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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Produce
Accounting
Seem
Ingenuity
Business
Genuinely
Seems
Requirements
Budget
Balanced
Budgets
Likely
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
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The government is indeed an institution, but the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
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Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
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Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
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Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
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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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There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
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Someone once said that many bad policies are just good policies that have been carried too far. For example, we have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we tolerate the immigration into our country of millions of intolerant people who hate millions of Americans who are already here.
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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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Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated - preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.
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The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
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Those who want to spread the wealth almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?
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Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
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As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
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