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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

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
People
Economists
Reminding
Economist
Prices
Lunch
Popular
Lunches
Economics
Menu
Free
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More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
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Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.
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The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
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Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.
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You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
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We should listen first and foremost to our own experience We should stop looking for saviors.Society has not existed for thousands of years because it had a succession of saviors. It's existed because it has institutions and processes through which people can realize their own goals.
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There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.
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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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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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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.
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The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
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One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
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However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.
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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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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 black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'.
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We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.
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