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The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?
Walter E. Williams
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Walter E. Williams
Age: 84 †
Born: 1936
Born: March 31
Died: 2020
Died: December 1
Columnist
Economist
Journalist
Radio Personality
University Teacher
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Walter Williams
Walter Edward Williams
Crucial
Intention
Effects
Policy
Question
Intentions
More quotes by Walter E. Williams
Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.
Walter E. Williams
How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal apartheid is legal Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.
Walter E. Williams
When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.
Walter E. Williams
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
Walter E. Williams
Trying to get government to be as efficient as business is as hopeless as trying to teach cats to bark and dogs to meow.
Walter E. Williams
Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality.
Walter E. Williams
A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, 'Delay, Denial and Dilution,' written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.
Walter E. Williams
Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.
Walter E. Williams
(F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement.
Walter E. Williams
No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.
Walter E. Williams
Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.
Walter E. Williams
Students who are alien and hostile to the education process ought to be removed. You say, What will we do with them? I say that's a secondary issue. The first priority is to stop thugs from making education impossible for everyone else.
Walter E. Williams
However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
Walter E. Williams
The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent) fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.
Walter E. Williams
Democracy gives the aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be considered tyranny.
Walter E. Williams
You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
Walter E. Williams
Socialism is just another form of tyranny.
Walter E. Williams
As American education and intelligence becomes replaced by feelings and emotion, not seeing the forest for the trees has become a major problem.
Walter E. Williams
Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.
Walter E. Williams
The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.
Walter E. Williams
