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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Nothing
Procedure
Never
Bureaucrats
Procedures
Bureaucracy
Outcomes
Libertarian
Understand
Everything
Bureaucracies

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.
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You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.
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What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.
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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
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Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational excellence, I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
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Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
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It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
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Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people's decisions is to use the word 'ask'-as in 'We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share.' But of course governments do not ask, they: tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not 'ask' for contributions. It takes.
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The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
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Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
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Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
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If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.
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The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
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If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily socially constructed notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
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Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
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Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities? The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
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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 ideals.
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You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.
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Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
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One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.
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