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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Success
Science
Sufficiently
Lows
Standards
Failure
Policy
High

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When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
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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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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
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People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
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Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
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The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
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In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment. The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
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In the United States, liberals have made it virtually impossible [to increase the supply of oil] by banning drilling in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
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Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other.
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Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.
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Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
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The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
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It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'
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As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.
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There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.
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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
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You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
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