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Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Needs
Inspired
Terms
Policy
Create
Economic
Analyzed
Term
Incentives
Rather
Policies
Need
Hopes

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Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
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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.
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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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Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
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You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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What makes it possible for politicians to do so many things that are economically counterproductive is that neither the public nor the media know enough of the basics to understand what's wrong with what they're saying.
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The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
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Intellect is not wisdom.
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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
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Too many people in Washington are full of themselves, among other things that they are full of.
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The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.
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Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.
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If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
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Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
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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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