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What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Taken
Welfare
Away
Receive
Money
Fail
Governmental
Even
Kinds
Moderate
Kind
Program
Moderates
People
Succeed
Programs
Failing
Paying
System
Extent
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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
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Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.
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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.
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Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.
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Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
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Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.
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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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The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is he confuses it with feeling.
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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
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One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
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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.
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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.
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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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The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.
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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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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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You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
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