless optimism. (2 p.227)
There are growing numbers of things that can destroy us. The Roman Empire lasted a lot
longer than the United States has lasted, and yet it too was destroyed. Millions of lives
were blighted for centuries thereafter, because the barbarians who destroyed Rome were
incapable of replacing it with anything at all comparable. Neither are those who threaten
to destroy the United States today. . . Once suicidal fanatics have nuclear bombs, that is
the point of no return. We, our children, and our grandchildren will live at the mercy of
the merciless, who have a track record of sadism. . . They want our soul and if they are
willing to die and we are not, they will get it. Thomas Sowell, Soul Survivors: The
meaning of Mumbai, December 9, 2008.
The indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere was all but exterminated by their
sudden exposure to the diseases of Europe and Africa-far more so than by the military
campaigns which occupy so much of history. (2 p.78)
Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal. Misusing history, April 27, 2010
It is difficult to survey the history of racial or ethnic relations without being appalled by
the inhumanity, brutality, and viciousness of it all. But there are no more futile or
dangerous efforts than attempts to redress the wrongs of history. . . This may be
frustrating and galling, but that is no justification for taking out those frustrations on
living human beings-or for generating new strife by creating privileges for those who are
contemporary reminders of historical guilt. (2 p.251)
History as a balm for wounded egos is likewise suspect. (2 p.252)
For history to contribute to human understanding, its own integrity as history must be
respectedA search of the past for group image-enhancement cannot be called history
either, nor can a record of the past purged of whatever may be currently embarrassing or
whatever is vetoed by contemporary group spokesmen, for whatever reason. (2 p.251)
Even the modest claim that history should teach mutual respect for different cultures is
suspect. There is much history of all peoples that does not deserve respectMore
fundamentally; respect is earned, not conferred. It is no a door prize. Equal respect is a
contradiction in terms, since the very concept of respect implies an inequality of esteem
and regard. All may be entitled to common decency but not all can receive a higher
relative rankingTo impose blanket conclusions a priori is not history but dogmatism,

41
and to impose them on others is not education but intimidation, violating the very
mutual respect that is supposedly being promoted. (2 p.253)
Anyone can be wrong about the futureBeing wrong about the past is something else. (4
p.79)
For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a
less enlightened age, and not the distilled experiences of millions who faced similar
human vicissitudes before. (4 p.118)
-sweeping dismissals of the past are more than just a passing fashion or a personal vanity.
They are a dangerous destruction of the hard-earned experience of millions of human
beings, living through centuries of struggle with the tragedy of the human condition, and
the replacement of this rich legacy with unsubstantiated and self-flattering fancies. (4
p.253)
History is the memory of a nation- and that memory is being erased by historians
enthralled by the vision of the anointedThis erasing of the national memory, and the
recording of a preferred vision over it, is yet another expression of the notion that reality
is optional. (4 p.252)
Elijah McCoy, born in 1844, the son of escaped slaves. He lived in Canada but somehow
made his way to Scotland, where he studied engineering. After returning to North
America, McCoy invented a device which allowed machines to be oiled automatically
while still running. Before, machinery either had to be shut down to be lubricated -which was costly in terms of lost production -- or boys had to risk injury by oiling by
hand while the machines were moving. McCoy's invention was so successful that it had
many imitators. None was as good, however, and buyers began to insist on getting "the
real McCoy" -- adding a new idiom to the language. Sweeping success under the rug,
November 23, 1999
The covert methods by which affirmative action has been foisted on a society that rejects
it, the vengeful manner in which busing has been imposed without regard for the welfare
of children, and the lofty contempt of a remote and insulated elite for the mass of citizens
whose feelings and interests are treated as expendable, or dismissed as mere racism,
provide the classic ingredients of blindness and hubris that have produced so many
human tragedies. However much history may be invoked in support of these policies, no
policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may
be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its
achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond
our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution. To dress up present-day people
in the costumes and labels of history and symbolically try to undo the past is to surpass
Don Quixote and jeopardize reality in the name of visions. To do so in ways that harm
the already disadvantaged is to skirt the boundaries of sanity and violate the very claims
of compassion used to justify it. (6 p.119)

42
One of the most heartening lesson of history is that poor and primitive peoples have,
more than once, not only caught up with those more fortunate, but have even advanced to
the forefront of human achievement. (5 p.334)
When facts about racial or ethnic groups that are both known and relevant are
deliberately suppressed because they would undermine a particular vision, doctrine, or
agenda, then history is prostituted and cannot serve as a check against visions, because
facts have been subordinated to visions. (9 p.277)
History is the memory of the human race. For an individual to wake up some morning
with no memory would be devastating. (9 p.276)
One of the most chilling lessons of the twentieth century is how deceptive domestic
tranquility can be in a multi-ethnic society, when it takes only the right circumstances and
the right demagogue to turn neighbor murderously against neighbor. (9 p.289)
Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history
to have heard about it. Thomas Sowell, An Old Newness, April 29, 2008.
In many places, history has been replaced by "social studies" -- a politically correct
rendition of current social issues. When there is history, all too often it is "revisionist"
history that looks back through the past to find things to denounce about America or
about Western civilization. . . Why is history important? The past is important because
the future is important. Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's
half- baked ideas have been tried, again and again -- and have repeatedly led to disaster.
Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with retreaded rhetoric.
Honest History, July 10.1998
Human nature
This past week has also seen revelations about our enemies. Venezuelan president Hugo
Chavez' cheap demagoguery at the United Nations was a clear sign of the intellectual and
moral bankruptcy of his anti-Americanism. Surely if he had anything concrete and
serious to say against this country, he would have said it. Equally clearly, he understood
that no coherent argument was necessary. All that was necessary was to tap into visceral
resentments and play to the gallery of those poisoned by envy and ready to blame their
own lack of achievement on somebody else. The Weeks Revelations, September 26, 2000
Neither individuals nor companies are successful forever. (3 p.110)
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who
must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive
people depends on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which
engender moral values, self discipline, and consideration for others. Those individuals on
whom this process does not take- whether because its application was insufficient in

43
quantity or quality or because the individual was especially resistant- are the sources of
antisocial behavior, of which crime is only one form. (1 p.150)
One of the people I am glad I trusted is someone who got angry and told me off. The
people to beware of are those who hide behind a smile and wait for a chance to put a
knife in your back. If you surround yourself with yes-men, you are asking for it. Thomas
Sowell, Random Thoughts, January 14, 2003
It is amazing what complicated lies some people will believe, even when the truth is
simple and obvious. Indeed, the truth is often rejected as "simplistic" by those who are
dedicated to some complicated lie. Random Thoughts, August 14, 2003
Seldom are the idle rich as hated as those who started out poor and worked their way up
to modest prosperity, because that achievement is a slap across the face of others who
have stagnated. Infallible Haters, January 14, 2002
Horses are supposed to be dumb animals. But they are smart enough not to bet on people.
Random Thoughts, November 22, 2005
If people are free to do as they wish, they are almost certain not to do as we wish. That is
why Utopian planners end up as despots. Thomas Sowell, December 20, 2004
When you see a four-year-old bossing a two-year-old, you are seeing the fundamental
problem of the human race; and the reason so many idealistic political movements for a
better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power
to create "social justice" is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom,
and all human dignity. Random Thoughts, November 28, 2003
It is we who are being irrational when we ask such naive questions as: How could anyone
do such a thing? People have been killing people as long as there have been people. Why
is it so incomprehensible that they are killing each other today? When we refuse to
face the fact of deliberate evil -- in a century that has seen mass murders of the innocent
by the millions -- our squeamishness does not protect anybody. It only leaves more
people exposed to more dangers. Declaring murderers crazy, sick or some other cop-out
will only get these killers sheltered from the law in psychiatric facilities -- and then
turned loose to walk the streets againThe desire of people to lash out at other people
has always been there. Babies are born into the world today with all the savage instincts
that they had back in the days of the cave man. Moral Anarchy, August 17, 1999
Anybody can be mistaken -- except haters, apparently. Whenever others express their
hatred of Americans, in words or deeds, the hand-wringers among us want us to ask:
"Why do they hate us?" Apparently we should automatically go in quest of those "root
causes" so dear to the ideology of the left, instead of realizing that many people in less
fortunate countries find hating Americans easier than facing the truth about
themselvesWhy then is it so surprising that the most productive country in the world is
so hated among those who lag far behind. Infallible Haters, January 14, 2002

44
Someone once said that a con mans job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people
to continue to believe what they already want to believe. Thomas Sowell, Wright Bound,
March 18, 2008
One of the many differences between human beings and God on Judgment Day is that
God does not have to worry about what is going to happen the day after Judgment Day.
(7 P.22)
It is one thing to be bitter because one cannot feed ones children and something very
different to be resentful because one cannot afford designer jeans or expensive watches
that keep no better time than cheap watches. (7 p.27)
With all of its intellectual and material accomplishments, Mayan civilization could hardly
be considered humanitarian. One of its central priorities was war and one of its chief
priorities in war was the capture, torture, and slaughter of enemy soldiers and
leadersWhile atrocities have occurred around the world, this was a society in which
such behavior was not simply accepted, but systematized and celebrated. (5 p.267)
When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or
hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves. (9 p.77)
The story of how human beings treat other human beings when they have unbridled
power over them is seldom a pretty story or even a decent story, regardless of the color of
the people involved. (9 p.138)
Nothing is easier to find than sins and shortcomings among human beings, regardless of
their race. (9 p.262)
When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failures or
hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves. (9 p.77)
The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that
George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be
such a fool. Unfortunately, we have a large supply of both amateur and professional
intellectuals. They are busy on college campuses across the country, sounding off with
their blame-America-first message. They are also an undercurrent in the mass media,
where they must insinuate what they can say unopposed in academia. Infallible Haters,
January 14, 2002
Immigration
Where weak, corrupt and capricious indigenous governments have been supplanted by
stronger and more dependable colonial governments, immigration has often increased,
even when those who immigrated were never accorded the same rights as the imperial
race or even the conquered native population. (5 p.17)

45
In the case of immigrants from Ireland, the massive efforts of the Catholic Church in the
nineteenth century to Americanize Irish immigrants are seldom mentioned among the
reasons why the No Irish Need Apply signs faded away during the twentieth century.
The picture too often presented might lead one to believe that it was all just a matter of
prejudice and bigotry in American society that lead to such signs in the first place,
leaving their disappearance in later times unexplained, except by some generality as
progress or by the efforts of the enlightened to dispel such prejudices and bigotry. (9
p.252)
Income
-the cold fact is that income is not distributed: it is earned. (4 p.211)
Blacks may all look alike to racists, but there are profound internal cultural differences
among blacks-West Indian family incomes are 94 percent of the U.S. national average,
while the family incomes of blacks as a group are only 62 percent of the national average.
West Indian representation in professional occupations is double that of blacks, and
slightly higher than that of the U.S. population as a whole. (6 p.77)
(in 1969) Harvard economist Richard Freeman compared blacks and whites whose homes
included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who had also gone on to obtain
the same number of years of schooling. There was no difference in the average income of
these whites compared to these blacks. (6 p.80)
Today, where husbands and wives are both college-educated, and both working, black
families of this description earn slightly more than white families of this descriptionnationwide and without regard to age. (6 p.81)
Women who remain single earn 91 percent of the income of men who remain single, in
the age bracket from 25 to 64 years oldwomen are typically not educated as often in
such highly paid fields as mathematics, science, and engineering, nor attracted to
physically taxing and well paid fields as construction work, lumberjacking, coal mining
and the like. (6 p.92)
As early as 1950, black female college graduates earned 91 percent of the income of
white female college graduates, and by 1960 were earning 2 percent more. Even when
black and white women in general hold the same job currently, black women average
more continuous experience on a given job- 38 percent moreIn short, here again the
ordinary labor market considerations seem to explain pay differences better than the civil
rights vision. Indeed, the ability of black women to overtake white women in the
marketplace is a very serious embarrassment to the civil rights vision. (6 p.102)
As of 1989, for example, black, white, and Hispanic Americans of the same age (29) with
the same I.Q. (100) all earned between $25,000 and $26,000. (5 p.371)

46
Comparing never-married women and men who are past the child-bearing years and who
both work full-time in the twenty-first century shows women of this description earning
more than men of the same description. ..For women in general- that is, not just academic
women- those single women who had worked continuously since high school were in
1971 earning slightly more than men of the same description. All this before affirmative
action was defined as under-representation in a 1971 Executive Order which went into
effect in 1972, and so represents what was happening under competitive labor market
pressures before any major government intervention to advance women. (11 p.77)
The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less
for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and
have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never
married individuals with no children who worked full time and were from 40 to 64 years
old- that is, beyond the child bearing years- men averaged $40,000 a year in income,
while women averaged $47,000. (11 p.70)
Because the situations of husbands and wives have not been symmetrical in traditional
families, it is likewise not surprising that marriage has had the opposite effects on the
incomes of women and men. (11 p.72)
Countries have high wages for a reason --- and that reason is usually that its output per
worker is higher. When a worker is paid twice as much and produces three times as much
per hour, the labor costs per product are lower. Why economists visit dentists so often,
February 5, 1999
In 2001, for example, cash and in-kind transfers together accounted for 77.8 percent of
the economic resources of people in the bottom 20 percent. In other words, the alarming
statistics on their incomes so often cited in the media and by politicians count only 22
percent of the actual economic resources at their disposal. (11 p.128)
-three-quarters of those Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975
were also in the top 40% at some point during the next 16 years. (11 p.135)
As far back as 1980, college-educated black married couples earned slightly more than
white college-educated married couplesBy 1989, blacks, whites, and Hispanics in the
United States of the same age (29) and with the same IQ (100) all had annual incomes
within a thousand dollars of one another when they worked year-round. (11 p.174)
Despite the popularity of the phrase income distribution, most income is earned- not
distributed. (11 151)
-as of 2001 a household income of $84,000 was enough to put those who earned it in the
top 20 percent of Americans. A couple making $42,000 each is hardly what most people
would consider rich. Even to make the top 5 percent required a household income of just
over $150,000- that is, about $75,000 apiece for a working couple. As for individuals, to

47
reach the top ten percent in individual income required an income of $87,300 in 2004.
(11 p.138)
While the top ten corporate executives earned an average of $59 million each in 2004, the
top ten celebrities earned an average of $119 million each that same year- twice as much.
(11 p.141)
Among individuals who are actively in the labor force, only 5 percent of those who were
in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were still there in 1991, compared to 29
percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 who had risen to the top quintile by 1991.
(11 p.146)
-when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the
greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay by one dime. (11 p.141)
The source of moral outrage over corporate compensation is by no means obvious. If it is
based on a belief that individuals are overpaid for their contribution to the corporation,
then there would be even more outrage toward people who receive hundreds of millions
of dollars for doing nothing at all, since they simply inherited money.(11 p.143)
Income differences between whites in Eastern Europe are far more apart than income
differences between blacks and whites in the U.S. -Video interview, Uncommon
Knowledg It is easier and cheaper to collect statistics about income brackets than it is to
follow actual flesh-and-blood people as they move massively from one income bracket to
another over the years. Whos in the top, November 8, 2011
IRS data show that actual flesh-and-blood people who were in the top 1 percent in 1996
had their incomes go down repeat, down by a whopping 26 percent by 2005. Whos
in the top, November 8, 2011
A University of Michigan study showed that most of the working people who were in the
bottom 20 percent of income earners in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some
point by 1991. Only 5 percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 were still there in
1991, while 29 percent of them were now in the top quintile. Whos in the top, November
8, 2011
Justice
Squeamishness is too often confused with humanity, but the consequence of
squeamishness can be needless suffering and needless deaths. Many a cold-blooded
murderer has had his life spared because people squeamish about executions imagine that
it is more moral or humane to lock him up for life -- or until he escapes or is pardoned
someday when an even more squeamish governor is elected. Additional people murdered
by convicted murderers are part of the grim price paid for that squeamishness.
Squeamishness Kills, August 28, 2007

48
Many of those with an unconstrained vision and a passionate opposition to inequality of
results assume that those who oppose them must be in favor of inequality of resultsIn
reality, those with the constrained vision may be passionately devoted to certain
processes (freedom to choose, the rule of law, etc.) and only secondarily concerned
with whether any particular result is equal or unequal. (1 p.135)
The judges moral duty is to faithfully carry out the law he was sworn to uphold, not
sincerely change the law to produce better results as he sees them. (1 p.59)
If justices can pick and choose which legal principles and practices they will follow, from
the many widely varying principles and practices in countries around the world, then they
can find a basis for doing just about anything they feel like doing. Another Judicial Power
Grab, May 5, 2010
People who claim that sentencing a murderer to "life without the possibility of parole"
protects society just as well as the death penalty ignore three things: (1) life without the
possibility of parole does not mean life without the possibility of escape or (2) life
without the possibility of killing while in prison or (3) life without the possibility of a
liberal governor being elected and issuing a pardon. Random Thoughts, June 26, 1998
The instrumental nature of justice and its consequent subordination at times to other
social imperatives, is a recurring theme in the constrained vision. Implicit in this
subordination of justice to order in the constrained vision is the conclusion that man will
suffer more by the breakdown of order-even an unjust order-than by some injustices. (1
p.174)
Few things blind human beings to the actual consequences of what they are doing like a
heady feeling of self-righteousness during a crusade to smite the wicked and rescue the
downtrodden . . . This process of interpreting the Constitution (or legislation) to mean
pretty much whatever you want it to mean, no matter how plainly the words say
something else, has been called judicial activism. But, as a result of widespread
objections to this, that problem has been solved by redefining judicial activism to mean
something different. By the new definition, a judge who declares legislation that exceeds
the authority of the legislature unconstitutional is called a judicial activist. The verbal
virtuosity is breathtaking. With just a new meaning to an old phrase, reality is turned
upside down. Those who oppose letting government actions exceed the bounds of the
Constitution justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are now called
judicial activists. It is a verbal coup. A Dying Constitution, May 8, 2009.
Law evolved as an expression of the natural feelings and experiences of human beings in
general, not the articulated rationality of intellectual or moral leaders. (1 p.180)
Once appellate judges are free to base their rulings on what people do in India, Egypt or
Germany, Americans are no longer a self-governing people. Another Judicial Power
Grab, May 5, 2010

49
Moral rights in the unconstrained vision are rights to results. (1 p.201)
If a footrace is conducted under fair conditions, then the result is just, whether that result
is the same person winning again and again or a different winner each time. Results do
not define justice in the constrained vision. (1 p.89)
One of the strongest arguments for the death penalty is that it means what it says -- unlike
"life" sentences that can mean that the criminal will be back on the streets after a few
years behind bars. Even "life without the possibility of parole" does not mean life without
the possibility of escaping or without the possibility of electing a liberal governor who
will set murderers free. Random Thoughts, January 14, 2003
Too many people- some of them judges -seem to think that freedom of speech means
freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your
boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to
bed tonight.""Freedom of speech does not imply a right to an audience. Otherwise the
audience would have no right to its own freedom. Academic Freedom? February 15,
2005
To help some hard pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may
bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case-but at the cost of
damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other
people depend, an on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.
(4 p.130)
If something went wrong, someone was to blame, preferably someone with a deep
Pocket from which to pay damages. Often these deep pockets were nothing more than
an aggregation of much shallower pockets, whether of taxpayers or of stockholders. (4
p.172)
Whatever moral principle each of us believes in, we call justice, so we are only talking in
a circle when we say that we advocate justice, unless we specify just what conception of
justice we have in mind. (7 p.3)
-unlike God at the dawn of Creation, we cannot simply say, let there be equality! or let
there be justice! We must begin with the universe that we were born into and weigh the
costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. We cannot simply do
something whenever we are morally indignant while disdaining to consider the costs
entailed. (7 p.8)
To apply the same rules to everyone requires no prior knowledge of anyones childhood,
cultural heritage, philosophical (or sexual) orientation, or the innumerable historical
influences to which he or his forebears may have subjected. (7 p.16)
-justice at all costs is not justice. What after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary
imposition of a cost- whether economic, psychic, or other- on an innocent person? And if

50
correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that
also an injustice? (7 p.28)
If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second
Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been
repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws. There is no point arguing, as many
people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn't happen
very often doesn't mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if
the intelligentsia are itching to change it. When the people wanted it to happen, the
Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920. Gun control laws,
June 29, 2010
The only clear-cut winners in the quest for cosmic justice are those who believe in the
vision it projects- a vision in which believers are so morally and/or intellectually superior
to others that their own relentless pursuit of this vision is seen as all that offers some
modicum of hope to those who would otherwise be victims of the lesser people who
make up the rest of society. It is a very flattering vision- and hence one not easily given
up. (7 p.43)
-cosmic justice attempts to create equal results or equal prospects, with little or no regard
for whether the individuals or groups involved are in equal circumstances or have equal
capabilities or equal personal drives. To do this, it cannot operate under general rules, the
essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes,
regardless of their own inputs. (7 p.160)
The case for upholding legal principles, known and relied upon by others, is precisely
that it can be done, and done while preserving a free society, whereas playing cases by
ear requires far more knowledge than anyone possesses and is incompatible with the rule
of law and the freedom which depends on that rule. (7 p.169)
Judge-made innovations are, in effect, ex post facto laws, which are expressly forbidden
by the Constitution and abhorrent to the very concept of the rule of law. (7 p.170)
-for each particular piece of legislation or any given legal case, the incremental damage
done to the Constitution may seem slight. It is only in the aggregate that this pursuit of
cosmic justice at all costs becomes a dangerous destruction of the rights that define and
defend a free society. (7 p.173)
When you enter a boxing ring, you agree to abide by the rules of boxing. But when you
are attacked from behind in a dark alley, you would be a fool to abide by the Marquis of
Queensbury rules. If you do, you can end up being a dead fool. Suicidal Hand-Wringing,
September 19, 2006
You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for
someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too
many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as

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supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings. . . Another Judicial
Power Grab, May 5, 2010
There is the old, moth-eaten argument cited by Justice John Paul Stevens, that the society
is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it.
Nobody-- from the moment that the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century to the
present-- has ever denied that societies evolve, and that their laws must evolve to meet
changing circumstances. But, unless Justice Stevens is either stupid or dishonest, he
cannot leap from a need for laws to change to the conclusion that it is judges who must be
the ones to make those changes. Another Judicial Power Grab, May 5, 2010
If you came home and found your spouse in bed with your best friend, would you give
them the presumption of innocence? Of course not. You would be a fool if you did.
Hiding behind a woman, August 11,1998
Knowledge
Endless repetition does not make something true. McCain's Straight Lies, February 1,
2008
Knowledge is one of the scarcest of all resources. (3 p.111)
People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Artificial stupidity, March 3,
2010
Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. (3 p.42)
The most dangerous kind of ignorance is the ignorance of the educated. (2 p.102)
When John Stuart Mill was a young man, he worried that we were running out of music,
since there were only 8 notes and therefore there was only a finite amount of music
possible. At that point Brahms and Tchaikovsky had not yet been born nor jazz created. Thomas Sowell
Language is thus the epitome of an evolved complex order, with its own systemic
characteristics, inner logic, and external social consequences-but without having been
deliberately designed by any individual or council. Its rationality is systemic, not
individual-an evolved pattern rather than an excogitated blueprint. (1 p.69)
Whether for an individual or for the whole human species, we usually learn how foolish
we have been only by suffering the consequences. Disasters---natural and political,
March 26, 1998
All of us are ignorant, if not misinformed, on vast numbers of things. What makes experts
different is that they dare not admit it. That is also what makes experts dangerous.
Random Thoughts, April 14, 2003

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The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience -- enough
experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone. Random
Thoughts, June 26, 1998
Some people are so busy being clever that they dont have time enough to be wise.
Random Thoughts, December 1, 2009
Stepping beyond your competence can be like stepping off a cliff. Too many people with
brilliance and talent within some field do not realize how ignorant or, worse yet,
misinformed they are when talking like philosopher-kings about other things. Random
Thoughts, December 1, 2009
Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be
corrected by those who are wedded to a vision. Who Really Cares, November 28, 2006
The pretense of having solutions can be more dangerous than the problem. Yet there are
whole armies of shrinks and social workers whose jobs depend on pretending that they
have answers, even when no one has answers. The Sources of Inequality,
May 25, 2010
"Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal
knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and the subtleties
of feelings, it is remarkable that one speck in this firmament should be the sole
determinant of whether someone is considered knowledgeable or ignorant in general. Yet
it is a fact of life that an unlettered person is considered ignorant, however much he may
know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his
mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human
feeling or social complexities." Knowledge and Decisions 1996
Virtues can be carried to extremes that turn them into vices. The Weeks Revelations,
September 26, 2006
While it is true that you learn with age, the down side is that what you learn is often what
a damn fool you were before. Random Thoughts, April 14, 2003
Starting with a certain presupposition, one may say aha! when encountering statistics
consonant with that presupposition. Often, however, one could just as easily have started
with the opposite presupposition and found occasion to say aha! from the same set of
data. (2 p.257)
Lots of people say that they tell the unvarnished truth. But, if you had a monopoly on the
sale of varnish, you would become a zillionaire. Random Thoughts, January 4, 1999
How anyone can argue in favor of being non-judgmental is beyond me. To say that being
non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a
violation of the principle. Random Thoughts, November 28, 2003

53
"The problem with clever people is that they don't know when to stop being clever."Thomas Sowell
Elites are all too prone to over-estimate the importance of the fact that they average more
knowledge per person than the rest of the population; and under-estimate the fact that
their total knowledge is so much less than that of the rest of the population. They
overestimate what can be known in advance in elite circles and under-estimate what is
discovered in the process of mutual accommodations among millions of ordinary people.
Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more
knowledge than any elite have ever possessed. The ignorance of people with Ph.D.s is
still ignorance, the prejudices of educated elites are still prejudices, and for those with
one percent of a society's knowledge to be dictating to those with the other 99 percent is
still an absurdity. Presumptions of the Left, May 16 2007
Why don't we all stipulate, once and for all, that no policy on any subject, anywhere or
anytime, is a panacea or a magic bullet. Then we can start talking sense like adultsIf
we are serious, we can compare one alternative to another, instead of comparing one
alternative to perfection. Social Insecurity, January 20, 2005
Science tells us that the human brain reaches its maximum potential in early adulthood.
Why then are young adults so seldom capable of doing what people with more years of
experience can do? Because experience trumps brilliance. Elites may have more
brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as
much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education
and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that
just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people
as a whole. How smart are we?,July 27, 2010
It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad
motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe
or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or
logic. Random Thoughts, December 6, 2004
It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of
moral superiority in their ignorance. Random Thoughts, November 30, 2005
Considering how often throughout history even intelligent people have been proved to be
wrong, it is amazing that there are still people who are convinced that the only reason
anyone could possibly say something different from what they believe is stupidity or
dishonesty." In other words "Being smart is what keeps some people from being
intelligent." Random Thoughts, March 25, 2004
If the temperature has risen by 10 degrees since dawn today, an extrapolation will show
that we will all be burned to a crisp before the end of the month, if this trend continues.
Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument. (4 p.568)

54
-a polemical tactic has developed which enables virtually any general statement, however
true, to be flatly denied, simply because it is not 100 percent true in all circumstances. (4
p.91)
Perhaps the purest example of an argument without an argument is to say that something
is inevitable. This is an inherently irrefutable argument, so long as any time remains in
the future. (4 p.101)
-specialists are not solipsists. They are simply aware of the limitations of the human
mind, and of the implications of those limitations, as the anointed so often are not. (4
p.205)
Everything fails by irrelevant standards. (4 p.207)
Someone once said that an idea that fails repeatedly may possibly be wrong. (6 p.111)
Sincerity of purpose is not the same as honesty of procedure. (6 p.120)
Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the
similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different
they are in the real world. Audacity without hope, March 26, 2008
The knowledge of how to build replacements is far more important than the physical
things in which that knowledge is embodied at a given moment. So long as the human
capital is not destroyed, the physical destruction can always be repaired or replaced. (5
p.336)
By ingredients they mean physical ingredients, which are usually inexpensive, rather than
the knowledge ingredient which is usually astronomically expensive because of years of
research, including much trial and error. (8 p.82)
As a young man, John Stuart Mill brooded over the fact that there was an ultimate limit to
the amount of music that could be produced by using the eight notes of the music scale.
But, at that time, Brahms and Tchaikovsky had not yet been born nor jazz yet conceived,
and rock music was more than a century away. Ultimate limits alone tell us virtually
nothing useful about whether there is or is not a practical problem. (8 p.216)
It doesnt matter how smart you are unless you stop and think. Thomas Sowell,
Interview with National Review On TV, August 2010
If people who are capable of being outstanding executives were a dime a dozen, nobody
would pay eleven cents a dozen for them. Thomas Sowell, The Greed Fallacy, January
23, 2007
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave the best definition of "consensus": Lack
of leadership. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, November 30, 2005

55
Language
Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail
a leg? When the audience said five, Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was
four. The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg. Thomas Sowell, Stimulas
or sedative, March 3, 2010
Late talking children
No one really understands why some children who are very bright are also very late to
begin speaking. But the worst problem is not ignorance. It is arrogance and dogmatism on
the part of too many professionals to whom desperate and trusting parents turn for help.
Some children have been declared "retarded" or "autistic" on the basis of less than ten
minutes' observation. Once the label is put on a child, everything that child does
afterward may be seen within that framework. Irresponsible experts, March 31, 1999
Leadership
Back during the Bush administration, the president invited some civil rights leaders to
meet with him at the White House. They set a precondition- that neither Alan Keyes nor
Thomas Sowell be present at that meeting. Alan Keyes in Illinois, August 19, 2004
What also serves the interests of black "leaders," but not of the black community, is their
paranoid vision of the world, in which all economic or other disparities are grievances -grievances which can be dealt with only by relying on "leaders" to get goodies for blacks
from the government. Where is black leadership leading? , July 20, 1998
A quarter of a century before the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln gave another
important but lesser known speech, pointing out that the basic free institutions of
American society were already in place -- and therefore would provide no glory to
leaders who merely preserved them. Glory could be won only by changing these
institutions, whether for the better or the worse. Lincoln argued that the greatest threats to
American institutions would come from within, from political leaders out to make a name
for themselves. For such leaders, merely occupying a governor's mansion or even the
White House would never be enough. They had to leave their mark -- and they could do
so only by remaking fundamental institutions that had stood the test of time, thereby
jeopardizing the freedom that depended on those institutions. A victory in Chicago, June
14, 1999
Liberals/the Left
Most people on the Right have no problem understanding people on the Left because
many, if not most, were on the Left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not
most, people on the Left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could
be on the Right. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, April 8, 2008

56
Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot
see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world. Thomas Sowell, Random
Thoughts, Sept. 4, 2007
Good Things have costs, often costs out of all proportion to whatever good they might
do. But notions like trade-offs and diminishing returns seldom deter zealots, whose own
egos are served by their zealotry in imposing their vision, however costly or
counterproductive it may be for others. Thomas Sowell, The tyranny of visions, Part II,
October 15, 2004
Soviet communism is now history but people who talk equality and practice elitism, who
wrap their own selfishness in the mantle of idealism, and who sacrifice others on the altar
to their own vision without a moment's hesitation are not only still with us but have
become the norm" Thomas Sowell, The New Nomenclature, September 3 2006
One of the reasons why government absorbs so much money and takes on everincreasing powers is that it is home to so many people whose beliefs could not withstand
the draconian tests of science, the marketplace or a scoreboard. What we the taxpayers
are ultimately paying for is their insulation from reality, as they pursue the heady
pleasures of power. The Insulation of the Left, May 29, 1998
Egalitarians are often in the vanguard of those seeking to promote this most dangerous of
all inequalities; the inequality of unaccountable power in the service of a vision. Thomas
Sowell, The tyranny of visions, October 14, 2004
Ask anyone who is suffering the agonies of some terrible disease whether he believes that
there is such a thing as reality, or whether he thinks it is all just a matter of "perceptions."
The pompous but silly notion that it is all a matter of how you choose to look at things is
an indulgence for those who are insulated from suffering, from accountability, and from
reality. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, April 14, 2003
At the heart of the liberal-left vision is the idea that the self-anointed saviors should be
telling the rest of us, through the power of government, what we ought to do, what we
can do and what we cannot do. They will define for us what is good and what is bad,
remaking us in their image. Urban sprawl is only the latest battleground in that crusade.
This is a culture war -- and the only thing worse than being in a war is being in a war and
not knowing it, while the other side is carrying on a Jihad. Urban Sprawl and Liberal
Gall, June 29, 19999
Do people on the left ever wonder why we do not suffer the poverty of India, the
oppression of North Korea, the anarchy of Liberia, the slaughters of Rwanda, etc.?
Would it ever occur to them that it might have anything to do with those very values and
traditions which they are striving so hard to undermine or dismantle. Random Thoughts,
September 29, 2003

57
While it was heartening to see Iraqis waving American flags in Baghdad and in
Dearborn, Michigan, I have still never seen an American flag on a single home in all my
visits to Berkeley. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, April 14, 2003
Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face Random Thoughts, January 4, 1999
Any engineer, businessmen or athletic coach who knew no more about what he was
doing than the talking heads on TV or foundation officials have to know would be
heading for disaster in no time. When your bridge collapses or your business goes
bankrupt or your team gets beaten again and again, you are history. The Insulation of the
Left, May 29, 1998
It is one thing to say that everyone should be equal before the law or is entitled to equal
opportunity. It is something else to deny the most blatant facts before our eyes, and insist
on a dogma of equality of performance, when virtually every individual or group is better
at some things than at others. Thomas Sowell, Stereotypes about stereotypes, May 20,
2002
While many studies have documented the predominance of the political left in the
academic world, the exceptional areas where they do not have such predominance are
precisely those areas where you cannot escape from facts and results -- the sciences,
engineering, mathematics and athletics. By contrast, no area of academia is more
dominated by the left than the humanities, where there are no facts to challenge the
fantasies that abound. Leftists head for similar fact-free zones outside of academia. The
Insulation of the Left, May 29, 1998
If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an
attitude. Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or
undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors
of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on. It seems
to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire
to run other people's lives than the free market and its defenders. Thomas Sowell, The
anger of the Left, May 15, 2007
One of the reasons people don't bother to stop and think is that symbolism lets them feel
good about themselves. They can go through life leaving havoc in their wake, while
enjoying a warm glow of self-approval. Thomas Sowell, Bookstore Ghettoes, May 10,
2007
As far back as the 18th century, Rousseau said that man is born free but is everywhere in
chains. In other words, the social restrictions essential to a civilized society were seen as
unnecessary hindrances to each individual's freedom. It never seems to occur to those
who think this way that if everyone were free of all social restrictions, only the strongest
and most ruthless would in fact be free, and all the others would be subject to their
dictates or destruction. Thomas Sowell, All the News, Feb 6, 2007.

58
Blacks vote overwhelmingly for liberal Democrats and yet no group has suffered more
from the way liberal Democrats among politicians and judges have let violent criminals
walk the streets. Moreover, no one has done more to make it illegal for the victims of
these criminals to get guns to defend themselves with than liberal Democrats. No group
has lost more from the dumbing down of public schools than blacks, as liberal
propaganda has replaced academic study. Loving enemies, March 22, 1999
The dirty little secret of liberal politics is that it is not about the poor or "social justice"
but is about the political careers and moral exaltation of liberals themselves. The actual
consequences of liberal policies on the poor or others seldom receives anything like the
amount of attention given to promoting these policies and demonizing the critics of these
politics. Random Thoughts, October 29, 1998
One of the many affectations of the political left and the intelligentsia is to disdain crass
material things. But it is the increased production of crass material things which has
released hundreds of millions of human beings from the curse of grinding poverty and
endless toil, and given them longer lives. Thomas Sowell, November 29, 2005
The essence of bigotry is denying other people the same rights you have. For generations,
it was racial bigotry which provoked filibusters to prevent the Senate from voting on bills
to extend civil rights to blacks. But bigotry is bigotry, whether it is racial bigotry,
religious bigotry or political bigotryAlthough this was the bigotry of the right, the
bigotry of the left has since become pervasive, not just in politics but also in our
educational system and in much of the media. Again and again, the left has claimed rights
for itself that it denies to othersIdeological bigotry has become the norm on even our
most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing
anything that challenges the left vision. Thomas Sowell, Green Bigots versus Human
Beings, May 24, 2001
White liberals in many roles- as intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, judges, teachershave aided and abetted the perpetuation of a counterproductive and self-destructive
lifestyle among black rednecks. The welfare state has made it economically possible to
avoid many of the painful consequences of this lifestyle that forced previous generations
of blacks and whites to move away from the redneck culture and its values. (9 p.51)
By projecting a vision of a world in which the problems of blacks are consequences of
the actions of whites, either immediately or in times past, white liberals have provided a
blanket excuse for shortcomings and even crimes by blacks. (9 p.52)
The general orientation of white liberals has been one of what can we do for them?
What blacks can do for themselves has not only been of lesser interest, much of what
blacks have in fact already done for themselves has been overshadowed by liberal
attempts to get them special dispensations- whether affirmative action, reparations for
slavery, or other race-based benefits- even when the net effect of these dispensations has
been much less than the effects of blacks own self-advancement. (9 p.55)

59
The claim is of course made that these busybodies are making the rest of us better off.
But whether their crusades actually promote the wellbeing of the ostensible beneficiaries
is not a question that arouses any great interest on their part. . . With all the parading of
concern about other people, there is remarkably little concern with allowing those other
people to live their own lives as they see fit. On the contrary, ever increasing and ever
more minute regulation of other people's lives has now reached the point where we
cannot even take a shower, flush a toilet, or take out our garbage the way we want to. It is
not about us, it is about their own egos. That's the naked truth. The Naked Truth, April
30, 1998
The liberal vision of blacks fate as being almost wholly in the hands of whites is a
debilitating message for those blacks who take it seriously, however convenient it may be
for those who are receptive to an alibi. (9 p.63)
It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political Left. The only reason for
rejecting the Left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the
world that the Left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow. Most of us learn that from
experience but experience is precisely what the young are lacking. "Experience" is often
just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after
the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong. Those who are
insulated from that pain; whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by
the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary can remain
in a state of perpetual immaturity. Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when
surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded
people. Even people born into normal lives, but who have been able through talent or
luck to escape into a world of celebrity and wealth, can likewise find themselves in the
enviable position of being able to choose whether to grow up or not. Those of us who can
recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful
transition from the sheltered world of childhood. No matter how much we may have
wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens
of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us
in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions. Should we be
surprised that the strongest supporters of the political Left are found among the young,
academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities, and federal judges?
These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution.
The working class are in fact today among those most skeptical about the visions of the
Left. Grow Up: The vision of the Left. September 09, 2008
No one can really understand the political left without understanding that they are about
making themselves feel superior, however much they may talk piously about what they
are going to do to help others. The left's lack of interest in testing the actual results of
their bright ideas against hard facts betrays what their real interest is. Random Thoughts,
July 31, 1998
Even if we give 1960s liberals the credit they think they deserve, if they were singlehandedly responsible for all civil rights advances, how could that compensate for their

60
undermining of such basic institutions as the family, law enforcement and education?
Food stamps are no substitute for a father, busing is no substitute for a decent education
and racial breast-beating is no substitute for being able to walk the streets without fear of
hoodlums and murderers. They used to say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating
but apparently that isn't fashionable any more. Today, the proof of the pudding is in how
good it made you feel to cook it. That is why liberals are so nostalgic about the 1960s.
Sixties Sentimentalism, June 22, 1998
What it all boils down to is imposing their superior wisdom and virtue on all the clods
they lump together disdainfully as "society." It is all supposed to be for our own good,
but there is remarkably little attention paid to evidence as to whether or not their
grandiose schemes work. These schemes always work in terms of allowing the selfcongratulatory anointed to feel superior and to feel excitement. Eric Hoffer said that
intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature. Everything must be "exciting,"
"innovative," or otherwise cater to their emotions. . The Naked Truth, April 30, 1998
The whole political vision of the left, including socialism and communism, has failed by
virtually every empirical test, in countries all around the world. But this has only led
leftist intellectuals to evade and denigrate empirical evidence. Random Thoughts, March
23, 1999
Politicians, intellectuals, and whole armies of caretaker bureaucrats are among those who
benefit, in one way or another, from picturing parasites as victims and their lags behind
the rest of society as reasons for anger rather than achievement. Two Worlds, September
6, 2011
Leading people into the blind alley of dependency and grievances may be
counterproductive for them, but it can produce votes, money, power, fame, and a sense of
exaltation to others who portray themselves as friends of the downtrodden. Two Worlds,
September 6, 2011
Media
What the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "defining deviancy downward" is
all too apparent in the choice of words used in the media. Illegal aliens have long since
been called "undocumented" immigrants. Rioters have been re-christened
"demonstrators." Now Palestinian terrorists have been redefined as "militants." Thomas
Sowell, Random Thoughts, September 29, 2003
Even though Saddam Hussein's regime has been toppled, there are still pockets of
resistance -- not only in Iraq but in Paris, Berkeley, and in the editorial offices of the New
York Times. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, April 26, 2003
Periods of crises often generate emotions which seek outlets by blaming personal and
intentional causes, rather than systemic causes, which provide no such emotional release
for the public or moral melodrama for the media and politicians. (3 p.1)

61
-the simple formula of hysteria-by-quotient has been creating false alarms-and best
selling books-for more than a century. (4 p.70)
Just the sight of a forlorn man on death row can be touching. The media cannot show that
same man when he was exulting in the savagery of the crime that brought him there,
cannot show his sadistic joy when he was raping and torturing a little girl who was
tearfully pleading for her life. If they could show that on television, many of those people
who gather outside prison to protest his execution might instead be inside volunteering to
pull the switch. The dangerous dramatizing of half-truths is the fatal talent of the
television or movie camera. (4 p.258)
Could slavery have been ended by the Civil War if television cameras had shown daily
scenes of the horrors of Shermans march through Georgia or the appalling sufferings of
civilians in besieged Vicksburg? (4 p.258)
Middleman minorities
In any given country, a particular minority may be hated for any of a number of reasons
peculiar to that country or that group. However, in a worldwide perspective, the most
hated kinds of minorities are often not defined by race, color, religion, or national origin.
Often they are generically middleman minorities, who can be of any racial or ethnic
background, and in fact are of many. (9 p.65)
For a particular minority group to become dominant in retailing or money-lending,
whether at a high or a low economic level, means that their behavior pattern must be
fundamentally different from that of the surrounding population. (9 p.72)
Some countries have had disastrous famines, not from a lack of food, but from a lack of
distribution of food. People have literally died from starvation in the interior while food
supplies rotted on the docks in port cities. In other economies, both production and
consumption suffer from a lack of credit. More to the point, mass expulsions of
supposedly parasitic middleman minorities have created shortages, higher prices, and
rising interest rates, in a number of countries and in a number of periods in history. (9
p.83)
Note that merely killing middleman minorities was not considered sufficient. Gratuitous
infliction of both physical and psychic pain has marked violence against the Chinese in
Southeast Asia, as well as against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Jews in
Europe. This suggests that what their enemies feel is not simply a need to be rid of them
but also a need to rid themselves of feelings of inferiority by subjecting middleman
minorities to humiliation and dehumanization. (9 p.103)
As in the prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and in countries around the world,
middleman activities have usually not been seen as producing wealth, but only as
appropriating pre-existing wealth, since the middleman does not visibly create a material
thing. (9 p.80)

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Another feature of middleman minorities cited by various scholars has been their
tendency to invest in highly mobile capital- intellectual skills being the ultimate in
portability- rather than fixtures that could not move. (9 p.107)
Even in the absence of differences in toil or reward, the seeming conjuring of wealth out
of thin air, apparently by overcharging others or making them pay back more money
than was lent, has been seen as parasitic activity, rather than as a contribution to the wellbeing of the community. (9 p.70)
Miscellany
Some people say that my philosophy is "tough." But it is life that is tough. My ideas are a
piece of cake compared to life. Lets hear it for unfairness, October 15, 1999
Edward, for example, was a popular name in Virginia and in Wessex, from which many
Virginians emigrated, but the first forty classes of undergraduates at Harvard College
included only one student named Edward. It would be nearly two centuries before
Harvard admitted anyone named Patrick, though this was a common name in western
Pennsylvania, where the Scotch-Irish were settled. (5 p.82)
In every aspect of our lives, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and all those giants
were not in the past. The principles of aerodynamics were not discovered by the Wright
brothers. They were simply the first to get a plane off the ground. (8 p.84)
France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a
great nuisance. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, April 26, 2003
There seems to be a growing number of people who think that the world should adjust to
them, while they don't have to show any consideration to anyone. Random thoughts,
march 23, 1999
My favorite food: Southern fried chicken. My favorite city: Sydney, Australia. My
favorite woman: I married her. (It saves a lot of travel time.) Random Thoughts,
November 23, 1998
There was a time when a guy was not likely to see a girls navel except on some more
memorable occasion than a visit to a mall. Random Thoughts, March 25, 2004
Some people seem to think that my views are "tough." I'm not tough. Life is tough --- and
I am just trying to get people to recognize that. Random thoughts, April 6, 1999
Why are shrinks so wise after the fact and so wrong beforehand? And why do we keep
taking them seriously? Tragedy and farce, April 28, 1999
Morality

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If most civilized people are unlikely to kill anybody, it is because of all the efforts put
forth during our childhood to give us some sense of morality. But some children don't get
as much moral training as others, or as good moral training as others -- or it just doesn't
take for some reasonThat is why there have always been evil and dangerous
individuals. The big question is: What have we been doing over the past two generations
that has led to there being so many more of them? Since the 1960s especially, we have
systematically undermined personal responsibility. It has seemed as if everything that
went wrong in our lives was the fault of somebody else, if only "society." Morality has
been seen as just a bunch of arbitrary hassles imposed on us by the power structure."
Thomas Sowell, Moral Anarchy, August 17, 1999
In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be non-judgmental, one
of the corollaries is that personal failings have no relevance to the performance of
official duties. Thomas Sowell, Non-Judgmental Nonsense, March 12, 2008
The era in which trends in crime, drunkenness, and other social degeneracy were turned
around was of course the era of Victorian morality, so much distained by the anointed
of later times. (4 p.86)
-moral equivalence- whatever form it takes- is moral self-exaltation. (7 p.137)
Moral principles cannot be separated from their consequences in a given context. (9
p.155)
If we ever allow morality or law to become just a question of whose ox is gored, then we
will have taken a fatal step toward national suicide. We can survive lapses into hypocrisy,
but we cannot survive making hypocrisy a ruling principle. Moral Outrage, November
19, 1998
Multiculturalism
Where separate group identities are government-subsidized-often under the general label
of multiculturalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States-an artificial
Balkanization is fostered, in utter disregard of the tragic historic consequences of
Balkanization in many parts of Asia and Africa, as well as in the Balkans themselves. (2
p.31)
The United States has been ethnically diverse for more than a century. Yet, successive
massive waves of immigrants have arrived on these shores and become Americans
without any such programs as have been proposed by the multiculturalists. (10 p.72)
One of the claims for multicultural programs in schools and colleges is that they reduce
intergroup conflict by making all groups aware of, and sensitive to, racial, ethnic, and
cultural differences- and more accepting of these differencesThe real dogmatism of
such claims comes out most clearly, however, where mounting evidence of increasing
animosities among students from different backgrounds, in the wake of multicultural

64
programs, is met by further claims that this shows the signs of racism of the larger society
overflowing into the schools. (10 p.84-85)
The notion that ghetto black was the authentic black not only spread among both white
and black intellectuals, it had social repercussions far beyond the intellectual community.
Rooting black identity in a counterproductive culture, it cut off those within that culture
from other blacks who had advanced beyond it, who might otherwise have been sources
of examples, knowledge, and experience that could have been useful to those less
fortunate. (9 p.58)
The fact that the Chinese have long prospered outside of China, and Indians outside of
India, undermines the multicultural view that Western prosperity in general is not due to
any superior features of Western institutions. (9 p.255)
Multiculturalists condemn peoples objections to transplanting hoodlums, criminals, and
dysfunctional families into the midst of people who may have sacrificed for years to be
able to escape from living among hoodlums, criminals, and dysfunctional families. The
cult of multiculturalism, October 19, 2010
The multicultural dogma is that we are to celebrate all cultures, not change them. In
other words, people who lag educationally or economically are to keep on doing what
they have been doing but somehow have better results in the future than those they
had in the past. And, if they dont have better results in the future, it is societys fault.
Change, Dont Celebrate, Cultures, October 20, 2010
Native Americans
Although classic government-to-government warfare and conquest were not the norm
between Indians and whites in colonial North America, fighting on the frontiers was not
only common but ferocious and brutal. Where Indians captured whites, for example, they
took delight in dashing white children against trunks or scalping or dismembering them
in front of their anguished parents, among the many other sadistic tortures they practiced.
White settlers, in turn, wiped out whole Indian communities and offered bounties for
Indian scalps. (5 p.293)
In general, warfare between whites and Indians was less common during the colonial era
than warfare among the Indians, fighting with one another for access to European
settlements. (5 p.296)
In general, the expansion of the white settlers into Indian territory in North America was
directed primarily toward taking over the land itself, rather than acquiring Indians as
subjects of the government or as vassals of white landowners or of European
ecclesiastical establishments, as happened in much of Spanish America. (5 p.298-299)

65
While todays American children would of course think it wrong to take other peoples
lands by force, the American Indians had no such conception and took one anothers
lands by force long before they ever laid eyes on a white man. (9 p.269)
Outsourcing
Ironically, those politicians who complain most loudly about outsourcing of jobs often
advocate the outsourcing of the job of making foreign policy and safeguarding American
national security to the United Nations or to our allies in Europe. Outsourcing and Saving
Jobs, March 16, 2004
Planning
What is called planning in political rhetoric is the governments suppression of other
peoples plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties,
armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these
collective plans impose on others. (11 p.32)
Whether moving people into government housing projects, giving them vouchers to
subsidize their living in middle class neighborhoods, or moving large numbers of them
from one city to another, the evidence is clear that changing peoples location does not
change their behavior. (11 p.45)
What is called smart growth in some places is government imposition of the
preferences of observers, critics, activists, or experts to over-ride the desires of he
people themselves, as expressed in what they are willing to spend their own money to
buy or rent. (11 p.48)
It is misleading to speak of planned and unplanned communities as it is to speak of
planned versus unplanned economiesWhat government planning means in practice is
the suppression of individual plans and the imposition of a politically or bureaucratically
determined collective plan instead. (11 p.48)
Political correctness
Being non-judgmental in one direction is part of the double standards surrounding the
politically correct social agenda on many campuses. For example, homosexuals are
free to publicly proclaim the merits of their lifestyle, as they see it, but anyone who
publicly proclaims the demerits of that lifestyle, as he sees it, is subject to serious
punishment. (10 p.182)
Being politically correct means deciding issues not on the basis of the evidence or the
merits, but on the basis of what group those involved belong to or what ideology they
profess. (10 p.183)

66
It isn't fashionable to talk about the blessings of this country in this politically correct
time of complaint and condemnation. But, if we ever forget these blessings -- or let them
erode because we have become fat, dumb and happy -- we will learn the hard way what
blessings we once had, but only after it is too late. Judicial Review, September 16, 1998
Of all the Biblical injunctions the one that seems hardest to keep is loving your enemies.
Yet that happens with remarkable frequency in politics. . . one need only look at old
newsreels of the 1930s to see the love and rapture in German crowds as they cheered
their fuhrer. . . Dictator Juan Peron and his wife Eva were the toast of Argentina as they
transformed this prosperous and vibrant country into an economic disaster area.
Argentineans were as capable as anybody else of loving their enemies. Kwame Nkrumah
in Ghana, Lenin in Russia and Mao in China are among the many beloved leaders around
the world who brought catastrophe to their respective peoples in this century. Napoleon
was said to have been regarded as a demi-god by the troops he led to their deaths in the
vast frozen reaches of Russia. Loving enemies, March 22, 1999
Politics
The political battles of the day are a potpourri of special interests, mass emotions,
personality clashes, corruption, and numerous other factors. Yet the enduring historic
trends have a certain consistency that reflects certain visions. (1 p.17)
Political ideologies are fairy tales for adults. Random thoughts aug11 2009
Political movements and even whole nations have been seized by a vision of the idle rich
exploiting the toiling masses, of people mired in grinding poverty from birth to death, and
of labor unions or socialist or communist movements as the only forlorn hope for those
otherwise economically doomed. (3 p.169)
Voting is not about finding soul mates or venting your frustration when you don't. It's
about choosing between alternatives for shaping the future direction of this country. . .
."If conservatives want Republicans to fight for conservative principles, then the answer
is to give them a real majority to fight with, not their current thin majority on paper that
can easily collapse under pressure if a few liberal or timid Republicans lose their nerve.
Thomas Sowell, This Election Should Be a No-Brainer for Conservatives: Bush Is the
Only Choice, November 27, 2004
Do you remember an old musical comedy song that said, "Anything you can do I can do
better"? Who would have dreamed that someday a grown man would be running for
President of the United States on that childish theme? Thomas Sowell, Stop and think,
Part II, October 26, 2004
Like the cleaning women who don't do windows, I don't try to explain Republicans. Edu-kai-tchun, October 23, 1998

67
Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion
of magic. It is also the key to political magic. The phrase public servants is increasingly
misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters . . . The more they
can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their
increasing control of our own lives but only if we sell our freedom cheap. 2/16/10
It is one thing to believe that policy A is better than policy B. It is something very
different to believe that those who believe in policy A are wiser, more compassionate,
and generally more worthy human beings than those who believe in policy B. Thomas
Sowell, The left and crime: part II, August 24, 2006
They say politics is the art of the possible, but it is really the art of the plausible. Many a
candidate will be elected by promising the impossible -- and re-elected because the voters
have forgotten. Random Thoughts, October 29, 1998
If political conflicts are reduced to contests between the wimps and the barbarians, the
barbarians are going to win. Thomas Sowell, Self-indulgent orgies, January 27, 2005
Turning the empirical question of the results of policy A versus the results of policy B
into the more personal question of a wonderful Us versus a terrible Them makes it harder
to retreat if the facts do not bear out the belief. Thomas Sowell, The left and crime: part
II, August 24, 2006
If the choice between policy A and policy B is regarded as a badge of personal merit,
either morally or intellectually, then it is a devastating risk to one's sense of self to make
empirical evidence the ultimate test. Thomas Sowell The left and crime: part II, August
24, 2006
People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts are a
danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the
votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to
pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are
widespread. Thomas Sowell, Who Cares About Facts Anymore, June 8, 2006
they (Republicans) seem still not to understand that you have to stand for something if
you expect people to support you. Moreover, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall
for anything. A national disaster, February 16, 1999
Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic
formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not
only our money but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20th century -Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- all used this formula and now class warfare politicians here
are doing the same. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, January 14, 2003
If one is politically correct, being factually incorrect doesnt matter. (4 p.66)

68
One of the scariest things about our times is how easy it is to scare people and start a
political stampede. There are people who could be upset if they were told that half of all
Americans earn less than the median income -- though of course that is the way median
income is defined. Random Thoughts, May 18, 1999
More generally, political attempts to solve various problems seriatim ignore the costs
created by each solution and how that exacerbates other problemsMuch of the
political rhetoric is concerned with presenting issues as isolated problems to be solvednot as trade offs within an overall system constrained by inherent limitations of
resources, knowledge, etc. (4 p.137)
If food were categorically more important than music, then we would never reach a point
where we were prepared to sacrifice resources that could be used to produce food in order
to produce musicA world where food had categorical priority over music would be a
world of 300-pound people, whose brief lives would never be brightened by a song or a
melody. (4 p.138)
The language of politics, and especially of ideological politics, is often categorical
language about rights, about eliminating certain evils, guaranteeing certain benefits, or
protecting certain habitats and speciesIndirectly but inexorably, this language says that
the preferences of the anointed are to supersede the preferences of everyone else. (4
p.142)
If the politicization of race could lead to barbarism and genocide among Germans, no
other peoples or society can be presumed to be immune. However catastrophic the
politicization of race may be in the long run, from the point of view of individual leaders
it is a highly successful way to rise from obscurity to prominence and power. (6 p.35)
Many racial policies continually add to the pile of combustible material, which only
needs the right political arsonist to set it off. (6 p.118)
Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor
sufficient for economic advancement It would perhaps be easier to find an inverse
correlation between political activity and economic success than a direct correlation.
Groups that have the skills for other things seldom concentrate in politics. Moreover,
politics has special advantages for ethnic minority groups, however much it may benefit
individual ethnic leaders. Public displays of ethnic solidarity and/or chauvinism are the
life blood of ethnic politics. Yet chauvinism almost invariably provokes counter
chauvinism. (6 p.32)
-killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the
goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians fingerprints
on the murder weapon. (8 p.8)
-misconceptions of the economic function of prices lead not only to price controls, with
their counterproductive consequences, but also to organized attempts by various

69
institutions, laws, and policies to get those prices paid by somebody else. For society as a
whole, there is no somebody else. Yet few of those in politics seem prepared to face that
fact. Economists may say that there is no such thing as a free lunch but politicians get
elected by promising free lunches. (8 p. 93)
In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a
clarification, when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Thomas Sowell, A
living lie, April 15, 2008
Such are the ways of politics, where the crusade of the hour often blocks out everything
else, at least until another crusade comes along and takes over the same monopoly of our
minds. (9 p.210)
-evidence is too dangerous- politically, financially and psychologically- for some people
to allow it to become a threat to their interests or to their sense of themselves. (11 p.2)
"If the meaning of words can be changed to suit political convenience, then discussions
become an exercise in futility."- Thomas Sowell, A 'Sound' Economy, November 4, 2008
Politicians can solve almost any problem usually by creating a bigger problem.
Spreading the wealth, October 18, 2011
It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to
others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears
any resemblance to reality or not. Spreading the wealth, October 18, 2011
Poverty
-both poverty and dependency were declining for years prior to the Johnson
administrations war on poverty. Black income was rising, not only absolutely but
relative to rising white income. In the five years prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at a rate
greater than the five years following passage of the Act. Nationwide, Scholastic Aptitude
Test scores were rising, venereal diseases were declining sharply, and the murder rate
was at an all-time low. This was the hopelessness from which the anointed came to
rescue us. (4 p.218)
Economic development has been one of the most successful anti-poverty programs. (7
p.47)
Some of the worst poverty in the world today can be found in thinly-populated regions
like sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, population density is several times higher in much
more prosperous Japan. There are also densely populated poor countries, such as
Bangladesh, but there are even more densely populated places like Switzerland and
Singapore, with far higher standards. (8 p.215)

70
Karl Marx was poor in that sense and his family sometimes suffered hunger and other
very real deprivations, even though Marx's known sources of income were sufficient for
them to have lived a lot better than they did. He spent money like a teenager all his life,
frittering away inheritances on various self-indulgences and then got angry at bill
collectors who wanted him to pay the bills he had run up. Creating poverty, October 25,
1999
Since the United States contains several times as many billionaires as any other country,
ordinary Americans would be among the most poverty-stricken people in the world if the
wealth of the wealthy derives from the poverty of the poor. (11 p.134)
While, in the late twentieth century, an absolute majority of those black families with no
husband present lived in poverty, more than four-fifths of black husband-wife families
did not. (11 p.164)
By and large, the sixties marked the beginning of many social disasters and we are still
picking up the pieces. Take the "war on poverty" -- please. Its vast expansions of social
programs were not intended simply to throw money at the poor. It was proclaimed by
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson alike to be the way to end dependency on government
by "investing" in upgrading skills and other social adventures with the taxpayers' money.
Dependency had been going down for years before the "war on poverty" began -- but
now it began to go up. Liberal Sentimentalism, June 22, 1998
Although advocates of the overpopulation theory argue that rising population threatens
to create more poverty, virtually no one can provide examples of countries that had a
higher standard of living when their population was half of what it is today. (11 p.204)
One of the hallmarks of many Third World countries, especially those with otherwise
favorable economic prospects in terms of natural resources or other favorable geographic
factors, has been ineffective, capricious, or corrupt law enforcement. (11 p.200)
-many of the problems of very poor countries are internal, however politically
unpalatable that may be to the inhabitants of those countries or to those on the Western
world who prefer other explanations. This conclusion is reinforced by the history of very
poor countries that rose rapidly to higher economic levels, such as Scotland in the
eighteenth century, Japan in the nineteenth century and China in the twentieth century. In
all cases, they raised themselves economically through internal changes, brought on by
recognition that such internal changes were necessary. (11 p.215)
If you gave every poor person enough money to stop being poor, that would cost a
fraction of what our welfare state programs and bureaucracies cost. The poverty pimps
poem, October 30, 1998
Let us celebrate the poor,
Let us hawk them door to door.
There's a market for their pain,

71
Votes and glory and money to gain.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Their ills, their sins, their faulty diction
Flavor our songs and spice our fiction.
Their hopes and struggles and agonies
Get us grants and consulting fees.
Celebrate thugs and clowns,
Give their ignorance all renown.
Celebrate what holds them down,
In our academic gowns.
Let us celebrate the poor.
-The poverty pimps poem, October 30, 1998
Power
Power lies at the end of a spectrum of causal factors which include influence, individual
discretion, and systemic interactions whose actual outcomes were not planned or
controlled by anyone. (1 p.151)
Whenever A can get B to do what A wishes, then A has power over B, according to the
results-oriented definition of the unconstrained visionBut if B is in a process in which
he has at least as many options as he had before A came along, then A has not
restricted Bs choices, and so has no power over him, by the process definition used
by Bauer and characteristic of the constrained vision. (1 p.160)
Unfortunately, people on the make seem to have a keener appreciation of the power of
words, as the magic road to other power, than do people defending values that seem to
them too obvious to require words. Thomas Sowell, Is talk cheap? March 3, 2009
When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around
to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and
social rules that apply to other people. Thomas Sowell, Non-Judgmental Nonsense,
March 12, 2008
The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to
wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic
duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in
politics. Random Thoughts, November 23, 1998
Yet nothing has been more common in history than for victims to become oppressors
when they gain power. (2 p.250)
One of the most dangerous powers that anybody can be given is the power to inflict high
costs on others at little or no cost to himself. . . What we really need is a more general
understanding of the dangers of putting unaccountable power in the hands of any little
band of busybodies -- whether they are licensing boards, accrediting agencies, coastal

72
commissions or an ever-increasing number of other unaccountable little tin gods. There is
never a lack of pious rhetoric to justify all the meddling and second-guessing that have
increasingly become part of our lives. Instead, there is a lack of the brains and guts to
stand up to this pious rhetoric and tell the busybodies to buzz off when they want such
powers put into their hands. Costs and Power; September, 24, 1998
Previous despots acquired power by royal birth or military prowess. The bloodiest
dictators of the twentieth century acquired power through words. Worse yet, we seem to
have learned nothing from these ghastly experiences. We remain as susceptible to heady
words, dazzling visions and runaway emotions as we have ever been, despite having seen
the horrors to which it can all lead. The worst of the century, December 31, 1999
Private property
When the Constitution's protection of private property was disregarded, so that politicians
could rob from the rich to give to the poor, that also gave politicians the power to rob
from the poor and give to the rich; such as seizing homes in low-income neighborhoods
and turning that property over to developers. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, March
20, 2007.
In a country without property rights, or with the food being owned by the people, there
was no given individual with sufficient incentives to ensure that this food did not spoil
needlessly before it reached the consumers. (3 p.243)
Property rights create self-monitoring, which tend to be both more effective and less
costly than third party monitoring. . . It is things not owned by anybody (air and water for
example) which are polluted. (3 p.243)
The powerful incentives created by a profit-and-loss economy depend on the profits
being private property. (3 p.245)
A free market economy is as much dependent on property rights as the political system is
on free speech rights. (7 p.164)
-there are two competing sets of people who wish to use the same resources in different
ways. Property rights allow this competition to take place in the marketplace, while
court-sanctioned abridgements of property rights allow the competition to take place
through a political process in which only one set of competitors can vote. (8 p.104)
Despite the depiction of property rights as mere protections those who own substantial
property, it has often been the affluent and the wealthy who have abridged property rights
through the political process, in order to keep working class and other less affluent people
from coming into their communities and changing its character via the developers and the
financial institutions which supply developers the capital to bid away land from existing
owners. (8 p.106)

73
-many of these same advocates of land use restrictions would also proclaim their concern
over a need for affordable housing. (8 p.107)
All the while, people in such places speak of a need for diversity and affordable
housing- neither of which that have or are likely to get, as their populations become
whiter and older with rising prices. (8 p.109)
One of the ironic consequences of regarding property rights as simple benefits enjoyed by
more fortunate people- rather than as fundamental checks on government power- was that
affluent and wealthy communities could now restrict the ability of moderate-income and
low-income people to move into their communities. (11 p.32)
Where property rights prevail in a free market, housing circulates regularly among
different classes of people. (11 p.33)
Often the character of a community includes a bucolic setting or expansive views of the
surrounding area which those who live there cherish. But they did not buy those settings
or those views or pay to have them guaranteed to remain the same in perpetuity. Other
people with other preferences have had the same rights under the Constitution, at least
until courts began to erode both property rights and the equal protection of the laws
prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. (11 p.35)
The rational for transferring people and resources is that what ends up being built is more
valuable than what was torn down. If this is true, then it should be possible to completely
compensate the losers for their losses and yet have enough left over for the new users to
be better off as well. But, if the compensation paid to the losers covers only a part of their
losses, then government redevelopment plans which create more losses than benefits are
still viable both economically and politically, because they are heavily subsidized by the
unwilling victims of eminent domain.
For economic activities that take time, property rights are a prerequisite, so that those
who farm or invest in business can feel assured that the fruits of their activities will be
theirs. Even people who own no property have a large stake in property rights, if they are
to be employed in an economy made prosperous by the presence of property rights. (11
p.200)
For businesses in general, whether large or small, the availability of other peoples
money is often crucial. Without property rights, lenders are reluctant to lend to people
who do not have the cash to pay then back- and whose homes or other assets are not
recognized as theirs by the legal system, and therefore cannot be used as collateral that
can be foreclosed and transferred to the lender in case of default. (11 p.202)
Pro-choice
For too long we have been led to believe that an abortion is the removal of some
unformed material, something like having an appendix operation. The very expression

74
"unborn baby" has almost disappeared from the language, being replaced by the more
bloodless and antiseptic term "fetus." Many vocal advocates who declare themselves
"pro-choice" do not want women to have the choice of knowing just what they are
choosing before having an abortion. . . Such patterns of determined evasions and
obfuscations show that "pro-choice" in practice often really means pro-abortion. . . With
most other medical procedures, "informed consent" is the watchword. But, when the
issue is abortion, great efforts are made to keep "choice" from becoming too informed.
Aborted knowledge, May 14, 1999
Productivity
While the pay of such workers is often low by comparison with that of workers in more
affluent industrial societies, so too is their productivity. An international consulting firm
determined that the average labor productivity in the modern sectors in India is 15
percent of that in the United States. In other words, if you hired an average Indian worker
and paid him one-fifth of what you paid an average American worker, it would cost you
more to get a given amount of work done in India than in the United States. (8 p.41)
Once again, the mundane reality is that productivity creates wealth, so that trade with and
investment in more productive countries is a far more important source of wealth than
exploitation of the Third World, however elusive the term might be defined. (5 p.333)
Striking changes in productivity among peoples can be traced to transfers of cultural
capital from others- (5 p.333)
Wishing to see a poor but meritorious man win a lottery is radically different from
insisting government redistributive policieswe reward productivity rather than merit,
for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it. (7 p.23)
Prosperity
You want to see more people have better housing? Build it! Become a builder or
developer . . . Would you like to see more things become more affordable to more
people? Then figure out more efficient ways of producing things or more efficient ways
of getting those things from the producers to the consumers at a lower cost. Thats what a
man named Sam Walton did when he created Wal-Mart, a boon to people with modest
incomes and a bane to the elite intelligentsia. In the process, Sam Walton became rich.
Was that the greed that you have heard your classmates and professors denounce so
smugly? If so, it has been such greed that has repeatedly brought prices down and
thereby brought the American standard of living up. Back at the beginning of the 20th
century, only 15 percent of American families had a flush toilet. Not quite one-fourth had
running water. Only 3 percent had electricity, and 1 percent had central heating. Only one
American family in a hundred owned an automobile. By 1970, the vast majority of those
American families who were living in poverty had flush toilets, running water, and
electricity. By the end of the 20th century, more Americans were connected to the
Internet than had been connected to a water pipe or a sewage line at the beginning of the

75
century. More families have air-conditioning today than had electricity then. Today, more
than half of all families with incomes below the official poverty line own a car or truck
and have a microwave. . . No nation ever protested its way from poverty to prosperity or
got there through rhetoric or bureaucracies. It was Thomas Edison who brought us
electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not
the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of
millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those
who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly
expressing compassion for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more
productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that
the affluent of yesterday could only dream about. The Real Public Service, June 1, 2010,
Race
People sort themselves out residentially around the world, not only by race and ethnicity
but also by income, education, lifestyle, and other characteristics. . . Observers who
presuppose that a random distribution of people is desirable often see residential sorting
as a problem to be solved, usually by governmental action. Often this view is
accompanied by an assumption that housing segregation is irrational or can be an
expression of prejudice or animosity toward another group. (2 p.104)
Social reformers, seeking to unsort people who have sorted themselves, often assume that
housing segregation patterns will endure indefinitely, through inertia, without outside
intervention. History and logic undermine that belief. (2 p.106)
There has been a huge accumulation of evidence on the correlation between test scores
and subsequent performances, not only for the general population but also for particular
racial and ethnic minorities. Repeatedly it has been demonstrated that the standard mental
tests do not underestimate the subsequent performance of low scoring minorities. They
have in fact a slight tendency to do the opposite-to predict for low scoring minorities a
higher subsequent performance than that actually achieved. This pattern has been
persistent over time and is international in scope. (2 p. 173)
Despite a widespread belief that hostility across racial lines is the worst kind of hostility,
the worst atrocities of the past decade have been committed by white people against other
white people in the Balkans and by black people against other black people in Rwanda.
Random Thoughts, July 31, 1998
Research findings have consistently shown black females to have higher IQ test scores,
and most other test scores, than black males in the United States. The same was true
among Jews when they scored low on mental tests in the past. However, among whiteraised black orphans with an average IQ of 106, there was no female advantage,
suggesting that the striking predominance of females among high-IQ blacks is an
environmental rather than a racial phenomenon. (2 p.171)

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Given the unique- and uniquely oppressive- history of blacks, it would follow almost
inevitably from the civil rights vision that blacks would today suffer far more than other
groups from low income, broken homes, and the whole litany of social pathologies. But
like so many things that follow from the civil rights vision, it happens not to be true in
factBoth the domestic and the international examples suggest that what is most
dramatic, most historic, or most morally revolting need not coincide with what is most
economically determining. In short, the historical uniqueness of blacks has not translated
into a contemporary uniqueness in incomes, occupations, I.Q., unemployment, female
headed households, alcoholism, or welfare dependency, however much blacks may differ
from the mythical national average in these respects. All of these represent serious
difficulties (sometimes larger calamities) for blacks, and indirectly for the larger society,
but the question here is the cause. If that cause is either a unique history or a unique
genetics, blacks would differ not only from the national average but also from other
groups that share neither that history nor the same genetic background. (6 p.74, 75)
Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a dialogue on race. Those who issue such
calls are usually quick to cry racism at any frank criticism. They are almost invariably
seeking a monologue on race, to which others are supposed to listen. Thomas Sowell,
Random Thoughts, April 8, 2008.
Our children and grandchildren may yet curse the day we began hyping race and
ethnicity. There are countries where that has lead to slaughters in the streets but you
cannot name a country where it had lead to greater harmony. Random Thoughts,
September 29, 2003
History has also dealt unkindly with the notion that racial purity produces people
capable of higher achievements than those of mixed ancestryWhile there may not be
any absolutely pure races in the world today, some are less mixed than others. The purest
of all are likely to be found in geographically isolated places, which are typically places
poorer and less technologically or educationally advanced than others. (5 p.372)
Race is used as a sorting device for decision-makers, even by people who are not racists.
(11 p.172)
Apparently there are middle-class blacks who spend a lot of time and energy worrying
about losing their roots and losing touch with their black brothers back in the hood.
In one sense, it is good that there are people who think about others less fortunate than
themselves. Thats fine but, like most good things, it can be carried to the point where it
is both ridiculous and counterproductive for all concerned. In a world where an absolute
majority of black children are born and raised in fatherless homes, where most black kids
never finish high school, and where the murder rate among blacks is several times the
national average, surely there must be more urgent priorities than preserving a lifestyle
and an identity. During decades of researching racial and ethnic groups in countries
around the world with special attention to those who began in poverty and then rose to
prosperity I have yet to find one so preoccupied with tribalistic identity as to want to
maintain solidarity with all members of their group, regardless of what they do or how

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they do it. Any group that rises has to have norms, and that means repudiating those who
violate those norms, if you are serious. Blind tribalism means letting the lowest common
denominator determine the norms and the fate of the whole group. Thomas Sowell, The
High Cost of Racial Hype, September 17, 2008.

Racism
Racism has scarred and bloodied the histories of lands around the world, but Northern
Ireland, India, and the Middle East are contemporary reminders of the enduring and lethal
hatreds that have revolved around religion. Historys Crusades, pogroms, Jihads, and
Inquisitions underscore the point. Secular religions or ideologies have likewise claimed
their millions of victims, from the killing fields of Kampuchea to the Soviet Gulags.
(Race has been a major enduring factor in some conquests, but can claim no monopoly as
a cause of mans inhumanity to man.) (5 p.16)
Among Western Hemisphere nations, racial oppression was at its worst in the United
States, especially in the former slave states of the South. Lynchings of Negroes peaked at
161 per year in 1892 in the United States. While this phenomenon remained unknown in
Latin America and the CaribbeanHaitian blacks, having been the most independent of
whites for more than two centuries, should be the most prosperous in the hemisphere and
American blacks the poorest, if racial oppression accounts for poverty, but in fact their
respective economic positions are directly the reverse- again suggesting that human
capital has a greater effect than racial oppression. (5 p.168-169)
The tendency to dismiss all unfavorable conclusions about any group as racism or as
prejudice, stereotypes, or other manifestations of ignorance overlooks the fact that often
those with the most unfavorable opinion of a group are in closest contact with them,
while those with a more favorable view know them lass well and often from a greater
distance. (5 p.365)
Is this then racism or behaviorism? That is, is race or behavior and attitudes that are
being condemned? (5 p.367)
A more tendentious definition of racism has emerged in the late twentieth century to
exempt racial minorities themselves from the charge. Racism was now said to require
power, which minorities themselves do not have, so that even the most anti-white, antiJewish, or anti-Asian statements (including those asserting a genetic basis for depravity)
were automatically exempt from the charge of racism. (5 p.368)
As for the racism of whites as an explanation of black educational deficiencies, there are
enough black-run schools, colleges, and universities where there would be dramatically
better results than white-run institutions, if racism were the explanation. But no such
dramatic differences are visible. (9 p.227)

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Many assume that racism is a prerequisite for discrimination, or is virtually synonymous
with it. However, a generalized hostility or specific discrimination may be directed
against a particular racial or ethnic group, without any belief that they are innately
inferior. (2 p.154)
Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred
black players score touchdowns-- and not one black player kick the extra point. Is this
because of some twisted racist who doesn't mind black players scoring touchdowns but
hates to see them kicking the extra points? . . . At our leading engineering schools-M.I.T., CalTech, etc.-- whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this
anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different? Bean
Counters and Baloney, August 2010
Recycling
Recycling is not categorically justified or unjustified, but is incrementally either worth or
not worth the costs-studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United
States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging
it. (8 p.14-15)
Religion
Initially, the Ottoman Empire was one of the more tolerant states towards those with
different religions- certainly more tolerant than contemporary medieval Europe was
toward Jews or toward Christians with heterodox viewsOnly after the later conquests
of the sixteenth century did the Ottoman Empire have a Moslem majority and it was then
that intolerance toward non-Moslems developedIn this earlier, expanding, and allconquering era, the Ottoman Empire was confident in its mission to spread Islam, its
superiority as a culture, and its military invincibilityLong disdainful of European
civilization, whose more backward regions it encountered in Eastern Europe and the
Balkans, The Ottoman Empire made no real effort to stay abreast of developments in
Western Europe and was consequently surprised and shocked when the Western
Europeans eventually overtook them in both cultural and military termsIt was in this
atmosphere of defeat, danger, and disillusionment that the Ottomans turned against their
own subjects, whom they now resented as political traitors. (5 p.193-194)
Rights
Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the
Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt
betrayed as the original concept of equal opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal
group results. (6 p.37)
-civil rights activists, whose own employment and visibility depend upon maintaining an
adequate flow of injustices, are forced to resort to things like comparable worth in
order to keep busy.

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The battle for civil rights was fought and won- at great cost- many years ago. Like any
fundamental human achievement, these rights cannot be taken for granted and must be
safeguarded. But civil rights are not protected or enhanced by the growing practice of
calling every issue raised by spokesmen for minority, female, elderly, or other groups,
civil rights issuesEqual treatment does not mean equal results. Everything desirable
is not a civil right. (6 p.109)
A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was Republicans whose Philadelphia Plan
in the 1970s sought to break the construction unions' racial barriers that kept blacks out of
skilled trades. What the GOP needs, January 20, 2010
Rights in the sense of exemptions from the power of government are very different from
rights to things that can be provided only by incurring costs. Your right to free speech
does not require someone else to pay for broadcasting what you say or to publish it in a
newspaper or magazine. But if you have a right to water, then others are forced to pay the
inescapable costs of getting it for you. (8 p.28)
So many rights have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware
that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties.
If you dont meet the terms of the Geneva Conventions, then the Geneva Conventions
dont protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to
American citizens do not apply to you. Suicide of the West, Sept 1, 2009
Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so
used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination. Thomas
Sowell, Random Thoughts, January 9, 2007
To say that someone has a right to any kind of housing is to say others have an
obligation to expend all these efforts on his behalf, without his being reciprocally
obligated to compensate them for it. (4 p.100)
Even more disturbing than such irresponsible uses of the law is the notion that there
should be "gay rights," "women's rights" and various ethnic group "rights." The
Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you
want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special
privileges. . . Many of those who are loudest in their demands for "gay rights" and in
breast-beating over their "identity" show the least respect for other people's rights and
even go out of their way to insult Catholics or others who do not share their lifestyle.
Homosexuals do not need my approval, but neither do they have a right to my approval -or to propagandize a captive audience of children in the public schools to get their
approval or to acquire new recruits. Murder is Murder, October 20, 1998
Safety

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There is no question that pesticides create harm. So does oxygen, so does sunlight, so
does almost everything imaginable. What all this means is that real safety is a matter of
weighing one thing against another, carefully and scientifically -- not launching an all-out
crusade against one thing, in total disregard of how this affects other things.
Unfortunately, politics is not about such subtleties. In politics the goal must be a danger
that will be ended, an evil that will be banished, an enemy vanquished or a "problem" that
is "solved." Finely weighed trade-offs do not give you slogans that you can put on
placards and bumper stickers or battle cries that you can shout while people cheer. . . If
you are serious about safety -- as distinguished from being political about it -- then the
last thing you want to do is to hamper the production of wealth that saves lives. Nor do
you want to squander that wealth, which amounts to the same thing. Politically, however,
nothing is more of a grand gesture than saying that "not one human life" is to be
sacrificed for the sake of money. But squandering billions on safety measures that
accomplish little or nothing is squandering lives that would be saved if that wealth were
left alone. Dangerous Safety, May 4, 1998
More children die each year from bicycle accidents than from gun accidents, but where is
there any such orchestrated hysteria about a need to ban bicycles? Gun Safety starts with
parental responsibility, July 2, 1998
Self-anointed
The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the
most disparate fields-from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to
the environmentalism of the latter decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism,
communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What
all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the
anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and
superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. (4 p.5)
In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the
original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later-and if not by empirical evidence, then
by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence
becomes Irrelevant. (4 p.15)
In short, however politically useful public concern about teenage pregnancy and access to
a captive audience in the public schools, the real goal was to change students attitudesput bluntly, to brainwash them with the vision of the anointed, in order to supplant the
values they had been taught at home. (4 p.19)
In short, what is claimed by the anointed to be evidence is clearly recognized by them as
not being evidence when its conclusions do not fit the prevailing vision. (4 p.35)
One of the most remarkable feats of those with the vision of the anointed has been the
maintenance of their reputations in the face of repeated predictions that proved to be
wrong by miles. (4 p.64)

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Complex phenomena may, of course, also have complex causes. But the a priori dogma
that they cannot have simple causes is part of the complex complex. It is one more way
of seeming to argue, without actually making any argument. It is also one more example
of the presumption of superior wisdom and/or virtue that is at the heart of the vision of
the anointed. As a tactical matter, this dogma enables them to deny, on purely a priori
grounds, that the various compassionate interventions in legal, economic, or social
systems could have been responsible for the many counterproductive consequences
which have so often followed. (4 p.88)
-in the vision of the anointed, the absence of precision becomes an authorization for
substitution of the imagination. (4 p.94)
Everyone is a progressive by his own lights. That the anointed believe that this label
differentiates themselves from other people is one of a number of symptoms of their
nave narcissism. (4 p.95)
Those with the vision of the anointed are seldom deterred by any question as to whether
anyone has the knowledge required to do what they are attemptingthe question for the
anointed is not knowledge but compassion, commitment, and other such subjective
factors which supposedly differentiate themselves from other people. The refrain from
the anointed is we already know the answers, theres no need for more studies, and the
kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing
progress. Solutions are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. (4
p.110)
Far more important than particular reckless policies, even those with such deadly
consequences as weakening the criminal law, is a whole mindset in which
omnicompetence is implicitly assumed and unhappy social phenomena are presumed to
be unjustified morally and remediable intellectually and politically. Inherent constraints
of circumstances or people are brushed aside, as are alternative policy approaches which
offer no special role for the anointed. The burden of proof is not put on their vision, but
on existing institutions. (4 p.110)
For those with the vision of the anointed, it is not sufficient to discredit or denigrate
proponents of the tragic vision. The general public must also be discredited, as well as the
social processes through which the publics desires are expressed, individually or
collectively, such as a market economy or social traditions. (4 p.119)
The anointed do not simply happen to have a distain for the public. Such distain is an
integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the
decisions of others. (4 p.124)
An umpire cannot become a champion of pitchers, except at the expense of batters and
vice versa-and in either case at the expense of the integrity of the game. Nevertheless,
this view has grown and, in many cases, prevailed in practice. Among the mascots chosen

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by the anointed have been vagrants, criminals and carriers of contagious diseases. (4
p.150)
Paradoxically, while feasibility is seldom addressed when proposing public policy, severe
limitations on what is feasible by others are often assumed by those with the vision of the
anointed and pushed to the point of determinism, with a corresponding denial of personal
responsibility. Since the bottom line of the prevailing vision is that anointed are moral
surrogates to make decisions for other people, these other people must be seen as
incapable of making the right decisions for themselves. (4 p.189)
The vision of the anointed is one in which such ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and
crime derive primarily from society, rather than from individual choices and behavior.
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. (4 p.203)
To believe that their knowledge and understanding are grossly inadequate for what they
are attempting- even if everyone elses knowledge is also grossly inadequate for such
ambitious social engineering- would be to bring their whole world crashing down around
themUtter certainty has long been the hallmark of the anointed. (4 p.204)
-exploration of the vision of the anointed will begin with its greatest achievement and its
greatest danger which are one and the same: That vision has become self-contained and
self-justifying- which is to say, independent of empirical evidence. That is what makes it
dangerous, not because a particular set of policies may be flawed or counterproductive,
but because insulation from evidence virtually guarantees a never ending supply of
policies and practices fatally independent from reality. This self contained and self
justifying vision has become a badge of honor and a proclamation of identity: To affirm it
is to be one of us and to oppose it is to be one of them. Moreover, the pervasiveness of
the vision of the anointed at all levels of the American educational system ensures future
supplies of people indoctrinated with this vision and also convinced that they should
make a difference,- that public policy is seen as ego gratification from imposing ones
vision on other people through the power of government. (4 p.241)
To the anointed, their vision and reality are one and the same. Yet the world inside their
minds has few of the harsh constraints of the world inhabited by millions of other human
beings The world of the anointed is a very tidy place- or, put differently, every
deviation of the real world from the tidiness of their vision is considered to be someones
fault. (4 p.24)
This self-flattering and self-centered view of the world is also related to the constant
seeking of exciting and new things, and a liberation from the constraints imposed
by lesser beingsIf the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent
in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the
anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which
they- and we all- can be liberated. The social disintegration which has followed in the

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wake of such liberation has seldom provoked serious reconsideration of the whole set of
assumptions- the vision- which led to such disasters. (4 p.247)
For the anointed, it is desperately important to win, not simply because they believe that
one policy or set of beliefs and values is better for society, but because their whole sense
of themselves is at stake. (4 p.252)
Self-exaltation introduces a bias into consideration of many issues. For example, it
creates a vested interest in the incapacity of other people. That is, there is not only a
tendency to see people as helpless and not responsible for their actions, there is a
tendency toward policies and programs which in fact reduce them to that condition and
induce them to accept that image of themselves, while the anointed visionaries play the
role of rescuer. (7 p.139)
These are people convinced of their own superior wisdom and virtue, who are constantly
trying to impose that wisdom and virtue on others, whether by media spin, government
regulation, classroom propaganda, or moral intimidation. Their exalted vision of
themselves is frustrated by the fact that the vast majority of other Americans reject -- or,
worse yet, ignore -- their presumptions of moral leadership. To some of us, that is called
freedom. But, to the self-anointed, it is enough to produce hostility to the values and
traditions of American society. Thomas Sowell, Infallible Haters, January 14, 2002
Self-esteem
In this latest round of international tests, American students led the world in one
department: "self-esteem." As in previous international tests, American students had the
highest perception of how well they had done. Seventy percent said that they thought
they had done well. This would be comic if it were not so tragic. The Wrong Filter,
February 26, 1998
Sex
The vision of a brave new world of ultra-rational attitudes toward sex, which is promoted
by advocates of the sexual revolution, is in painful contrast with soaring pregnancy and
abortion statistics on many campuses across the country.
"Women's Liberation" and the "sexual revolution" have not liberated women. They have
liberated the sort of man who is a "love and leave em kind of guy, who lets the woman
deal with the consequences, including pregnancy." Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts,
March 20, 2007.
Both venereal diseases and unwed teenage pregnancy were going down before "the
heroic sixties" dawned. Gonorrhea declined in every year of the 1950s from what it was
the year before. There were only half as many cases of syphilis in 1960 as in 1950. Enter
the modern, "enlightened" and "healthy" view of sex that was to be spread throughout the
schools of the land under the dishonest title of "sex education." It was not education

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about biology but propaganda designed to replace the values that children had absorbed
from their families, from "society" and other sources disdained by the anointed.
Downward trends in both venereal disease and teenage pregnancy reversed during this
"heroic" decade and headed skyward. Other things that started a long downward trend
during the 1960s included the test scores of school children. Liberal Sentimentalism, June
22, 1998
Someone has claimed that men think about sex every 8 seconds. The way some women
dress suggests that they want to make it more frequent than that. Random Thoughts,
January 4, 1999
No one is a bigger enemy to women than those who promote easy sex. Many a woman
has been saddled with the burden of raising a child alone, while the man responsible has
gone off and forgotten all about his responsibilities.Yet feminist "leaders" have pushed
easy sex and a unisex vision of the world, when in fact the consequences for women are
very different -- and much worse -- than for men. Yet such leaders have been followed by
the very women whose lives have been blighted by their philosophy. Loving enemies,
March 22, 1999
Social Justice
Others who share a similarly secular view are often driven to personify society in order
to re-introduce concepts of moral responsibility and justice into the cosmos, seeking to
rectify the tragic misfortunes of individuals and groups through collective action in the
name of social justice. (7 p.5)
In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for
society as a whole, what is called social justice might more accurately be called antisocial justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to
society. (7 p.10)
[If] every deviation from the ideal is a reason to be panicked and stampeded into putting
dangerous arbitrary powers into the hands of government, then go directly to
totalitarianism, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. September 15, 2009, Fables or
Adults.
Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some
segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as
windfalls gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge
required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and
superhuman. (7 p.13)
Using their gilded diplomas from big-name academic institutions as passes into policymaking positions, the educated ego-trippers can spend years -- perhaps a lifetime -pursuing self-aggrandizement under pious names like "compassion" or "social justice." .
The Naked Truth, April 30, 1998

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I never cease to be amazed at how often people throw around the lofty phrase "social
justice" without the slightest effort to define it. It cannot be defined because it is an
attitude masquerading as a principle. Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, August 2, 2005
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take the people's money
quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. Random Thoughts, May
11, 1998
Social justice can easily become class warfare that polarizes a nation, while leading
those at the bottom into the blind alley of resentments, no matter how many broad
avenues of achievement may be available to them. Liberal visions for health care Sept, 7
2011
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved
replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education,
housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were
put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has
neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them. -Thomas Sowell, from
Mark Perry, Carpe Diem Blog
The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of
people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children
warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or
less optional. What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as
mascots of the self-congratulatory elites. These elites are able to indulge themselves in
non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down
with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others. The effect of all this on the mascots
themselves is not a big concern for the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others.
The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed
benefactors. So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize selfdestructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their
own children to private schools, they neednt worry about what happens to the children of
the mascots in the public schools. Other people who cannot afford to send their children
to private schools can simply be called racists for objecting to what the indulgence of
the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to
other children trapped in the same schools with them. A hundred years ago, groups that
are now indulged as mascots were scapegoated by Progressive-era elites, treated like dirt,
and targeted for eradication in the name of eugenics. There are no permanent mascots.
As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of
tomorrow. But who thinks ahead anymore? Mascot Politics, January 5, 2011
Social security
Politicians who oppose letting individuals invest their own Social Security money
conjure up an image of Joe Six pack trying to pick stocks on Wall Street. But most people
are well aware of what they don't know -- unlike politicians and intellectuals. Just as most
people go to doctors with their medical problems and to repair shops with their

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automobile problems, so they can take their retirement money to financial specialists. . .
One huge difference between private investments and Social Security taxes is that private
investments increase the total amount of real wealth and productive capacity in the
economy. Private investments create factories, computer networks, apartment buildings
and other real assets. . . One of the biggest objections to privatization is ideological. The
very idea that individuals will look out for themselves is anathema to those who like to
play the role of guardians and saviors of us all. It is not a coincidence that the same
people who oppose school vouchers or gun ownership also oppose the privatization of
Social Security. Individual self-reliance shatters the vision of those who think it is their
job to run our lives. Taking Stock, September 14, 1998.
Southerners
Most of the common white people of the South came from the northern borderlands of
England- as well as from the Scottish highlands and from Ulster County, Ireland. All
these fringe areas were turbulent, if not lawless, regions, where none of the contending
forces was able to establish full control and create a stable orderThe highlanders
lagged far behind the lowlanders in education and economic progress, as well as in the
speaking of the English language, (9 p.2/3-8)
What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole
constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the
world which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive
in the world to which they were going- and counterproductive to the blacks who would
live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the urban
centers of the United States, taking with them similar values. (9 p.6)
Centuries before black pride became a fashionable phrase, there was cracker pride- and
it was very much the same kind of pride. It was not pride in any particular achievement or
set of behavioral standards or moral principles adhered to. It was instead a touchiness
about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an
insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it. (9 p.7)
Among the definitions of a cracker in the Oxford dictionary is a braggart- one who
talks trash in todays vernacular- a wisecracker... What is painfully ironic is that such
attitudes and behavior are projected today as aspects of a distinctive black identity,
when in fact they are a part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst
generations of blacks lived in the South. (9 p.12-12)
Not only did many of the groups who settled the South distain business as a career, as
their ancestors had in parts of Britain from which they came, they typically lacked the
kinds of habits necessary to be successful in business. (9 p. 18)
Southern whites were as different from Northern whites when it came to sexual patterns
as they were in other ways. Widespread casual sex was commented on by outside

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observers in both the American South an in those parts of Britain from which Southerners
had come. (9 p.23-24)
Many Southern religious gatherings were not held in churches but at outdoor camp
meetings- a style that went back to practices of these Southerners ancestors in Britain.
So too did the oratorical style of Southern preachers and the behavior of their
congregations, whether in churches or outdoorsWhile many of those listened to
hellfire-and-damnation sermons were moved to extreme emotional reactions of fear,
confession, and repentance, many others took these services as dramatic performances or
spectacles, and the young women and men often treated these religious gatherings as
occasions for socializing and preludes to romantic encounters later. (9 p.25-26)
Much of the cultural pattern of Southern rednecks became the cultural heritage of
Southern blacks, more so than survivals of African cultures, with which they had not
been in contact for centuriesMoreover, such cultural traits followed blacks out of the
Southern countrysides and into the urban ghettos- North and South- where many settled.
The very way of talking, later to be christened black English, closely followed the
dialects brought over from those parts of Britain from which many white Southerners
came. (9 p.27)
With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture.
Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of
the white population, since only one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South,
while nine-tenths of all blacks did. (9 p.33)
Slavery
Thus the institution of slavery, existing on every continent and going back thousands of
years, is often discussed as if it were peculiar to Western civilization when, in fact, even
the African slave trade was carried on by Arabs for centuries before Europeans took part,
and continued for at least another century after the European slave trade to the Western
Hemisphere ended. . . At the heart of the story was the Wests ending of slavery in its
own domains within a century and maintaining pressure on other nations for even longer
to stamp out this practice. Instead, the West has been singled out as peculiarly culpable
for a worldwide evil in which it participated, when in fact its only real uniqueness was in
ultimately opposing and destroying the evil. (2 p.149-150)
Although slavery in the United States was referred to as a peculiar institution, slavery
was in fact one of the oldest and most widespread institutions on Earth. (2 p.186)
Although slavery has come to be identified with the enslavement of Africans, that too
ignores the long history and vast scope of the institution. The very word slave is
derived from the Slaves, who were enslaved on a massive scale and were often sold into
bondage all across the continent of Europe an in the Ottoman Empire. (2 p.186)

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In the 1820s, 6000 Greeks were sent to Egypt as slaves and, half a century later, a report
to the British Parliament noted that both white and black slaves were still being traded in
Egypt and Turkey, years after blacks had been emancipated in the United States. (2 p.
187)
Perhaps the most important moral legacy of slavery is a keener appreciation of freedom.
(2 p.223)
If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be
trusted with unbridled power over other human beings no matter what color or creed
any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically
shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history. But that is not the
message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and
in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people
enslaved black people. . . The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the
treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or television
dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges dont pound it into the
heads of students. The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a
new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons
we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole
human species around the world are presented as special defects of our society or the
sins of a particular race. . . Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but
for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in
today at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were
committed. Thomas Sowell, Misusing History , April 27, 2010
Mortality rates were even higher among those who were walked across the burning sands
of the Sahara than among those subjected to the horrors and dangers of the Atlantic
crossing. (2 p.188)
Africa itself used large numbers of slaves in all sorts of agricultural, domestic, military,
and even commercial and governmental enterprises. (2 p. 188)
Moreover, it is only the To explain slavery as being a consequence of certain ideas
leading to bondage for Africans is to ignore the glaring fact that slavery extended in time
and space far beyond Europeans and Africans, and far beyond those who shared
particular European ideas. (2 p. 189)
-the choice as to which outsiders to enslave was not a matter of racial ideology, but was
based on pragmatic considerations as to availability, including both the military and legal
obstacles to their enslavement. (2 p. 193)
Europeans became mass traders of African slaves largely by purchase from Africas more
powerful tribes and empires. (2 p.195)

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It was common for Sothern slaveholders to hire white workers, often Irish immigrants, to
do work considered too dangerous for slaves. (2 p.200)
An estimated 1 to 2 percent of the babies born to plantation slave women were fathered
by white men, compared to nearly half in the cities. Southern cities had a chronic surplus
of white men over white women and a chronic surplus of black women over black men.
Similar sexual imbalances have led to mixed offspring in many other times and societies,
so the antebellum South was not exceptional in this. If most of the slave women who
gave birth to racially mixed babies were simply raped by their owners, then such babies
would be undoubtedly have been more common on the plantations, where white control
was greatest, rather than in the cities, where it was more lax. (2 p.207)
What can any society hope to gain by having some babies in that society born into the
world with a priori grievances against other babies born into that same society on the
same day? (2 p.251)
In the west, racism was promoted by slavery, rather than vice versa. (2 p.195)
-what successively removed various peoples of the world from the ranks of those
vulnerable to being enslaved was the long process of consolidation of state power,
whether their own or that of European imperialist nations. (5 p.13)
New England Puritans differed not only from the backwater people of the South, but also
from the Southern tidewater aristocracy, who settled on the coastal plains of the
American eastern seaboard and who originated largely in southern and western parts of
England with a long tradition of very hierarchical societies, including, during the early
middle ages, slavery. (5 p.80)
-over the centuries, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million people were shipped
across the Atlantic as slaves, and another 14 million African slaves were sent to the
Islamic nations of the Middle East and North Africa. On both routes, many died in transit.
Moreover, these 25 million people were not the only African victims of slavery, for
Africa itself used large numbers of slaves in many agricultural, domestic, military, and
even commercial and governmental enterprises. (5 p.111)
In some Islamic countries in Africa and the Middle East, slavery lasted even longer.
Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and the Sudan continued to hold slaves on past the middle of
the Twentieth century. Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1980, though its own
government admitted that the practice continues nevertheless. (5 p.112)
The horrors of the Atlantic voyage in packed and suffocating slave ships, together with
exposure to new diseases from Europeans and other African tribes, as well the general
dangers of the Atlantic crossing in that era, took a toll on lives amounting to about 10
percent of all slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere in British vessels in the
eighteenth century- the British being the leading slave traders of the era. However the
death toll among slaves imported by the Islamic countries, many of these slaves being

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forced to walk across the vast, burning sands of the Sahara, was twice as highIt has
been estimated that, for every slave to reach Cairo alive, ten died on the wayA special
danger to men and boys was castration, to produce the eunuchs widely used in Islamic
countries for work in the haremsAn estimated ninety percent of the men or boys died
from the operation (5 p.154-155)
A slave in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century cost thirty times what he cost
on the coast of Africa. American slave-owners were very reluctant to lose this kind of
investment- so much so that they often hired Irish immigrants to do work considered too
dangerous for slaves. (5 p.160)
One third of free colored families in New Orleans owned slaves and 3,000 free persons
of color joined the Confederate army during the Civil War. Charleston, another
exception, had many slave-owning free persons of color from the British West Indies
and Santo Domingo. (5 p.161)
By the middle of the nineteenth century most free persons of color in the United States
could read and write and, half a century after emancipation, so could more than half the
entire Negro population of the country. This has been called an accomplishment seldom
seen in human history. (5 p.170)
Education and acculturation in general spread very unevenly among American Negroesfirst reaching the house servants and later the field hands, first the free then the slaves,
first the mulattos and then the blacks. These large historical social disparities within the
African origin population of the United States were reflected in the fact that some
American Negroes graduated from college before slavery was abolishedThroughout
the era of slavery, free mulattos in the Western Hemisphere tended to distance themselves
socially from blacks, both slave and freethe elite among American Negroes tended to
remain, for generations after emancipation, a distinctly lighter-complexioned and socially
exclusive group. (5 p.164-165)
Centuries before the first African was carried in bondage to the Western Hemisphere,
Slavs were being enslaved on a massive scale-Slaves were so widely sold into bondage
that the very word for slave was derived from the word for Slave in a number of Western
European languages, as well as in Arabic. (5 p.190-191)
The side effects of slavery were not negligible, especially in the United States, where the
staggering economic and human costs of the Civil War seemed to fit Abraham Lincolns
premonition that all the treasure built up from unpaid labor might be sunk in the ensuing
war and every drop of blood drawn by the lash might be paid in blood shed with the
sword. (8 p.65)
-the very need to pass laws to keep slavery from self-destructing piecemeal was further
evidence of it economic deficiencies, quite aside from its violations of moral and
humanitarian principles. (8 p.67)

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Many who have dismissed the anti-slavery words of the founders of the American
republic as just rhetoric have not bothered to check the facts of history. Washington,
Jefferson, and other founders did not just talk, they acted. (9 p.145)
Since slaves had no voice whatever in the selection of Southern Congressman, counting
the slave population at full strength would have given white Southerners a stronger proslavery contingent in CongressIt should also be noted that in the Constitutions
distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free,
not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites- and free blacks existed
before the Constitution existed. (9 p.155)
China in centuries past has been described as one of the largest and most comprehensive
markets for the exchange of human beings in the world. Slavery was also common in
India, where it has been estimated that there were more slaves than in the entire Western
Hemisphere- and the original Thugs kidnapped children for the purpose of enslavement.
(9 p.112)
-within Western civilization, the principle impetus for the abolition of slavery came first
from very conservative religious activists- people who would today be called the
religious right. (9 p.116)
It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to
Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the
Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the
Western Hemisphere. (9 p.120)
Despite the impression created by Roots, during the era of the massive slave trade from
West Africa, a white man was more likely to catch malaria in Africa than to catch slaves
himself. (9 p.121)
While slavery was referred to in antebellum America as a peculiar institution, in an
international perspective and in the long view of history it was not this institution that
was peculiar but the principles of American freedom, with which slavery was in such
obvious and irreconcilable conflict. (9 p.127)
People were enslaved because they were vulnerable, not because of how they looked. (9
p.113)
Ironically, when some blacks in the twentieth century began repudiating what they call
slave names, they often took Arabic names, even though Arabs over the centuries had
enslaved more Africans than Europeans had. (11 p.163)
Sports
Like so much in academia, intercollegiate sports programs survive on myths and dogmas
which facilitate the extraction of money from students and taxpayers, and the diversion of

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money from donors seeking to support academic programs, but in fact supporting lavish
spending on coaches and an athletic empire. (10 p.234)
In effect, the college athlete in big-time sports is buying a lottery ticket and paying for it
with his body and with four years of his life. He may also pay for it through the corrosive
cynicism generated by participating in the various shabby tricks designed to maintain his
eligibility to play, pretending to be a student while avoiding the demands of real
education. (10 p.241)
Despite such favoritism and scandal , most top-level (division I-A) football and
basketball players do not graduateThen, when the students eligibility eventually runs
out, he finds himself out on the street with no skills, no degree, and perhaps no character.
(10 p.243-144)
Obviously, no one can slug .800 all season -- unless he is Babe Ruth. The Babe was the
only man to have slugged over .800 -- and he did two seasons in a row. He is still the
greatest. . . If you want to win a bet with someone, bet him that Babe Ruth stole home
more times than Lou Brock. Random Thoughts, October, 21, 1998
Taxes
As for taxes, we could stop taxing productivity and start taxing consumption. After all,
productivity is what makes a society more prosperousSomeone who is adding to the
total wealth of this country is not depriving you of anything. But someone who is
consuming the nation's wealth, without contributing anything to it, is. Yet our tax system
penalizes those who are producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are only
consuming it." Thomas Sowell, A taxing experience, November 25, 2004
Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance ones own moral
adventures, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same
freedom and dignity as oneself, so they can make their own choices with their own
earnings, is considered to be pandering to greed. (3 p.306)
Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely
called censorship. (4 p.123)
The huge federal debts that we already have are the ghosts of Christmas past.
Taxpayers Trillion, September 24, 2008
Using long drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is
like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire. If you
cut taxes tomorrow, people would have more money in their next paycheck, and it would
probably be spent by the time they got that paycheck, through increased credit-card
purchases beforehand. If all this sound and fury in Washington was about getting an
economic crisis behind us, tax cuts could do that a lot faster. Thomas Sowell, What Are
They Buying? Hint: It's not an immediate end to the financial crisis, January 27, 2009

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Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer resources from the
people to itself, without raising taxes. A $100 bill would buy less in 1998 than a $20 bill
would buy in the 1960s. This means that anyone who kept his money in a safe over those
years would have lost 80 percent of its value, because no safe can keep your money safe
from politicians who control the printing presses. Politics vs. Gold, September 30, 2010
The first big cut in income taxes came in the 1920s, at the urging of secretary of the
Treasury Andrew Mellon. He argued that a reduction of the tax rates would increase the
tax revenues. What actually happened? In 1920, when the top tax rate was 73 percent, for
people making over $100,000 a year, the federal government collected just over $700
million in income taxes and 30 percent of that was paid by people making over
$100,000. After a series of tax cuts brought the top rate down to 24 percent, the federal
government collected more than a billion dollars in income-tax revenue and people
making over $100,000 a year now paid 65 percent of the taxes. How could that be? The
answer is simple: People behave differently when tax rates are high as compared with
when they are low. With low tax rates, they take their money out of tax shelters and put it
to work in the economy, benefiting themselves, the economy, and government, which
collects more money in taxes because incomes rise. High tax rates that very few people
are actually paying because of tax shelters do not bring in as much revenue as lower tax
rates that people are paying. -Thomas Sowell
If people want to build or buy homes in precarious locations, that is their own business.
When these homes go sliding down into the ocean,t hat should also be their own
business. Unfortunately, it is the taxpayers' business because politicians can buy a
compassionate image by giving away tax money from the treasury to help people rebuild
their homes -- usually in the same place, subject to the same dangers as before. This is
worse than insanity. It is subsidized insanity. Disasters---natural and political, March 26,
1998
Terrorism
The Aztecs, like such other conquers as the Mongols, used terror as a weapon to
demoralize their enemies and keep the subjugated peoples in line. (5 p.277)
We could deter the Soviet Union with our own nuclear weapons, but no one can deter
suicidal fanatics, whether they are international terrorists of the sort that caused 9/11 or
suicidal fanatics in charge of the government of Iran, who have long been supplying
international networks of suicidal fanatics. Threatening to launch nuclear retaliation
against the people of Iran will not deter them. They have already shown how little they
care about the people of Iran and how much they care about their fanatical beliefs and
hate-filled agendas. Dismantling America Part III, August 2010
Time

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Time by itself accomplishes nothing. In particular, it is a serious mistake, with dangerous
consequences, to imagine that time itself improves relations among racial ethnic groups.
(2 p.xi)
Tolerance
Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival. An intolerant Islamic
world may outlast the Western world that seems ready to tolerate anything, including the
undermining of its own fundamental values and threats to its continued existence. March
23, 2011, Random Thoughts
Trust
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.
Random Thoughts, June 26,1998
Unions
One factor in the loss of British economic pre-eminence in the world was Britains earlier
development of strong and widespread labor unions, which were able to restrict the
application of new technology, both directly and by appropriating a sufficient share of
technologys economic benefits to reduce the incentives for further technological
investment. (5. P.44)
Universities
American universities are usually ranked among the best in the world, based primarily on
having some of the best scholars in the world on their faculties- even if many of these top
scholars are from other countries. (11 p.87)
Back in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, himself a professor, pointed out how the
faculty of endowed academic institutions are enabled to indulge themselves in ways that
they would not be able to in an enterprise dependent on its performance for its survival.
(11 p.88)
There may be a curriculum listed in the college catalogue but it can mean little if there
are many disparate options for meeting a particular curriculum requirement- if, for
example, a course on the history of motion pictures can be used to satisfy a social science
requirement instead of a course on leading nations or empires of the world. Thus a
student may graduate from some of the most prestigious colleges in the country
fundamentally ignorant of history and all the insights and implications of history. (11
p.93)

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-some professors at various colleges and universities have openly admitted to selecting
textbooks on the basis of bonuses paid to them by the publishers of particular books. (11
p.90)
While the educational interests of the students might be served by exposing them to
different views of ideological issues, professors are able to confine the ideological
spectrum to those views of their own, not only in selecting reading material for their own
classes but still more so in deciding whom to hire as fellow faculty members, leading to
situations in which it is not uncommon for the ratio of Democrats to Republicans to be
dozens to one in some departments, even though supporters of the two parties are
relatively evenly divided in the country at large. (11 p. 95)
What a student can judge is how well the professor conveyed the information in the
course- how clearly the material was presented and how interesting it seemed- but what
the student is not equipped to judge is what information and conflicting analysis was left
out. (11 p.96)
Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006,
only four had Ivy League degrees and just over half graduated from state colleges, or a
community college. (11 p.105)
When increased voluntary spending is called rising costs, and becomes a basis for
raising tuition, seeking more taxpayer money, or even dipping into the principal of
endowments, then the kinds of economic constraints faced by competing business
enterprises are clearly not operating in the academic world. (11 p.110)
Tenure rules have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas
who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly
ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty. Thomas
Sowell, Academic Freedom? February 15, 2005
Visions
Ideals are weighed against the cost of achieving them in the constrained vision. But in the
unconstrained vision, every closer approximation to the ideal should be preferred. Costs
are regrettable, but by no means decisive. (1 p.34)
Idealism in words is not idealism in deeds. Thomas Sowell, Who really Cares, November
28, 2006
In short, the special role of the thinking people or of the brightest and the best has for
centuries been a central theme of the unconstrained vision. (1 p.47)
In the tragic vision, individual sufferings and social evils are inherent in the innate
deficiencies of all human beings, whether these deficiencies are in knowledge, wisdom,

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morality, or courageThis there are no solutions in the tragic vision, but only tradeoffs that still leave many desires unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world. (4 p.113)
In the unconstrained vision, where much of the malaise of the world is due to existing
institutions and existing beliefs, those least habituated to those institutions and beliefs are
readily seen as especially valuable for making needed social changes. (1 p.63)
The intrinsic difficulties which dominate the constrained vision are not the real obstacles
in the unconstrained vision, in which deliberate obstruction and obfuscation account for
many evils, and in which what is crucially needed on the part of the public-spirited
reformers is commitment. (1 p.73)
Social rules are as central to the constrained vision as unfettered individual judgment and
individual conscience are at the heart of the unconstrained vision. (1 p. 81)
Patriotism and treason thus become a meaningless distinction at the extremes of the
unconstrained vision, while this distinction is one of the most central and most powerful
distinctions in the constrained vision. (1 p.81)
Despite the power of the prevailing vision, some have escaped its gravitational pull. (4
p.6)
People do not change their vision of the world the way they change cloths or replace light
bulbs. But change they must if they mean to survive. No individual (or group) is going to
capture all of reality in his vision. If the only reaction to other visions- or uncomfortable
evidence- is blind mudslinging, then the limitations that are common to all human beings
become, for them, ideological prisons. (6 p.140)
If one goes through enough numbers, one will eventually come upon some statistics that
seem to fit ones vision. These are what might be called Aha! statistics. Other statistics
which suggest opposite conclusions bring no Aha! but are more likely to be glided over
and forgotten. (7 P.34)
If the tyranny of visions can prevail in questions of war and peace- which is to say, life
and death questions for both individuals and societies- it should hardly be surprising that
the same tyranny can prevail in visions of social and economic activities. (7 p.119)
Far worse than the self-serving actions of black politicians is the vision of the world that
they present -- especially to the rising generation of young blacks. It is a vision of a world
in which everything they don't have is the fault of whites. It is a vision of a future in
which their only hope is in changing whites or getting preferences or hand-outs from the
government. Where is black leadership leading? , July 20, 1998
-as in other expressions of cosmic visions, results are not the test. Taking a moral stand is
the test. (7 p.104)

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On issue after issue, the morally self anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if
no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in
error but in sin. (7 p.103)
-one of the important advantages of a prevailing vision is that it is so easily and
unconsciously absorbed from those around us, without our having to take the trouble to
think about it. A prevailing vision is, in computer terms, the default setting for our
opinions on a whole spectrum of issues. It is what we believe in general when we have no
special reason to believe otherwise. (7 p.135)
-visions can acquire a tyrannical sway over peoples minds by offering them an exalted
sense of themselves in exchange for their loyalty to the vision through all the vicissitudes
of facts to the contrary. (7 p.136)
It is not visions that are dangerous. What is dangerous are insulated visions. (7 p.141)
Both internally and internationally, Western intellectuals have for centuries romanticized
noble savages in various parts of the world, peoples who supposedly lived in some sort
of Eden before evil was introduced from outside by modern Western society. Facts about
the carnage, oppression, or brutality in such societies have been gilded over, totally
ignored, or brazenly denied by those pursuing a vision- and disseminating that vision
through their writings, teachings, motion pictures and other channels. (5 p.351)
When facts about racial or ethnic groups that are both known and relevant are
deliberately suppressed because they would undermine a particular vision, or agenda,
then history is prostituted and cannot serve as a check against visions, because facts have
been subordinated to visions. (9 p. 277)
The constrained vision of human intellectual and moral capabilities relies less on
articulated rationality to convince and more on incentives to influence behavior. (1 p.169)
What kind of world do we want: one in which everyone works to increase wealth to
whatever extent he can, or a world in which everyone will be supported by either
government handouts or private philanthropy, whether he works or doesnt work? It is
not an abstract question. We can already see the consequences on both sides of the
Atlantic. Those who have grown used to having others provide their food, shelter, and
other basics as rights are by no means grateful. Two Worlds, September 6,2011
Volunteerism
Forced to volunteer. That is the Orwellian notion to which contemporary liberalism has
sunk Here we get to the heart of the so-called community service idea. Its central
purpose is to create a certain set of attitudes in the students. It is compulsory submission
to state- sponsored propaganda for the liberals' vision of the world. That is what students
must be "forced to volunteer" for. What is wrong with the idea of a free people, using
their own time as they see fit, for those things that matter most to them, instead of being

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pawns in a propaganda program more in keeping with what happens in totalitarian
societies? What is wrong with each individual defining for himself or herself what being
civic minded means, instead of having the government define it and impose it? In a
country where more than 90 million people already volunteer for civic projects of their
own choosing, why must students be drafted to become "volunteers" for
environmentalism or other causes The casual arrogance of those who define for other
people what is a "community service" is breathtaking. Forced to Volunteer, August 9,
1999

Wealth
Media and even academic preoccupation with instant snapshot statistics create major
distortions of economic reality. The rich and the poor have become staples of income
discussions, even though most of the people in the top and bottom income categories are
the same people at different stages of their lives, rather than fixed classes of people who
remain at the top and bottom throughout their lives. (3 p.168)
In policy terms, making it easier for people born in less fortunate circumstances to
acquire the knowledge and skills to become brain surgeons is very different from simply
decreeing that pay differentials between brain surgeons and carpenters be reduced or
eliminated. (3 p.171)
The average Americans annual income could buy everything the average Japanese
annual income buys and still have thousands of dollars left over. Therefore the average
American has a higher standard of living than the average Japanese. Yet statistics based
on official exchange rates show the average Japanese earning thousands of dollars more
than the average American, leaving the false impression that the Japanese are more
prosperous than Americans. (3 p.221)
-money is not wealth. It is just a way to transfer wealth or to give people incentives to
produce wealth. (3 p.224)
As for the top 20 percent, so often referred to as the rich,In income, a little over
$58,000 a year was enough to put a household in the top 20 percent in 1992 and a little
under $100,000 was enough to put it in the top 5 percent. (4 p.51)
One of the many shallow statements that sound good if you dont stop and think about
them is that at some point, you have made enough money. . . . Are we really so
eaten up with envy, or so mesmerized by rhetoric, that we are willing to sacrifice our own
freedom by giving politicians the power to decide how much money anybody can make
or keep? Of course, that will start only with the rich, but surely history tells us that it
will not end there. . . Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry
should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your
own rights in jeopardy quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting
anybodys rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open

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the floodgates, you cant tell the water where to go. The moral bankruptcy of the notion
that third parties can decide when somebody else has enough money is matched by its
economic illiteracy. The rest of the country is not poorer by the amount of Bill Gatess
fortune today and was not poorer by the amount of John D. Rockefellers fortune a
century ago. Enough Money, May 18, 2010
As far back as 1969, black males who came from homes where there were newspapers,
magazines, and library cards had the same incomes as whites from similar homes and
with the same number of years of schooling. In the 1970s black husband-and-wife
families outside the South earned as much as white husband-and-wife families outside the
South. By 1981, for the country as a whole, black husband-and-wife families where both
were college educated and both working earned slightly more than white families of the
same description. (4 p.57)
Few things have saved as many lives as the simple growth of wealth. (3 p.307)
Sometimes a variety of favorable geographical features exist in combination within a
given region, as in northwestern Europe, and sometimes virtually all are lacking, as in
much of tropical Africa, while still other parts of the world have some of these favorable
features but not others. The consequences include not only large variations in economic
well being, but more fundamentally, large variations in the skills and experiences- the
human capital- of the people themselves. (8 p.209)
Despite many depictions of the elderly as people struggling to get by, households headed
by people aged 70 to 74 have the highest average wealth of any age bracket in American
society. (11 p.136)
The genuinely rich and genuinely poor, put together, do not add up to even 10 percent of
the American population. Yet these two groups are the central characters in the moral
melodramas which dominate American politics, journalism, and even academic and
judicial discourse. (7 p.39)
A 1996 study found that four-fifths of all the American millionaires studied earned their
fortunes within their own lifetimes. (7 p.53)
Central to the concept of social justice is the notion that individuals are entitled to some
share of the wealth produced by a society, simply by virtue of being members of that
society, and irrespective of any individual contribution made or not made to the
production of that wealth. (1 p.192)
Judging businesses or their owners by how much wealth they give away rather than by
how much wealth they create is putting the cart before the horse. Wealth is ultimately
the only thing that can reduce poverty. In countries around the world, the most dramatic
reductions in poverty have come from increasing the amount of wealth rather than
from a redistribution of existing wealth. Two Worlds, September 6, 2011

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Weapons
When an airplane crashes, costing hundreds of lives, does anyone suggest banning
planes? When thousands die in automobile accidents, does anyone suggest banning cars?
But let a fraction as many people die from guns and shrill cries for banning guns ring out
across the land. No one asks about how many lives have been saved by guns in the hands
of law-abiding citizens defending themselves and their families against the violent
criminals that liberal gun controllers allow to walk the streets. Tragedy and farce, April
28, 1999
All weapons are for assault. That is what makes them weapons, whether they are guns,
bows and arrows or boomerangs. Because they are capable of assault, they are also
capable of deterring assault, usually just by being pointed at a potential assailant. They
are a lot better for protection than phoning 911 and waiting for the police to arrive after
the crime has been committed and the criminal is long gone. In short, guns save lives and
guns take lives. If we are serious, then we can talk about how many lives are involved
each way and what can we do to continue to deter violent criminals, while reducing the
deaths caused by accidents or crime. Tragedy and farce, April 28, 1999
War
Authority in general and physical force in particular, are anathema to many among the
intelligentsia, academic or otherwise. They can always think of some "third way" to
avoid hard choices, whether on campus, in society, or among nations. Thomas Sowell
Academic Intimidation, December 18, 2007
When push comes to shove, people will support tyranny rather than suffer lethal chaos
that makes normal everyday life impossible for themselves and their children. Thomas
Sowell, Another Vietnam? January 16, 2007
Benedict Arnold was a war hero but that did not exempt him from condemnation for his
later betrayal. Thomas Sowell McCain's Straight Lies, Friday, February 1, 2008
The great curse of the 20th century was the inability of decent people to realize that what
was unthinkable to them was both thinkable and doable by others -- like Hitler, Stalin,
Mao and Pol Pot. Are we to wait until Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction
and we wake up some morning to find a couple of American cities obliterated? Thomas
Sowell, Random Thoughts, July 8, 2002
The Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb was based on intelligence
reports that Hitler's atomic bomb project was farther along than it turned out to be.
Should we have waited and risked having Hitler get the first atomic bomb? Thomas
Sowell, Weapons of political destruction, February 10, 2004

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Negotiations are not a substitute for force. When international negotiations work, often it
is because aggressors know what is going to happen if it doesn't work. Thomas Sowell,
Weapons of Political Destruction, February 10, 2004
In this era of non-judgmental mush, too many Americans have become incapable of
facing the brutal reality of unprovoked hatred, based on envy, resentment and ultimately
on a vicious urge to lash out against others for the pain of one's own insignificance. That
has been a common thread in things as disparate as ghetto riots, two world wars, and now
Islamic terrorism. Thomas Sowell, Facing up to evil, October 21, 2002
Like other evil, war is seen by those with the constrained vision as originating in human
nature and as being contained by institutions. To those with the unconstrained vision, war
was seen as being at variance with human nature and caused by institutions. (1 p.144)
According to this vision (constrained) wars are a perfectly rational activity from the
standpoint of those who anticipate gain for themselves, their class, or their nation,
whether or not these anticipations are often mistaken, as all human calculations may be.
(1 p.143)
There is a cost to this war as there have been costs to all wars, including the Cold War.
And there have been painful setbacks and surprises in this war, as there have been in all
wars. George Washington lost most of the battles he fought but we still came out of it as
a new and independent nation. But there were grownups in that war and in our other
wars. The big question today; and for our future; is not whether our enemies have
unlimited resources but whether we have an inexhaustible supply of immaturity in our
media and among our politicians. Thomas Sowell, The fallacy with 90 lives, November
20, 2004
World government is one of those goals often pursued in complete disregard of the
prerequisites for such a thing to be both possible and beneficial. Nothing is easier than to
create an international monster by surrendering national sovereignty in pursuit of a
mirage. The heedlessness with which we are trying to create democracies around the
world reflects the same utter disregard for prerequisites. When parliamentary government
was first tried in Yugoslavia back in the 1920s, the parliamentarians there would pull out
their guns and begin shooting at each other during the heat of debate. One party leader
was shot dead during one of these exchanges. In Africa, setting up newly independent
nations as European-style democracies led quickly to despotisms and massive killings.
Whoever gained power immediately after independence usually made it a top priority to
ensure that this power would never have to be relinquished to another party. The hopeful
phrase, "one man, one vote" became the cynical phrase, "one man, one vote -- one time."
Where democracy exists today -- and it is still exists in only a minority of countries in the
world at large -- it has taken centuries of political and social evolution to create the
conditions in which it is viable. You cannot export those centuries of experience and the
cultures and traditions that derive from that experience. But you can get a lot of
Americans killed trying to put cultural transplants into unpromising soil. Carrying a little
stick, October 8, 1999

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Phrases like the peace movement, used to describe disarmament advocates, preempt the
whole momentous question as to whether peace is more likely to be achieved through
disarmament or through military deterrence. With untold millions of lives depending on
the answer to that question, something more substantive than a presumption that some
people like peace more than others might be expected. (4 p.184)
The futility of war is an exhilarating set of sounds rather than a serious statement to be
tested seriously against facts. (7 p.112)
It is one thing to be willing to put your life on the line to defend your country. It is
something else to be sent hither and yon around the world on fuzzy missions, and to be
away from your family for years at a time, dealing with some other country's problems.
Carrying a little stick, October 8, 1999
"Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other
force" Thomas Sowell
The military and political viability of the newly created states, and the dangers to the
peace of Europe as a whole when the international balance of power was made fragile by
the existence of so many small and vulnerable countries were considerations lost in the
euphoria of victory and the heady process of nation building- or more accurately,
empire dismemberment. But the importance of these factors was painfully revealed by
the subsequent breakdown of the balance of power in Europe, as Hitler was able to pick
off- one by one- countries that would have been much more difficult to conquer when
they were part of a consolidated empire, thus enabling Nazi Germany to begin shifting
the military balance of power in its favor, even before the onset of the Second World
War. (5 p.18)
The agenda of the Left is fine for the world that they envision as existing today and the
world they want to create tomorrow. That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by
inherent constraints and the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a
world where there are attractive, win-win "solutions" in place of those ugly trade-offs in
the world that the rest of us live in. Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing
nations and work things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military
equipment to keep them at bay. The Left calls this "change" but in fact it is a set of
notions that were tried out by the Western democracies in the 1930s; and which led to the
most catastrophic war in history. For those who bother to study history, it was precisely
the opposite policies in the 1980s; pouring tons of money into military equipment; which
brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation to an end. The Left fought
bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted the burden of the Soviet threat,
instead of leading to war as the elites claimed. Thomas Sowell, Grow Up: The vision of
the Left. September 09, 2008
Gen. Douglas MacArthur gave a one-word definition of defensive warfare: defeat.
Thomas Sowell, Is talk cheap? March 3, 2009

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Passionate discussions of the "haves" and the "have nots" seem completely unaffected by
growing evidence that most of these are the same people at different stages of their lives.
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and
oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on
their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or
imagined grievances. Random Thoughts, September 4, 1998

Book List
Intellectuals and Society (2010)
Housing Boom and Bust, Revised Edition (2010)
The Housing Boom and Bust (2009)
Applied Economics (2009)
Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)
A Conflict of Visions, Revised Edition (2007)
Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, Third Edition (2007)
A Man of Letters (2007)
On Classical Economics (2006)
Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)
Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (2004)
Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy, Second Edition (2004)
Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (2003)
The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late (2001)
Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy (2000)
A Personal Odyssey (2000)
The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999)
Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1998)
Late-Talking Children (1997)
Migrations and Cultures: A World View (1996)
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for
Social Policy (1995)
Race and Culture: A World View (1994)
Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (1993)
Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (1990)
Choosing a College: A Guide for Parents and Students (1989)
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)
Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (1985)
Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality (1984)
The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective (1983)
Ethnic America: A History (1981)
Markets and Minorities (1981)
Knowledge and Decisions (1980)
Race and Economics (1975)
Classical Economics Reconsidered (1974)

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Say's Law: An Historical Analysis (1972)
Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972)
Economics: Analysis and Issues (1971)

References
(1) Sowell, Thomas (1987). A conflict of visions: Ideological origins of political
struggles. New York, New York: Quill-William Morrow.
(2) Sowell, Thomas (1994). Race and culture: a world view. New York, New York:
Basic Books, A Subsidiary of Perseus Books, LLC.
(3) Sowell, Thomas (2000). Basic economics: a citizen's guide to the economy. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
(4) Sowell, Thomas (1995). The vision of the anointed: Self-congratulations as a basis
for social policy. New York, NY: Basic Books, A Division of Harper Collins
Publishers, Inc.
(5) Sowell, Thomas (1998). Conquests and cultures: an international history. New
York, NY: Basic Books, A Member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.
(6) Sowell, Thomas (1984). Civil rights: Rhetoric or reality? New York, NY: Quill
William Morrow.
(7) Sowell, Thomas (1999). The quest for cosmic justice. New York, NY: The Free
Press: A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
(8) Sowell, Thomas (2004). Applied economics: Thinking beyond state one. New York,
NY: Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.
(9) Sowell, Thomas (2005). Black rednecks and white liberals. San Francisco, CA:
Encounter Books.
(10) Sowell, Thomas (1993). Inside American education: The decline, the deception,
the dogmas. New York, NY: The Free Press: A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
(11) Sowell, Thomas (2008). Economic facts and fallacies. New York, NY: Basic
Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group.

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All newspaper columns are cited with name of column and date it appeared.
Biography sources: Hoover Institution, Stanford University; tsowell.com;
Townhall.com; Amazon.com