Quote

There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.

Thomas Sowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Offs
Conservative
Solutions
Trade

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

Image
A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Thomas Sowell
Image
If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves
Thomas Sowell
Image
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.
Thomas Sowell
Image
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.
Thomas Sowell
Image
In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people - and to hate those other people.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
Thomas Sowell
Image
Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all - inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
Thomas Sowell
Image
No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.
Thomas Sowell
Image
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.
Thomas Sowell
Image
If you don't control the borders, it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive -- and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.
Thomas Sowell
Image
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.
Thomas Sowell
Image
If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
Thomas Sowell