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The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Politics
Goods
Desire
Desires
Firsts
Economics
First
Rule
Infinite
Chasing
Resources
Finite
Number
Services
Numbers
Ignore
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.
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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.
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Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
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If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.
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An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
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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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How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?
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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
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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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We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.
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You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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Intellect is not wisdom.
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When all is said and done, the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.
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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.
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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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People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
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Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
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If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
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