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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.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Desire
Others
Live
Different
Widespread
Wholly
However
Society
Free
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'
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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.
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What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
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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?
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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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An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.
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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
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What freedom does a starving man have? The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.
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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.
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In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.
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Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
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Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
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People used to say, Ignorance is no excuse. Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have a right to your own opinion - and self-esteem to boot.
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If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
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To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
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Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
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